"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Catherine de' Medici, too, what justice of sight, what readiness of means, what elasticity against defeat! But alas! madam, her Featherheads were her own children; and she had that one touch of vulgarity, that one trait of the good-wife, that she suffered family ties and affections to confine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... slightly under the shock of Eve's new tactics in life. This was the woman who, on only the previous night, had been inveighing against the ostentation of her son's career at the Grand Babylon. Now she seemed determined to rival him in showiness, to be the partner of his alleged vulgarity. That the immature Sissie should suddenly drop the ideals of the new poor for the ideals of the new rich was excusable. But Eve! But that modest embodiment of shy and quiet commonsense! She, who once had scorned the world of The Daily Picture, was more and ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... jewelry in a public place in the East, you may take it for granted that she belongs to the British nobility. Germans, French, Italians and other women of continental Europe are never guilty of similar vulgarity, and among Americans it ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... sitting-room, he stood looking about him as though appraising the value of the curios, pictures, and engravings with which the apartment was crowded. Wrayson, while waiting for his call, watched him curiously. In his present state his vulgarity was perhaps less glaringly apparent, but his lack of attractiveness was accentuated. His ears seemed to have grown larger, his pinched, Semitic features more repulsive, and his complexion sallower. He was pitchforked into a world of which he knew nothing, and he seemed stunned by his first contact ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some to be migratory. But he stays with us all winter. Cheerful. Noisy. Poor soloist. A spice of vulgarity in him. Dash of prose in his song. Appetite extraordinary. Eats his own weight in a short time. Taste for fruit. Eats with a relishing gulp, like Dr. Johnson's. Fond of cherries. Earliest mess of peas. Mulberries. Lion's share of the raspberries. Angleworms ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... my dear young lady—I insist that you're only a wretched victim like ourselves," M. de Brecourt remarked, approaching her with a smile. "I see the hand of a woman in it, you know," he went on to the others; "for there are strokes of a vulgarity that a man doesn't sink to—he can't, his very organisation prevents him—even if he be the dernier des goujats. But please don't doubt that I've maintained that woman not to ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Rich old bachelors, without heirs, were held in the supremest honor. Money was the first object in all matrimonial alliances; and provided that women were only wealthy, neither bridegroom nor parent was fastidious as to age, or deformity, or meanness of family, or vulgarity of person. The needy descendants of the old patricians yoked themselves with fortunate plebeians, and the blooming maidens of a comfortable obscurity sold themselves, without shame or reluctance, to the bloated sensualists ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... few minutes the crowd had fallen back. They watched her with respectful admiration from a decent distance. They had the chivalry towards woman so characteristic of the West. There was no vulgarity in their curiosity, though most of them had never seen her before. All, however, had heard of her and her father, the giant greybeard who moved and lived in an air of mystery, and apparently secret ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... often in error when we blindly admire, or unhesitatingly adopt, the works of the ancients as perfection. In Athens and Rome in past time, as in Paris and London at present, we may meet with instances of bad taste; for vulgarity belongs to no age or station, and may be visible in the costly decoration of a rich mansion, whose owner is uneducated in art, and insists on ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... entered upon the discharge of his duties by reading Monte Carlo, and How to Do It, by W.F. GOLDBERG, and G. CHAPLIN PIESSE (J.W. ARROWSMITH). He reports in the following terms to his loved Chief:—This book achieves the task of combining extraordinary vulgarity with the flattest and most insipid dulness—not a common dulness, but a dulness redolent of low slang and dirty tap-rooms. The authors seem to plume themselves on their marvellous success in reaching Monte Carlo, which, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser's, vowed away from coarseness and vulgarity: he's the most perfect intellectual companion in the world. He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire even such applause as theirs.... Of course, that ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... peers. He is of the old school, I admit, but he is nevertheless right on the spot with his points and his psychology. His name is Harry Champion. Perhaps you have seen him and been disgusted with what you would call the vulgarity of his songs. But what you call his vulgarity, my dears, is just everyday life; and everyday life is always disgusting to the funny little Bayswaterats, who are compact of timidity and pudibonderie. The elderly adolescent has no business at the music-hall; his place is the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gertrude would allow her, she would try to dress her hair as well as she could. That it would be of no use to ask Jennet again, Clare well knew; and she shrank from exposing her dear old Barbara to the insolent vulgarity of Gertrude. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... up your minds," Tai-yue put in, "to initiate a poetical society, every one of us will be poets, so we should, as a first step, do away with those various appellations of cousin and uncle and aunt, and thus avoid everything that bears a semblance of vulgarity." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... stature, with a face like the egg of a goose. Her eyes so beautiful, with their well-curved eyebrows, possessed in their gaze a bewitching flash. At the very sight of her refined and elegant manners all idea of vulgarity ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... vulgarity about it, no ostentation, except the perfume. The fireworks were as private ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... avowal of fondness of good eating and drinking which is employed to give a comic stamp to servants and persons in a low rank of life, it may still be used without impropriety: of those to whom life has granted but few privileges it does not require much; and they may boldly own the vulgarity of their inclinations, without giving any shock to our moral feelings. The better the condition of servants in real life, the less adapted are they for the stage; and this at least redounds to the praise of our more humane age, that in our "family ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... see and hear what was going on there; it was revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are about 215,000 retail liquor houses in this nation. Allowing 20 feet to each, it gives us an unbroken liquor front of about 781 miles. Just think of it! Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of profanity and vulgarity. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of Sabbath-breaking. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of drunkard-making. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of filth, debauchery, anarchy, dynamite and bombs. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Retz shut the window with a shrug of protest against the vulgarity of prejudice. He did not notice four men in the garb of pilgrims who stood in the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... the opinion expressed by the naval lieutenant at Naples, who said "She was a very handsome, vulgar woman." All her portraits confirm what the sailor says about her beauty, and the most reliable records are confirmatory so far as his view of her vulgarity is concerned. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... over-refined literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... authorities on self-sacrifice, agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of despatches with New York, ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... reassuringly, and for the matter of that, there were probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... say that he had genius. The best piece of painting of his hand in the room is the boy in Harlowe's picture of the "Kemble Family;" a picture of considerable artistic merit, but ruined by the coarse vulgarity of a caricature of Mrs Siddons. How unlike the Lady Macbeth! The corpulent velvet dark mass and obtruding figure is most unpleasant. It is much to be regretted Mr. Harlowe did not redesign that principal figure. There are several landscapes of Gainsborough's, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... will demand men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Wordsworth. But of all these things nothing is worse than ——, in spite of Hunt's extracting the only good stanzas, with his usual good nature. Indeed, I ought not to complain of Hunt's good nature, for no one owes so much to it. Is not the vulgarity of these wretched imitations of Lord Byron carried to a pitch of the sublime? His indecencies, too, both against sexual nature, and against human nature in general, sit very awkwardly upon him. He only affects the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... such credit as was his due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... chiefly of modern date; the streets are broad, and furnished with raised pavements for foot passengers. There is much gaiety in the two squares on Sundays and festivals. A market of every possible thing, but especially provisions, is held there. The extraordinary vulgarity and rudeness of the common people struck me greatly; on all sides I heard only abuse, shouting, and cursing. To my astonishment I saw dromedaries ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... preface, unless the fact that I have heard several other ballads upon the subject of these celebrated lovers—all of the same tendency, and all in the highest praise of the beauty and virtues of the fair Cooleen Bawn. Their utter vulgarity, however, precludes them from a place in these pages. And, by the way, talking of the law which passed under the administration of Lord Chesterfield against intermarriages, it is not improbable that the elopement of Reilly ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the track and Millinery, Of Giles the grocer, and from there To Emilie the milliner, There to be tempted by the sight Of hats and blouses fiercely bright. (O guard Miss Thompson, Powers that Be, From Crudeness and Vulgarity.) ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the return I had met for a kind attempt to correct a mistake of my husband's, that made him liable to ridicule on the charge of vulgarity! And to deny, too, that he said "Miss," when I had been worried about it for more than a ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... not scrupulously pious in some part of his life is known by many idle and indecent applications of sentences taken from the Scriptures, a mode of merriment which a good man dreads for its profaneness, and a witty man disdains for its easiness and vulgarity. But to whatever levities he has been betrayed, it does not appear that his principles were ever corrupted, or that he ever lost his belief of revelation. The positions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... beastly show,' as you called it—the freak fashions, the ugly eccentric dances, the costly pageant balls, the shouldering, the striving, the worship of money, the gambling, the self-advertisement—all the abject vulgarity of it? And my set, the artistic, soulful literary set, you said was the worst of all: you actually described the high-priestess as looking like a 'decomposing cod-fish,' and added by way of a final insult that you thought the woman ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... wondered that Arthur was ever attracted by Miss B——, for he was very fastidious, and the least suggestion of aiming at effect or vulgarity, or hankering after notoriety, would infallibly have disgusted him. But this was ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... worthy, from an American point of view, of all Mr. Ruskin says of it; and if circulation were determined by merit, it would speedily outstrip a good many now popular children's books which have a vein of commonness, if not of vulgarity."—Hartford Courant. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... aware of circumstances calculated to give this negative comfort. His maternal uncle enjoyed, indeed, his newly acquired property only a few years after it came into his possession. Partly on account of his cruelty to his relations, partly from a meanness and vulgarity of character, which soon displayed itself in his novel situation, and which, it was believed, had previously kept him in the lowest walks of his profession as a Dublin attorney, he found himself neglected ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... vulgar, as to have an opinion on any subject, unless it should be the opinion of the persons you may happen to be in company with; and, as we have the reputation of possessing that quality in an eminent degree, everywhere but at home, take especial heed to eschew vulgarity—if you can. You will have the greatest care, also, to wear the shortest bob in all your private, and the longest tail in all your public relations, this being one of the most important of the celebrated checks and balances of our government. Our ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... unhappy country, when our bloods were chafed, and our hands were red. Excuse the rudeness that gave you a rough welcome, and lay it upon the evil times, and not upon us." All this was said with the manners of a princess, and in the tone and style of a court. Nor was there the least tincture of that vulgarity, which we naturally attach to the Lowland Scottish. There was a strong provincial accentuation, but, otherwise, the language rendered by Helen MacGregor, out of the native and poetical Gaelic, into English, which she had acquired as we do ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... her. She had hoped that sufficient time had elapsed for the extinction of curiosity; but it was quite otherwise. The people looked at her with tender interest as the deserted girl-wife—without obtrusiveness, and without vulgarity; but she was ill prepared ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... was a contemporary of Ennius; he was a native of Umbria, and of humble origin. Education did not overcome his vulgarity, although it produced a great effect upon his language and style. He must have lived and associated with the people whose manners he describes, hence his pictures are correct and truthful. The class ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes, your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that the man was compelled to pay to the master. True, this attitude was atoned for on occasion by blunt boldness, but the abased position and the lack of subtle distinction of air and mind of the noble, forbade to the Fourth Mousquetaire the last gracious touch of a Bayard of heroism. But the vulgarity ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, and seems ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Gabrielle, mournfully. "Listen, wise Ruth, I shall be a mother soon; and to my child, if it is spared, and to you, I devote myself. You have seen the Misses Erminstoun—you have seen vulgarity, insolence, and absurd pretension; they have taunted me with my ignorance, and I will not change it now. The blood of the De Courcys and O'Briens has made me a lady; and all the wealth of the Indies can not make them so. No, Ruth, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... a head taller, and a bold and challenging figure. Her blond hair distinguished her even more than the emphasis of her florid hat. Her pallor that morning refined the indubious coarseness of her face, and changed vulgarity into the attractive originality of a spirited character. Many there knew her, but she recognized nobody. She yawned once, in a fair piece of acting, and in her movements and the poise of her head there was ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions." Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... blue and red letters such a phrase as this: "Try the Jigamaree Bitters!" Very much like this is the sort of advertising I am speaking of. It is not likely that I shall be charged with squeamishness on this question. I can readily enough see the selfishness and vulgarity of this particular sort of ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. Vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality. In these cases, as we shall see hereafter, the social sanction requires to be corrected by the moral and religious sanctions, and it is the special province of the moral and religious teacher ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... its own dreams which would only be thwarted by external illustration. Yet I do not bring forward the text or the etchings in this volume as examples of what either ought to be in works of the kind: they are in many respects common, imperfect, vulgar; but their vulgarity is of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought "popped into Catherine's head"; but it nevertheless is far better, as an initiation into literary style, that a child should be told this than that "a subject attracted Catherine's ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... know it all. In her way, she has been educated. Neefit pere is utterly illiterate and ignorant. He is an honest man, as vulgar as he can be,—or rather as unlike you and me, which is what men mean when they talk of vulgarity,—and he makes the best of breeches. Neefit mere is worse than the father,—being cross and ill-conditioned, as far as I can see. Polly is as good as gold; and if I put a house over my head with her money, of course her father and her mother will ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken by the ancient Court of Scotland, to which no idea of vulgarity could be attached; and the lively manners and gestures with which it was accompanied were so completely in accord with the sound of the voice and the style of talking, that I cannot assign them a different origin. In long derivation, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... hands or even the figures of their counterfeit presentments on canvas or in marble tallied with the originals. Sir Joshua Reynolds, as we know, would have regarded this as the essence of finical vulgarity. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with what delight I recur to the days which I spent at Cambridge. In the delightful seclusion from noisy vulgarity, in the sweet interchange of kind sentiments, and in the mutual competition of classic pursuits, I possessed a unity and tranquillity of purpose far beyond the merits of my later years. My first years there were not marked with this peculiar character. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... measure, to counterbalance that of his mistress, however unhappily he has placed his affections. But the real excellence of these scenes consists less in peculiarity of character, than in the vivacity and power of the language, which, seldom sinking into vulgarity, or rising into bombast, maintains the mixture of force and dignity, best adapted to the expression of tragic passion. Upon the whole, as the comic part of this play is our author's master-piece in comedy, the tragic plot ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... "have" Gabriel Nash; a truth exemplified in his unexpected delight at the prospect of Miriam's drawing forth the modernness of the age. You might have thought he would loathe that modernness; but he had a joyous, amused, amusing vision of it—saw it as something huge and fantastically vulgar. Its vulgarity would rise to the grand style, like that of a London railway station, and the publicity achieved by their charming charge be as big as the globe itself. All the machinery was ready, the platform laid; the facilities, the wires and bells and trumpets, the roaring, deafening newspaperism ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the weakness common to several other fine gentlemen who have combined letters and haut ton, of being ashamed of the literary character. The vulgarity of the court, its indifference to all that was not party writing, whether polemical or political, cast a shade ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Daisy I do not know what to do with you. Do you like, is it possible that you can like, dirt and vulgarity?" ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... suggestion even of coarseness in libretto or in stage business." The hint was hardly necessary, for Mr. Savile Clarke was not the sort of man to spoil his work, or to allow others to spoil it, by vulgarity. Several alterations were made in the books before they were suitable for a dramatic performance; Mr. Dodgson had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters, which the Walrus and the Carpenter had devoured. He also completed "Tis the voice of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... that Lady Webling was shocked—by the vulgarity, no doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language—only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... value. And then commenced the general warfare; full purse and empty head—versus no purse, and old nobility. They had the satisfaction of ruining each other—the full purse was emptied by devouring duns, and the old nobility suffered by its connexion with vulgarity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... literary movement was started by Sir Walter Scott, who made a revolution in novel-writing, introducing a new style, freeing romances from bad taste, vulgarity, insipidity, and false sentiment. He painted life and Nature without exaggerations, avoided interminable scenes of love-making, and gave a picture of society in present and past times so fresh, so vivid, so natural, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... times, I must confess. I swear it is enough at times to make you swear You would almost rather be anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... all was! how free from any attempt at display of style! yet equally free from any trace of vulgarity or ill-natured gossip. Mousie had added grace to the banquet with her blooming plants and dried grasses; and, although the dishes had been set on the table by my wife's and children's hands, they were daintily ornamented and inviting. All had been within our means and accomplished by ourselves; ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... store of biscuits needed replenishing before luncheon. She was putting on her bonnet to go to order them, when a doubt seized her whether she was transgressing the dignities of the Honourable Mrs. Martindale. Matilda had lectured against vulgarity when Arthur had warned her against ultra-gentility, and she wavered, till finding there was no one to send, her good sense settled the question. She walked along, feeling the cares and troubles of life arising on her, and thinking she should never again be gay and thoughtless, when she ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is rich in invention, even for Haydn at his best; it is full of jollity far removed from vulgarity; the atmosphere is continuously fresh, almost fragrant, and there are endless touches of poetic seriousness. The Adagio is as profound as anything he wrote. Perhaps, on the whole—and it may be wrong ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a field-marshal's baton may brain a helpless State?—our navies because in ships pirates have "sailed the seas over?" Let us not commit the vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of perversion by the vicious and the profligate. Let us not utter us in hot bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the sweet ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... through this divine initiation,—this sacred inspiration of our nature,—and find, when they have come into the innermost shrine, where the divinity ought to be, that there is no god or goddess there; nothing but the cold black ashes of commonplace vulgarity and selfishness. Both of them, when the grand discovery has been made, do well to fold their robes decently about them, and make the best of the matter. If they cannot love, they can at least be friendly. ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you shall see the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and beastliness. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... fiddlefaddle—a dash of bitters, a squirt of orange, an olive, cherry, or onion wrenched from its proper place in the saladbowl, a twist of lemonpeel, sprig of mint or lump of sugar and an eyedropperful of whisky; or else they embrace the opposite extreme of vulgarity and gulp whatever rotgut is thrust at them to addle their undiscerning brains and atrophy their undiscriminating palates. Either practice is foreign to my nature and philosophy. I believe the happiest combinations of liquors are simple ones, containing no more than two ingredients, each ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... room of sumptuous vulgarity two men sat drinking wine. One of them was old and grey, the other a young Jew. The young Jew was holding a roll of bank-notes in his hand, and was bargaining with the old man. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... were at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London. The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... as is the work of these two painters, it does not reach the highest level. It falls short of grandeur, and has that worldly tone that borders on vulgarity. As we study it we feel that it marks the point to which Venetian art might have attained, the flood-mark it might have touched, if it had lacked the advent of the three or four great spirits, who, appearing about the same time, bore it up to ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... condition. On these occasions I used to consider with a sort of fierce humor how Nina would receive him—for though she saw no offense in the one kind of vice she herself practiced, she had a particular horror of vulgarity in any form, and drunkenness was one of those ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... appeared upon the next day at dinner. His manners, though not so coarse as I had expected, were exceedingly disagreeable; there was an assurance and a forwardness for which I was not prepared; there was less of the vulgarity of manner, and almost more of that of the mind, than I had anticipated. I felt quite uncomfortable in his presence; there was just that confidence in his look and tone, which would read encouragement even in mere toleration; and I felt more disgusted ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Take the truth; I'll not be poisoned with it! I am sick of you; you have disgusted me! I will ease my heart by telling you the whole. If I seek the society of other women, it is because I find not among them your meanness and vulgarity!" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... women? These are sisters of charity—these are heroines without a record in any human literature. Have they been injured by mixing with the rude affairs of war in camps and among soldiers? When women take upon themselves such necessary duties they take vulgarity from vulgarity, and coarseness becomes refined, for it is the heart of woman that brings life ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... make any difference if I did," I said, with unconscious asperity, for indeed this excess of free manners was jarring upon me. The line dividing it from vulgarity was becoming so thin I was losing sight of the divisor. Yet no one, even the most fastidious, could associate vulgarity with Natalie Brande. There remained an air of unassumed sincerity about herself and all her actions, including even her dress, which absolutely excluded her from hostile ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... nothing to do with devotion. And the impertinent patronage of worshippers in "fustian" is at least as offensive as the older-fashioned vulgarity of pride in congregations who "come in their own carriages." And I do protest against the flippant inference that good clothes for the body must lower the assumptions of the spirit, or make repentance insincere; ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he drove without thought of where he was going. Detail after detail of the affair presented itself to his mind in endless repetition. It had been a humiliating experience. The old woman's vulgarity; Macomber's stolid, iron hand clearing the air, like brushing trash from his doorstep; the consciousness of prying eyes at that upstairs window! "I've been a feeble cuckoo," he thought. "Mighta supposed two years in the army would have taught me better'n that. Played ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... comedy of the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance, Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and beautiful. And something ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... not be asked to enter the Cabinet in person. The country abhorred him; Parliament despised him; his inveterate habits of slander and vituperation, his vulgarity, and his incurable want of veracity, had made him so hateful to the educated classes that it would have required no common courage to give him office; his insolent sneers at royalty would have made his appointment little less than a personal insult to the Queen; and ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Full short in stature and rotund is he, Pale grey his watery orbs, that dare not scan His interlocutor, and his goatee, With hair and whiskers like a furnace be: Concave the mouth from which his nose-tip flies In vain attempt to shun vulgarity. O haste, ye gods, to snatch from him the prize, And send him hence to ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and few were taught writing. This confined education precluded elegance; yet, though there was no polish, there was no vulgarity."[48] ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... vulgar, and we dislike vulgarity. 'Commission Office,' 'Racing Bank,' 'Mr Hopposite Green's Office,' 'Betting-Office,'are the styles of announcement adopted by speculators who open what low people call Betting-shops. The chosen designation is usually painted in gold letter on a chocolate-coloured ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... taint of snobbery in M. Halevy's treatment of all this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things. There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... deference, if not into admiration, by exact knowledge of the number of dollars which dangled from the shoulders of the fashionable butterfly. This boastful parade of information as to how much one expends in this or that article implies an undertone of vulgarity peculiar to those who have nothing but money to be proud of. The cultivated and truly genteel mind is never guilty of it. Yet it somehow prevails too extensively among American women. Display is a sort of mania with too many of them. A family in moderate circumstances marries ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... except little Ida and Miss More—the real humanity and faithful kindness that dwelt in the terribly hard and coarse-grained fighting financier. Lady Maud had her faults, no doubt, but she was too big, morally, to be disturbed by what seemed to Margaret Donne an intolerable vulgarity ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... American taste is partial to sentiment, and antagonistic to themes that fail to present the American in the light of optimistic romance. But our defects in taste are slowly but certainly being remedied. The schools are at work upon them; journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon them. Our taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste in architecture, our taste in music go up, as our taste in magazine fiction ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Hale. Mr. Thornton had thought that the house in Crampton was really just the thing; but now that he saw Margaret, with her superb ways of moving and looking, he began to feel ashamed of having imagined that it would do very well for the Hales, in spite of a certain vulgarity in it which had struck him at the time of his looking ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... glimpse of the round moon rising above the solemn heights of the opposite shore, and felt the cool breath of mountain and river sweep his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... "literature." He is so unassuming, so mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with his long and deliberate career. A large volume, yet one arrives at the end of it with surprising quickness, because the pages seem ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... of calling tyrant, Mrs. Riley. Nor ojus vulgarity. Nor epithets I will not repeat, relating to family connections. Concerning which, I say, God forgive Alethear! For the accommodation at a nominal rent of persons in reduced circumstances is not an almshouse, say what she may. And her Aunt Trebilcock ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... retained the charm of musical expression, though her voice was but a thread. And so we spoke of her; two old men with all the enthusiastic admiration of fifty years ago. Pleasant was it also to hear him speak of the public singers of those early days. Braham, so great, spite of his vulgarity; Miss Stephens, so sweet to listen to, though she had no voice of power; and poor Vaughan, who had so feeble a voice, and yet was always called "such a chaste singer." How he would roar with laughter, when I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the well-laid plan came to naught. The specimens of local and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not find them ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Colambre found a spirit of improvement, a desire for knowledge, and a taste for science and literature, in most companies, particularly among gentlemen belonging to the Irish bar: nor did he in Dublin society see any of that confusion of ranks or predominance of vulgarity, of which his mother had complained. Lady Clonbrony had assured him, that, the last time she had been at the drawing-room at the Castle, a lady, whom she afterwards found to be a grocer's wife, had turned angrily when her ladyship had accidentally trodden on her train, and had exclaimed ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... or crevice, there pierces through the countenance of a man, through the very posture of his body as he stands or moves, a glimpse of his nobility and freedom, or again of something in him low and grovelling—the calm of self-restraint, and wisdom, or the swagger of insolence and vulgarity? ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... again unveil ourselves to each other. At this time I began to learn from the older boys the pitiful, childish vulgarities and common terms of sex, and to invent and exchange rhymes and stories that were pathetic in their attempts at vulgarity. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... were appointed in and by Great Britain, and helped to control the commercial policy. Another member was the bishop of the Anglican Church, for the seemly ceremonies and graded orders of clergy of this body were deemed to be a counterpoise to popular vagaries and vulgarity. Prior to the American Revolutionary War there had been no colonial bishopric; {35} three years after its close the first bishop of ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... Tudor fireplace, whose moulded four-centred arch was nearly hidden by a figured blue-cloth blower, were seated two women—mother and daughter—Mrs. Hall, and Sarah, or Sally; for this was a part of the world where the latter modification had not as yet been effaced as a vulgarity by the march of intellect. The owner of the name was the young woman by whose means Mr. Darton proposed to put an end to his bachelor ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... good-natured of Mr. Chorley to send me a copy of his book, and he sending so few—very! George who admires you, does not tolerate Mr. Chorley ... (did I tell ever?) declares that the affectation is 'bad,' and that there is a dash of vulgarity ... which I positively refuse to believe, and should, I fancy, though face to face with the most vainglorious of waistcoats. How can there be vulgarity even of manners, with so much mental refinement? I never could believe in those ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... no vulgarity in this idea: it is a poetical degree in the scale of passion. An abhisarika is a lady so mastered by her love that she cannot wait for her lover, but goes to him of her own accord. There are all sorts of conditions laid down to regulate her going: she must not go in broad ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... advantage at present was on Lisa's side, for as the time for striking the decisive blow approached she manifested the calmest serenity of bearing, whereas her rival, in spite of all her efforts to attain the same air of distinction, always lapsed into some piece of gross vulgarity, which she afterwards regretted. La Normande's ambition was to look "like a lady." Nothing irritated her more than to hear people extolling the good manners of her rival. This weak point of hers had not escaped old Madame Mehudin's observation, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... a paradise, in which the ugliness, vulgarity, sordidness and cruelty of the present scheme of things will ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... emphasis which nature had given to his features, he was a presentable person. Flying side-whiskers made his mouth appear grotesquely wide, and the play of strong feelings had produced vicious wrinkles on his spare face. He appeared to be a man of energy, vivacity and vulgarity, reminding one of a dinner of pork and cabbage. He was soon forgotten in the excitement of a delightful day, whose glories came to a brilliant end in that banquet which introduced the nephew of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... my efforts to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... To avoid the vulgarity of ushering this company into the presence of the punctilious reader without even the ceremony of a Bedouin introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... France, Germany and England are the work, not of academies, but of individual scholars, of Littre, Grimm and Murray. Matthew Arnold's plea for an English academy of letters to save his countrymen from the note of vulgarity and provinciality has met with no response. Academies have been supplanted, socially by the modern club, and intellectually by societies devoted to special branches of science. Those that survive from the past serve, like the Heralds' College, to set an official ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Rose to a Crimson Rambler, which she enthusiastically declares is the grandest Rose in the world. Side by side with her letter is one from an artist. "I don't like Ramblers," writes he. "An artistic Rose to my mind is like a jewel in a right setting. Too many jewels denote vulgarity." Every class of Rose has its enthusiastic devotees. The best Hybrid Teas come nearer combining all merits of a Rose, and nearer pleasing all standards of taste than any other; yet any florist will tell you that they are ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... Jack!" exclaimed the girl, her smile apologizing for the vulgarity of the expression. "If I had a ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... political assemblage of the people was graced by the presence of women. Had it needed a law to enable them to be present, what an argument could have been made against it! How easily it could have been shown that the coarseness, the dubious expressions, the general vulgarity of the scene, could have had no other effect than to break down that purity of thought and word which women have, and which conservative and radical are alike sedulous to preserve. And yet the actual presence of women at political meetings has not debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... word Mr. Tutt rolled Bibby up and threw him away, while his master shuddered at the open disclosure of his trusted major-domo's vulgarity, mendacity and general lack of sportsmanship. Somehow all at once the case began to break up and go all to pot. The jury got laughing at Bibby, the footmen and the cops as Mr. Tutt painted for their edification the scene following the arrival of Mrs. Witherspoon, when ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... the attainment of this taste, in any meritorious degree, by necessarily requiring much study, operate as preclusive of information to the possession of which no peculiar epithet of a commendatory nature has hitherto been awarded? Nay, is there not a sort of prejudice allied to a notion of vulgarity, directed against almost any shew of acquaintance with the habits and histories of uncultivated nations? But it would be unpardonable to imagine, there were not other reasons of a less invidious nature to explain the fact. We must certainly be allowed to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... practical ability, and moderately versed in the laws of acoustics, with an eye for form, and not deficient in a certain conception of art as art; who have the instinct to check any approach to vulgarity, and work on lines, curves and thicknesses, more or less true, elegant, and the best for producing fine tone, have seen, and will yet again see, their efforts of small avail, cast aside, never to assume even mediocre rank in the stern array of violins of modern make, much ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... ideas, a man cannot "let himself down," who "associates only with those whose moral characters are unimpeachable." It is true that he was pleasant and playful in conversation with all classes of people; but he was remarkably free from any tinge of vulgarity. It is true, also, that he was totally and entirely unconscious of any such thing as distinctions of rank. I have been acquainted with many theoretical democrats, and with not a few who tried to be democratic, from kind feelings-and ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... kind-hearted girl, she had captured with a glance the eldest son of the newly rich Pletheridge, who had, perhaps, inherited his grandfather's genial admiration for chambermaids; but, to-day, after a generation of self-indulgence, her prettiness had coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart had withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry. And, from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at last reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of nothing more ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that Thackeray, though he had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to periodicals,—to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral literature of the month,—had already become effective on the tastes and morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good breeding but never approaches it; dishonest gambling, whether with dice or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already received condign punishment from Yellowplush, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Wilson is right in not suffering Emily to read such things." And Jane, who had often devoured the treacherous lines with ardor, shrank with fastidious delicacy from the indulgence of a perverted taste, when it became exposed, coupled with the vulgarity of unblushing audacity. ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... is one branch of the Civil Service located in Somerset House, which has little else to redeem it from the lowest depths of official vulgarity than the ambiguous respectability of its material position. This is the office of the Commissioners of Internal Navigation. The duties to be performed have reference to the preservation of canal banks, the tolls to be levied at locks, and disputes with the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... at Joan's tongue," said Nancy. "Starling said last night that her stomach was a little out of order, and we rebuked her for her vulgarity." ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... known as plain 'Shawn Duffy, of the Devil's Half-acre.' It was undoubtedly a most diabolic address; but Shawn was a man of considerable strength of mind, as well as of muscle, and he resolved to become a juntleman, despite this damning reminiscence. Vulgarity, it is said, sticks to a man like a limpet to a rock. Shawn knew the best way to rub it off would be by mixing with good society. Dress, he always understood, was the best passport he could bring for admission within ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... worth considering (blatant ignorance or base vulgarity alone excepted) that the revolution effected by Christianity in human life is immeasurable and unparalleled by any other movement in history; though most nearly approached by that of the Jewish religion, of which, however, it ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... back in disorder, like a mane, with features that looked as if they had been cut out with a bill-hook, but which were so powerful, and in which there lay such a flame of life, that one forgot their vulgarity and ugliness; with black eyes under bushy eyebrows, which dilated and flashed like lightning, now were veiled as if in tears and then were filled with serene mildness, with a voice which now growled so as almost to terrify its hearers, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of intellectual people, but he did draw great crowds who came out of curiosity to see the gyroscopic gyrations. Talmage never ventured far from shore, and he of all men knew that while the mob would forgive vulgarity—in fact, really enjoyed it—unsoundness of doctrine was to it a hissing. Orthodoxy is very tolerant—it forgives everything but truth. Every fetish of the superstitious and cringing mind, Talmage repeated over and over in varying ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them. If, then, Tracts for the Million seem a necessity, they also seem an impossibility; for what self-respecting man will sit down to weave that tissue of sophistry, special-pleading, violence, and vulgarity, which alone will serve the practical purpose with those to whom trenchency is everything and subtlety nothing? Even though the means involve a violation of taste rather than of morals, yet can they be justified ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... shrieked its cry of despair. He moved mechanically toward the church and waked from his reverie to find himself jammed in a solid mass of humanity. Never before had he realized the utter vulgarity of a public wedding. Why should any one wish a crowd of curious fools to witness even the happiest wedding? Its meaning is surely frank enough without shouting it from the housetops. Should not its joys and mystery be something too shy and sweet and holy for a vulgar crowd of strangers to gaze ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of way that I'd been jounced out of the office. He said it was 'a bally shame,' Oh, I did envy that chap his eight hundred a year! Life seemed to him one grand, sweet song. Cricket, Riviera, dances, clubs, country houses, everything. He was fenced in on every side, safe from the vulgarity of the world. He was hall-marked—a public-school man. He was a citizen of his world, I was an alien. He was rich. I had not ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... hand on her shoulder like a protector). We shall fight your vulgarity together. (All this time he has been arranging sticks for his fire.) Now get some dry grass. (She brings him grass, and he puts it under the sticks. He produces an odd lens from his pocket, and tries to focus ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... English School, we are less seldom disgusted with the coarseness, both of subject and manner, that prevailed in some of their contemporaries and immediate successors. In no branch of art is this improvement more shown than in scenes of familiar life—which meant, indeed "Low Life." Vulgarity has given place to a more "elegant familiar." This has necessarily brought into play a nicer attention to mechanical excellence, and indeed to all the minor beauties of the art. We almost fear too much has been done this way, because it has been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... cause of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? Why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, whilst the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? Both of these assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert in America that the Senate is hostile ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... these unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, as with our Pundit's famous countryman Mr. Jaberjee, though they use the purest language, they can instantly express every shade of thought with grace and completeness without resorting to slang:—that ready cloak wherewith puny minds strive to cover their vulgarity ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... costume, or performer. It has no plan, no idea; some ideas are flung into it in passing; but it remains as shapeless as an English pantomime, and not much more interesting. Both appeal to the same undeveloped instincts, the English to a merely childish vulgarity, the French to a vulgarity which is more frankly vicious. Really I hardly know which is to be preferred. In England we pretend that fancy dress is all in the interests of morality; in France they make no such pretence, and, in dispensing with shoulder-straps, do ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... must have its own forms of ostentation, pretence, and vulgarity. The ancient Romans had theirs, the English and the French have theirs as well,—why should not we Americans have ours? Educated and refined persons must recognize frequent internal conflicts between the "Homo sum" of Terence ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... aristocratic ships as these) attempts to be rampantly facetious at her expense. But the damsel with the unkempt auburn locks flowing about her comely face, lit up by a pair of blue Irish eyes under their dark lashes, takes the cad's vulgarity together with his money, like the pill with the jam, giving in return the valueless pieces of carved wood, until her little stock is exhausted and a good morning's work ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of these social supervisors! and what a wretch, the habit of deferring to no principle better than their decision has made many a being, who has had originally the materials of something better in him, than has been developed by the surveillance of ignorance, envy, vulgarity, gossiping and lying! In those cases in which education, social position, opportunities and experience have made any material difference between the parties, the man who yields to such a government, exhibits the picture of a giant held in bondage by a pigmy. I have always remarked, too, that ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the Arabs and they to me, and I am inclined to be 'kind' to their virtues if not 'blind' to their faults, which are visible to the most inexperienced traveller. You see all our own familiar 'bunkum' (excuse the vulgarity) falls so flat on their ears, bravado about 'honour,' 'veracity,' etc., etc., they look blank and bored at. The schoolboy morality as set forth by Maurice is current here among grown men. Of course we tell lies to Pashas and Beys, why shouldn't we? But shall I call in that ragged ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... rate, he said that it was his duty before he, as the out-going President, broke his wand of office to remind the Society that it existed for two definite objects—the pursuit of pleasure, and the suppression of vulgarity. He then went on to state that Mr. Wilkins, formerly of St. Cuthbert's, had kindly consented to give an account of his travels ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... meat and fat people. I used to like to be with the hired girls in the kitchen. I was entirely untouched by the often-repeated expositions made to me of the vulgarity of such habits, and of the low esteem in which I should be held in consequence. What is vulgarity to a child? Spontaneity, unconscious existence, has no vulgarities. Vulgarity comes of restraints and distortions; and a child's life is commonly for a time untouched by the girdling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... written for and sung by the late Mr. Fitzwilliam, the comedian, as others of Hudson's songs were by Mr. Rayner. Collectors of comic ditties will not readily forget "Walker, the Twopenny Postman," or "The Dogs'-meat Man"—rough caricatures of low life, unstained by the vulgarity of many of the modern music-hall ditties. In the motto to one of his collections of poems, Hudson borrows from Churchill an excuse for the rough, humorous effusions that he scattered ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury |
