"Artifice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less to listen to him, when he delivered his edicts, or the thanks of the House from the chair. His sonorous voice issuing from a diminutive person, and the epigrammatic points of empty sentences, formed with great artifice, were in very bad taste—though much admired by a House which consisted of so few men of a classical education. His rise was extraordinary, because his talents little exceeded mediocrity. But he was a courtier, and an intriguant. He was the son of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... known him then. Oh, Mr Wentworth, promise me that you will not turn your back upon him if he comes home, after all your kindness. I will tell Lucy how much you have done for him," said Miss Wodehouse. She was only half-conscious of her own gentle artifice. She took the Curate's hand in both her own before he left her, and said it was such a comfort to have his advice to rely upon; and she believed what she said, though Mr Wentworth himself knew better. The poor ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... in a little artifice. She produced a memorandum book, to see when Miss Minford took her last lesson; and, in order that she might read distinctly, drew out her eyeglasses, and adjusted them with a graceful movement of the arm and hand. Overtop thought that she handled the eyeglasses in a most ladylike manner; and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... accustomed to terrify Europe. He reckoned upon passing the Niemen on the 22nd or 23rd, and on the 16th wrote from Koenigsberg, authorizing Lauriston to ask his passports. The despatch was dated the 12th, from Thorn, the ambassador having been told of the artifice. Napoleon soon learned that Lauriston had not been allowed to leave Wilna. It mattered little now; having reached the banks of the Niemen, his proclamation was everywhere ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... determining and thus acting, you will pursue the plain and direct road to the attainment of your wishes; you will defeat the insidious designs of your enemies, who are compelled to resort from open force to secret artifice; you will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings; and you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... wife, was powerless to hold him back! powerless to keep him beside her, when that mad fit of passion seized him to go on one of those wild quests, wherefrom she always feared he could not return alive: and this, although she might use every noble artifice, every tender wile of which a loving and beautiful ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... my artifice, for he looked at me as if incredulous; and, instead of being satisfied with my answer and leaving me, according to my expectation, he walked at my side, and, with the greatest ease imaginable, began a conversation in the free style which only belongs to old ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... resumed and enforced his claim to the provision of benefices in France. Simony and the whole train of concomitant abuses reappeared more scandalously than ever; and Louis found himself despised by his subjects as the dupe of papal artifice. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... both the Seeds, Male and Female, so by our artifice, an artificial and like conjunction is made of Agents and Patients."(1) "All teaching," says KELLY, "that changes Mercury is false and vain, for this is the original sperm of metals, and its moisture must not be dried up, for otherwise it will not dissolve,"(2) ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... brilliancy; if there be no sunshine, the wall veil is subdued and varied by the most subtle gradations of delicate half shadow, hardly less advantageous to the shaft which it relieves. And, as far as regards pure effect in open air (all artifice of excessive darkness or mystery being excluded), I do not know anything whatsoever in the whole compass of the European architecture I have seen, which can for a moment be compared with the quaint ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Gorgias, the famous rhetorician, was sometimes thus hired. A truly Greek artifice—this substitution of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... couvrant tout de ses vapeurs funbres, 35 Sur les yeux les plus saints a jet ses tnbres. Lui seul, invariable et fond sur la foi, Ne cherche, ne regarde et n'coute que toi; Et bravant du demon l'impuissant artifice, De la religion soutient tout l'difice. 40 Grand Dieu, juge ta cause, et dploie aujourd'hui Ce bras, ce mme bras qui combattait pour lui, Lorsque des nations sa perte animes Le Rhin vit tant de fois disperser les armes. Des mmes ennemis je reconnais l'orgueil; ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... shared his suspicions. Her hostess's artifice was a transparent one, but she nevertheless fell in with it. She had seen Vane only in the company of others; this might be the same again to-morrow; and there was something to be said. By intuition as much as reason, she recognized that there was something working in his mind; something ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... anything to make an issue of. We all work for the good of the people, and the whole people. There is no greed of glory or gain; no personal ambition to gratify. Were I to use any artifice to secure office or popularity, I should be instantly deprived of public esteem and notice. I do my duty conscientiously; that is the aim of public life. I work for the public good and my popularity comes as it is ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... contrast, would bring out its perfect sweetness and grace, as well as its variety of expression: finally, it should be compared with any composition subsequent to the time of Raffaelle, in order to feel its noble freedom from pictorial artifice and attitude. These three comparisons cannot be made carefully without a sense of profound reverence for the national spirit[18] which could produce a design so majestic, and yet remain content ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... mere danger, and of occasions to prove his valour. Charged with the maxims of a refined courtesy, to be observed even towards an enemy; and of a scrupulous honour, which will not suffer him to take any advantages by artifice or surprise; indifferent to spoil, he contends only for renown, and employs his valour to rescue the distressed, and to protect the innocent. If victorious, he is made to rise above nature as much in his generosity and gentleness, as in ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... a boy, and yet sillier than one, if thou lookest to obtain any information from me? There is no outrage nor artifice by which Jupiter shall bring me to utter this, before my torturing shackles shall have been loosened. Wherefore let his glowing lightning be hurled, and with the white feathered shower of snow, and thunderings beneath the earth let him confound ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... appear, on their face, to urge caution and even delay, in the proceedings. They leave this impression on the general reader, and have been so regarded from that day to this. The artifice, by which the responsibility for what followed was shifted, from the Ministers, upon Phips and the Court, has, in a great measure, succeeded. I trust that I have shown that the clauses and words that seem to indicate caution, had very little force, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... lingered I should lose it, no great matter perhaps, seeing that the exchange, my principal object, had not been made; but if I remained with Henriette, she with her baby and I with mine, the whole of the artifice might at any moment ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... arrived, was as shrewd and far-sighted as either Tom or any of the others. It was these very qualities, coolness and self-reliance in the crisis of danger, that made him nominally the leader of the Riflemen of the Miami. He saw the great advantage gained by O'Hara's artifice in attracting the attention of the Indians to the point opposite to that from which the peril threatened; but, at the same time, he well knew that those same Shawnees were too well skilled in woodcraft to suffer their gaze to ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... laws by the actual course of civilisation, Comte adopts what he calls "the happy artifice of Condorcet," and treats the successive peoples who pass on the torch as if they were a single people running the race. This is "a rational fiction," for a people's true successors are those who pursue its efforts. And, like Bossuet and Condorcet, he confined his review to ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... creature should be trammeled in vice. What! be the companion of such men, relate a string of falsehoods, give a forged draft on a banker, and even shed tears at distress which, if it were not real, was a most base and odious artifice? That she could act so cunning and so vile a part, and I not detect her, was wholly incredible. I was very unwilling to imagine I could be so imposed upon, so duped. A raw traveller? If so, raw indeed! Of all suppositions, that was the most humiliating. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... sell all your tea, otherwise you must keep all. The people will risk life and fortune in this affair,—the very being of America depends on it. I am sorry the Company are led into such a scrape by the ministry, to try the American's bravery, at the expence of their property. The artifice of the ministry is to dispose of your tea, and preserve the vile Tea Act; but they'll miss their aim,—the Americans will not swallow cheap tea, which has a poison in the heart of it. They see the hook thro' the bait. I am a well wisher to the Company, and also to America; but death to an American ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... any restrictions, that her aunt should think proper, she expressed an obedience, to which Madame Cheron did not give much confidence, and which she seemed to consider as the consequence of either fear, or artifice. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... feel so no longer. Love, I take it, is a battle, and I use a military simile because there is war about us. If a good general wishes to take a position, and if he fails in the direct charge—if he is repelled with loss—he does not on that account retreat; but he resorts to artifice, to stratagem, to the mine, to the sly and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... morbus.—Nothing doth more invite a greedy reader than an unlooked-for subject. And what more unlooked-for than to see a person of an unblamed life made ridiculous or odious by the artifice of lying? But it is the disease of the age; and no wonder if the world, growing old, begin to be infirm: old age itself is a disease. It is long since the sick world began to dote and talk idly: would she had but doted still! but her dotage is now broke forth into a madness, and ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... him the red and yellow covered tale. "The Cracksman's Spoil, or Young Sleuth's Double Artifice" ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... the outer hall, and there the Greek, who could not make up his mind to see his golden dream vanish in smoke, examined with the most minute attention the shafts of the pillars to make certain that they did not conceal some artifice, that they did not mask some trap which might be discovered by displacing them; for in his despair he mingled the realism of Egyptian architecture with the chimerical constructions of the Arab tales. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... doctors. I had heard of such poisons, and here, in very truth, was one of them at work. His vengeance on her for her indifference to his suit was not so clumsy and primitive as that of simply slaying her. He had, by his infernal artifice, intended, secretly, to bear her off. To-morrow when men found a broken church-door and a violated bier, they would set the sacrilege down to some wizard who had need of the body for his dark practices ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... you,' she answered, having entered into his artifice. He went away, feigning to limp on his right knee, and keeping his face ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... that the ancestor of his family made his escape by artifice, and succeeded in taking with him a portion of his property. Such was also the good fortune of the brothers Faneuil, who were part of the numerous company from old Rochelle who emigrated to New ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... two days the partners had haunted the court-room where their lawyer, together with the counsel for the Scandinavians, had argued and pleaded, trying every possible professional and unprofessional artifice in search of relief from the arbitrary rulings of the court, while hourly they had become more strongly suspicious of some sinister plot—some hidden, powerful understanding back of the Judge and the entire ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... cup or fruit work he found ladies the only possible agents. No one in Nona would dream of taking wine from a man; and as for presents of figs, Grifone was maturely of opinion that the last and present Pontiffs had exhausted that pretty artifice. Finally, you can easily understand how useful Duke Amilcare found a demure lad of this kind in the matter of moulding his ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Poetical Works, issued in 1832, "by a judicious transposition of the comparison, and by the substitution of the more definite waves for seas, Lord Byron's clear and noble thought has been produced." But the literary artifice, if such there be, is subordinate to the emotion of the writer. It is in movement, progress, flight, that the sufferer experiences a relief from ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... ever constructed or the centuries ever caressed into greater beauty. This corner of the palace has an ever-increasing fascination for me, and at all hours of the day and night this strong column below and the slenderer one above it hold the light—whether of sun or moon or artifice—with ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... for breath, and let out a cry of rage and dismay, the first sound which he is perfectly certain did make its way past his lips on this night of terrors. This then was the death he had escaped! This was the devilish artifice of murder poor Tom's soul had perhaps tried from beyond the border to warn him of. For this was how he had died. Byrne was certain he had heard the voice of the seaman, faintly distinct in his familiar phrase, "Mr. Byrne! Look out, sir!" ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... up the two papers and put them into my pocket. I did not then feel, nor have I since been able to understand, all the indignation which has been poured on Lord Clive's head for this artifice, by which a treacherous, overreaching scoundrel was robbed of the blackmail he had tried to extort. As to the charge which has been made against that great man of having caused Admiral Watson's name to be forged to the second treaty, I can only say that ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... them was a customary Indian stratagem. A person, affecting to be a white man, hailed them, and requested them to lie by, that he might come on board. Finding that the boat's crew were not to be allured to the shore by this artifice, the Indians put off from the shore in three canoes, and attacked the boat. Never was a contest of this sort maintained with more desperate bravery. The Indians attempted to board the boat, and the inmates made use of all arms of annoyance and defence. Captain Hubbel, ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... not a trained statesman. His methods of action were direct and clear. His conduct was free from duplicity, and artifice of every sort was foreign to his nature. In the first years of his administration he relied upon his Cabinet in all minor matters relating to the departments. Acting upon military ideas, he held the head of a department to his full ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... timidity? That they are curious is certain; for if a person lies on the ground, and plays strange antics, such as throwing up his feet in the air, they will almost always approach by degrees to reconnoitre him. It was an artifice that was repeatedly practised by our sportsmen with success, and it had moreover the advantage of allowing several shots to be fired, which were all taken as parts of the performance. On the mountains of the Tierra del Fuego, I have more than once seen a guanaco, on being approached, not ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... they should resort to the same artifice as he, and one of them appeal to the earth for evidence. He would be equally quick to discover the proximity of the fugitives, and with his sense of hearing trained to the finest point by many years' exercise, would locate ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... obligations to other firms. He who had to recover money from men thus depressed had a hard task indeed, as Anton soon found out. On every side he heard lamentations which were but too well founded; and frequently every species of artifice was employed to evade his claims. Every day he had to go through painful scenes, often to listen to long legal proceedings carried on in Polish, out of which he generally came with an impression of having been "done," though the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual compass, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of the next day's noon before the preacher recovered from the effects of potations so unusual to him. It was then that Dalton questioned him, and discovered the artifice and cruelty of the treacherous Burrell, in abandoning the poor preacher to starvation: a consequence that must have occurred, had not the Skipper providentially stood in need of some articles of bedding, that were kept in this chamber, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... fantastic animal; the sound of the wind a plaintive cry, etc.), or again, on a resemblance with a predominating emotional element: A perception provokes a feeling, and becomes the mark, sign, or plastic form thereof (the lion represents courage; the cat, artifice; the cypress, sorrow; and so on). All this, doubtless, is erroneous or arbitrary; but the function of the imagination is to invent, not to perceive. All know that this process creates metaphors, allegories, symbols; it should not, however, be believed on that account that it remains restricted to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... with diamonds, put up their favours to the highest bidder, without having either more beauty or accomplishments, perhaps, than the distressed female who sells hers at the lowest price. But caprice, good fortune, intrigue, or artifice, sometimes occasions an enormous distance between women who have ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... recent and strong emotion, visible at that moment on the pirate's countenance, did not escape the Proveditore, who attributed them, and rightly, to an artifice he had practised. Previously to entering the dungeon, he had caused the name of Nicolo Dansowich to be repeated several times in a deep hollow voice. Aware of the superstitious credulity of the Uzcoques, the wily Venetian had devised this stratagem as one likely to produce a startling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids—envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme worthy of thought; ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... and night is lashed by the breakers of an ocean never at rest. Well did Francois Pyrard de Laval, in the year 1605 exclaim, 'C'est une merveille de voir chacun de ces atollons, environne d'un grand banc de pierre tout autour, n'y ayant point d'artifice humain.'"[62] ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told without artifice, but with an elective sureness of knowledge. The story of Tukang Burok's love, related in the old man's own words, conveys the very breath of Malay thought and speech. In "His Little Bill," the coolie, Lim Teng Wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us, an insignificant and tragic ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... different parts of the body were fractured and broke open, supposed to have been done by, the falling timbers of the burning house. It is said, "in one skull, two flint arrow-heads were found." How easy for the artifice of the white men that accomplished the massacre in the manner they did, to have sunk these two flint arrows into one of those skulls, to leave the conjecture in after times to have been done by ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... position. If he meant to keep her there he could do so, and opposition made him only more obstinate, more determined to press his advantage. Had she been more politic—Juliana off the stage as well as on—she, whose artifice was ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... temperament was not like Varvilliers'. For an hour or two, when I was exhilarated with society and cheered by wine, I could seem to myself such as he naturally and permanently was. But I was not a native of the clime. I raised myself to those heights of unmoral serenity by an effort and an artifice. He forgot himself easily. I was always examining myself. That same motive, or instinct, or tradition of feeling (I do not know how best to describe it) on whose altar I had sacrificed my first passion was still strong in me. I did not fear that Coralie would or could exercise a political ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... desensualized, desecularized visionary and God-intoxicated man; and even yet when one hears anybody praised, because he lives "wisely," or "as a philosopher," it hardly means anything more than "prudently and apart." Wisdom: that seems to the populace to be a kind of flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully from a bad game; but the GENUINE philosopher—does it not seem so to US, my friends?—lives "unphilosophically" and "unwisely," above all, IMPRUDENTLY, and feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... suspect—mind you, I am merely guessing—but I repeat that I suspect the honesty of Monsieur Jean de Courtois in this matter. There was no earthly reason why he should not have married Lady Hermione some weeks ago, but it is clear that he has used every artifice to delay the ceremony until to-night—and, it may be found when we learn the facts, was prepared to put it off once more till to-morrow or next day. Why? In my opinion, the reason is not far to seek. The Earl of Valletort ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... made no scruple in filling his pages with the sentimental declamations in which the reaction of that day against the burden of a decaying system of social artifice found such invariable relief and satisfaction. None of these imaginary pieces of high sentiment was more popular than the episode of Polly Baker. It occurs in the chapters which describe the foundation of New ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Pistoja, as I have said already in connection with another matter, was won over to the Florentine republic by no other artifice than this. For the town being split by factions, the Florentines, by now favouring one side and now the other, without incurring the suspicions of either, brought both to such extremities that, wearied out with ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... has two suitors, a young and an old one, the latter of whom wins her against her inclinations by practising the artifice of Hippomanes in his race with Atalanta. Being very jealous, he locks her up in a tower; and the youth, who continued to be her lover, makes a subterraneous passage to it; and pretending to have married her sister, invites the old man to his house, and introduces his own wife ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... life could be long enough to give me a fair test of that," he smiled, and then he added in a serious voice, "It is in the cities that men and women grow tired. It is under artifice that the soul wearies. That life I knew, and left with the bitterness of exile—but that was long ago. When I go into it now, it shall be only for the joy of coming back here ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... divulged—the income which would afterwards follow for his partners and himself, must be immense. It was this view of the subject that justified, to his mind, the means which he had used—that silenced self-reproof, when it accused him of artifice, and called him to account for the deception he had practised upon his colleagues. It must be acknowledged, that the plan which he proposed held out fair promise of ultimate success and that, reckoning upon the united will and assistance of his partners, he had good reason to look for an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the soul, blazoning its past or its future without possibility of concealment. Paint a face, no matter how delicately or how thick; the very paint—the very choice of colours red or white—betrays the nature lurking beneath it, and no amount of artifice or imitation in a writer can obscure the secret of self. Artifice and imitation reveal the finikin or uncertain soul as surely as deliberate bareness reveals a conscious austerity. Except, perhaps, in mathematics, there seems no escape from this ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... labors are not yet completed, and he does not wish to allow his friends to believe him dead, he has concluded to communicate with me, his nephew. And as he knew of no other way of doing so, he resorted to the artifice of the ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... object the same effect in sculpture, which is attained by light and shadow in painting.—In a picture, the Artist, by a judicious obscurity, so veils the magnitude of the car in which he places a victor, that notwithstanding its size, it may not appear the principal object; but this artifice is denied to the sculptor, who is necessitated to diminish the size of those things which are of least importance, in order to give dignity to the predominant figures. Raphael, in making the boat so small in the miraculous draught of fishes, is thought to have injudiciously applied ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... uneasiness for themselves under an affected concern for me, my good Nanny," she said hurriedly; "and your own affection makes you an easy dupe to the artifice." ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... one of them is acutely aware of it, and takes very deep-laid precautions to circumvent it; the other, I suppose, does not trouble about the theory of his procedure, but he too adopts a certain artifice which carries him past the particular problem, though at the same time it involves him in several more. Little as Richardson may suspect it, he—and whoever else has the idea of making a story out of a series of letters, or a running diary written from day to ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... but entangling alliances with none," has long been a maxim with us. Our true mission is not to propagate our opinions or impose upon other countries our form of government by artifice or force, but to teach by example and show by our success, moderation, and justice the blessings of self-government and the advantages of free institutions. Let every people choose for itself and make and alter its political institutions to suit its own condition and convenience. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... young bloods of every party in the state, he was able, by the wise adjustment of his machinery, to deal, or at least to intend, disaster only to those that were opposed to him. Caesar might well have been praised for so intelligent an artifice, and yet Messer Simone of the Bardi, for all that he was brave enough, was very far from being a Caesar. However, he planned his plan well, and I praise him for it all the more light-heartedly because it came to grief so signally, and all through ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... purple thistles, the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought "Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt, and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he might need it in the winter.—"In fine, we must live among the living, and let the river flow ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... people will say that his sermons are simply sublime. Robert Louis Stevenson knew what he was doing when he discussed every sentence of Treasure Island with his schoolboy step-son before giving it its final form. It was by that wise artifice that one of the greatest stories in our language came to ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of favour in English literature while we read it and enjoy it in German. There is little valid reason for our aversion; the rhythm has been made familiar to our ears by long courses of Greek and Latin and the rarity of spondaic feet is assuredly to be supplied by art and artifice. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... strictest inquiry; and the more we behold her, still the more shall we be in love with her charms. But it is not so with guilt. The baneful fiend makes use of unjustifiable means to conceal her wicked designs and prevent discovery. Artifice and cunning are her supporters, bribery and corruption the defenders of her cause; she flies before the face of law and justice, and shuns the probation of a candid and impartial inquiry. Upon the whole matter, ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... there, the sun would be burning the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came to Europe. I really miss them; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Administration, and that his chances for the succession would thereby be strengthened. Charges of political chicanery were brought against him in shapes more varied than that of Proteus and thick as the leaves that strew the vale of Valombrosa; but he invariably extricated himself by artifice and choice management, earning the sobriquet of "the Little Magician." He could not be provoked into a loss of temper, and he would not say a word while in the chair except as connected with his duties as presiding officer, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... little idea of the advance in industrial artifice and appliances of all kinds made in the United States in the two decades after the Civil War. Take it first in textile manufacturing. A century earlier one person in every family had to work incessantly at spinning and weaving to keep the whole ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... I spoke against his Homer, and the portentous cub never forgives!" Part of Pope's severe criticism only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed unless it was personal; and no personalities would sufficiently adorn a poem ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... to mention here, that we owe a great deal to the art of minute injection, by which we are enabled to trace the smallest vessels in the midst of the tissues where they are distributed. This is an old artifice of anatomists. The famous Ruysch, who died a hundred and thirty years ago, showed that each of the viscera has its terminal vessels arranged in its own peculiar way; the same fact which you may see illustrated in Gerber's figures after the minute injections of Berres. I hope to show you ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... year 1434 this party began to hold up its head. Powerful as the Albizzi were, they only retained the government by artifice; and now they had done a deed which put at nought their former arts and intrigues. A Signory favourable to the Medici came into office, and on September 26th, 1434, Rinaldo in his turn was summoned to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... ministry, and the actions of which they were the authors, we shall see that they had formed and executed the project of re-establishing the old monarchy, and of overturning the constitutional government either by artifice or by main force. The royal charter was spurned by them, and they trampled without scruple on the civil and political rights which it consecrated. Every guarantee given to the army, the magistracy, the public functionaries, or ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... conditions of climate and duties, acting in conjunction with a natural taste for harmonious coloring and simple form? That dress, I will maintain, sprang as naturally from the salt sea as Aphrodite did; and the man who suspects artifice in it or invention has had his mind perverted by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... therefore she did not do it; but she stationed herself as near to the door as she well could, that she might, if possible, get the advantage which the housemaid would have had, without descending to the housemaid's artifice. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... where they made a long halt, resting and refreshing themselves after their long and wearisome journey. Then they again took up their line of march westward, and reached Venice, as we have seen, in November, 1295, only to find their identity denied and their stories disbelieved, until, by an artifice, they made themselves truly known to their fellow-townsmen, who had long since given them ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... sense is daily insulted by these weak attempts at mystery. If the secret is one that cannot be kept, why, let the author tell it us at once, and we can then follow with sympathy the attempts to baffle those in the story who are trying to detect it, instead of being offended with a shallow artifice. Here lies the artistic error of that very clever book, "Paul Ferroll." We all see at once that Mr. Ferroll murdered his wife, and the author would have lost nothing and gained much by taking us into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... door had clapped shut, but Janet had not entered. She had employed the artifice to convey the impression it had. She did not wish to go in to her work just yet, for calm as she had appeared during the interview her emotions were running full tide. Love Ed Sorenson? Marry him? She groped for and dropped into a wicker chair, her head sinking ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... be admitted that the garden is as much a work of art,* or artifice, as anything that can be mentioned. The energy localised in certain human bodies, directed by similarly localised intellects, has produced a collocation of other material bodies which could not be brought ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... had to give way. Adroit politicians were not wanting to flatter his vanity, defend his follies, and show him how to violate the spirit and intent of the Constitution, while keeping within the letter of the law. The Legislatures were packed with subservient office-holders, while every artifice was used to debauch the native electorate and to foment race prejudice. The national debt grew up from $389,000 in 1880 to $1,936,000 in 1887. At the same time, under the existing law, no foreigner could be naturalized ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... silence amid which I floated on the water was disturbed by a sort of whispered singing that hovered all around me. It was half breath, half music; it rose softly from the waters of the lake; and I was surrounded by it through I knew not what artifice. It followed me, moved with me and was so soft that it did not alarm me. On the contrary, in my longing to approach the source of that sweet and enticing harmony, I leaned out of my little boat over the water, for there was no doubt in my mind that the singing ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... in pure pearls dressed, That beareth," said I, "the pearl of price, Who formed thy figure-and thy vest? Truly he wrought with cunning nice; For thy beauty, above nature's best, Passeth Pygmalion's artifice; Nor Aristotle the lore possessed To depict in words so fair device. Than fleur-de-lys thou art fairer thrice, Angel-mannered and courtly bred,— Tell to me truly: in Paradise What meaneth the ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... Mr. Booth will hardly improve his present execution, since he is now at the age of thirty-two, and can never fill more easily the youthful beauty of the part, without artifice, and, we may say, by the first intention. We should like to see him, ere many winters have passed over his head, in some new classic play, whose arrangement should not be confined to the bald, antique model, nor drawn out in sounding speeches like Talfourd's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... spirit nearly a hundred years before. It had died with Francis I. The wars of the League were wars of Chicane; Artifice in arms, Subtlety in steel coats. The profligacy of the courts of Louis Quatorze, and his successors, dissolved at once the morals and the mind of France. That great country exhibited, to the eye of Europe, the aspect of the most extravagant license, and the most rapid decay. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... supplied its food, and anticipated its every want, has made it independent of those devices by which carnivorous animals provide for their subsistence; and, from the absence of all rivalry between it and the other denizens of the plains, it is never required to resort to artifice for self-protection. For these reasons, in its tranquil and harmless life, it may appear to casual observers to exhibit even less than ordinary ability; but when danger and apprehension call for the exertion of its powers, those who have witnessed their display are ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... term I do not mean anything against the gospel of simplicity which I am so constantly preaching, but, for want of a better term, I use the word "artifice" to express the mechanical devices by which we endeavor to attract and hold the attention of the audience. The art of telling stories is, in truth, much more difficult than acting a part on the stage: First, because the narrator is responsible for the whole drama and the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... bind Germany hand and foot, to gag her and drag her back into absolutism before her sentimentality will allow her to put herself on the defensive. They are pandering to the lowest instincts of the people, and enervating their manhood by every artifice in their power. Thus they have successfully achieved the introduction into Germany of that most degraded form of self-worship—Chauvinism. They poison her morality by wisely organizing that every conscience, every conviction, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Adolphus made himself master of the Rhine, and threatened the three neighboring electorates with his victorious arms, his vigilant enemies in Paris and St. Germain's made use of every artifice to deprive him of the support of France, and, if possible, to involve him in a war with that power. By his sudden and equivocal march to the Rhine, he had surprised his friends, and furnished his enemies with the means of exciting a distrust of his intentions. After the conquest of Wuertzburg, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... utmost patience. No doubt the young villain is well instructed in his lesson. He knows that he may safely defy my power. From threats I descended to entreaties. I even endeavoured to wind the truth from him by artifice. I promised him a part of the debt if he would enable me to recover the whole. I offered him a considerable reward if he would merely afford me a clue by which I might trace him to his retreat; but all was insufficient. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... was eating now, and the tension was great. She knew that no artifice could keep him, and he was aware of her emotion ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... knew it. He thought himself possessed of a very important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means to make, some use. You are aware of the artifice I employed to prevent any possible evil consequences from any action of his. I have the genuine document, of course. I wish you to go over with me to The Poplars, and I should be glad to have good old Father Pemberton go with us; for it is a serious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... said that I had no more sacrifices to make." The Countess rose. "For your sake, Madame, because you have always been kind to me, and because it is impossible not to love you, I have degraded myself. I have pretended to love a man who saw through the artifice and told me so, to save me further shame. O Madame, it ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the bad money they had was tendered in payment among the good, that by ignorance or oversight some might possibly be made to pass; and as these took it, so they were not wanting again in all the artifice and sleight of hand they were masters of, to put it off again; so that, in short, people were made bites and cheats to one another in all their business; and if you went but to buy a pair of gloves, or stockings, or any trifle, at a shop, you ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... account, the contractor will suggest that, because of the excellence of his work, it would be only just and right to give him Rs. 100 extra. The driver of a tonga almost habitually asks for more, irrespective of what has been given him. Hence people practise the innocent artifice of handing to him somewhat less than his legal fare, and then when he asks for more giving him the balance, and he usually goes away quite satisfied. Porters at railway stations unblushingly beg for tips, and remonstrate at the smallness of the gift, and pursue the traveller about the station beseeching ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... doubt about it: this eternal, driveling, old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace her by artifice. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... what unworthy artifice did you gain his love? Was it by witchcraft? or some poisonous philtre learned from ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... at his own meanness in coming to visit a servant and his folly in being caught by so shallow an artifice. He groaned aloud. The clock in the hall struck ten. There was just time to get back if they would lend him a conveyance. He shouted, he screamed, he prayed. He offered terms humbly, piteously; he would forgive ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... while Price, remembering my former artifice, began to believe that I was only pretending to be ill, in order to draw Martin on, and then taking a certain liberty with me, as with a ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... generations. Their secret gloom, the imagined residence of an invisible power, by presenting no distinct object of fear or worship, impressed the mind with a still deeper sense of religious horror; [63] and the priests, rude and illiterate as they were, had been taught by experience the use of every artifice that could preserve and fortify impressions so well suited to their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... sixpences; and as those who came first were entitled to priority of payment, the agents went out at one door with the specie they had received, and brought it back by another, so that the bona-fide holders of notes could never get near enough to present them. "By this artifice," says our authority, somewhat quaintly, "the Bank preserved its credit, and literally faced ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... common and allowable artifice, in those attempting to lead us up the hill of science, to point to some attractive object that is to be reached at the summit. Mr Kavanagh employs this expedient with great effect. He shows us, near the outset of our journey, one astonishing result to which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... to office), than Punch displayed a huge placard across the front of his offices inscribed, "Why is Punch like the late Government? Because it is JUST OUT!!" And no device of the sort, or other artifice that could be suggested to the resourceful minds in Punch's cabinet, was left untried. Things were against Punch. It was not only that the public was neglectful, unappreciative. There was prejudice to live down; there were stamp duty, advertisement duty, and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... a few days, he suspected that the whole was an artifice of Voltaire. In accordance with his open, noble character, he wrote immediately to Rousseau, made his complaint, and asked if he had written ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... out of him by abnormal hurry. The Rev. Abraham Amble had been lord of his wife in the water, but his innings was over. He had evidently enjoyed it vastly, and I now understood why he had chosen to prolong it as much as possible. Your eccentric characters are not uncommonly amateurs of petty artifice. There are hours of vengeance even ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... must be remembered that this was not the Galilean crowd by which Jesus had been brought in triumph into the city a few days before, but the mob of Jerusalem, with whom the ecclesiastical authorities had influence.[3] The priests and scribes, then, mingled among them and used every artifice they could think of. Probably their most effective argument was to whisper that Jesus was obviously the choice of Pilate, and therefore ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... seventh shaft apparently found a less perfect part, and the Christian dropped heavily from his horse. But the dismounted Oriental found himself suddenly in the grasp of the European, who had recourse to this artifice to bring his enemy within his reach. The Saracen was saved again by his agility; and loosing his sword-belt, which the knight had grasped, he mounted his watching horse. He had lost his sword and his arrows and his turban, and these ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... monotonous to most readers of a romantic period. Equally serious is the inability which Pope shared with most of the men of his time to understand the culture of the still half-barbarous Homeric age. He supposes (in his Preface) that it was by a deliberate literary artifice that Homer introduced the gods into his action, supposes, that is, that Homer no more believed in the Greek gods than did he, Pope, himself; and in general Pope largely obliterates the differences between the Homeric warrior-chief and the eighteenth century gentleman. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in any great strength, the Irish chieftains would do exterior homage to the English Crown; and they very frequently, by this artifice, averted from their country the miseries of invasion: but they remained completely unsubdued, till the rebellion which took place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, of which that politic woman availed herself to the complete subjugation of Ireland. In speaking of the Irish about the reign of Elizabeth ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism, scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a transcendentalist without false ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... is mistaken," said Morton. "The story of Smith's death was a mere fiction, got up by Houston to save the life of his favorite from the sworn vengeance of certain Texans, on whose conduct he had acted as a spy. I fathomed the artifice twelve months since." ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... endless effort to find it, little guessing, sometimes, that it is not the most obvious thing Man has to offer. With colour and scent and silken sheen, she makes a lure of her body; with cunning artifice she makes temptation of her hands and face and weaves it with her hair. She flatters, pleads, cajoles; denies only that she may yield, sets free in order to summon back, and calls, so that when he has answered she ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Arthur Symons' first few publications revealed an intellectual rather than an emotional passion. Those volumes were full of the artifice of the period, but Symons's technical skill and frequent analysis often saved the poems from complete decadence. His later books are less imitative; the influence of Verlaine and Baudelaire is not so apparent; the sophistication is less cynical, the sensuousness more restrained. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the river could not bring assistance to their friends, that he ought not on that account to ascribe very much to his own valour, or despise them; that they had so learned from their sires and ancestors, as to rely more on valour than on artifice or stratagem. Wherefore let him not bring it to pass that the place, where they were standing, should acquire a name, from the disaster of the Roman people and the destruction of their army or transmit the remembrance [of such an event ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... praestare 20 queam quam tu vehementer cupis; nam mihi quoque non iniucundum fuerit interim in amici multo omnium suavissimi contemplatione versari. Sed primum non cuiusvis est omnes Mori dotes perspexisse. Deinde haud scio an ille laturus sit a quolibet artifice depingi sese. 25 Nec enim arbitror levioris esse operae Morum effingere quam Alexandrum magnum aut Achillem, nec illi quam hic noster immortalitate digniores erant. Tale argumentum prorsus Apellis ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... in helping your companions out of difficulty, though even then, such tricks are departures from honorable dealing. But especially when there is no purpose to be served but that of appearing to know more than you do, it certainly must be considered a very mean kind of artifice. I think I have sometimes observed an individual to be prompted, where evidently the assistance was not desired, and even where it was not needed. To whisper to an individual the answer to a question, is sometimes to pay her rather a poor compliment, at least; for it ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... stage—thro' every shifting scene, Obscure or bright, tempestuous or serene, Still has your smile her trembling spirit fir'd! And can she act, with thoughts like these inspir'd? Thus from her mind all artifice she flings, All skill, all practice, now unmeaning things! To you, uncheck'd, each genuine feeling flows; For all that life ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... the mercer became irritated and clamorous for his money and freedom of exit. Two attendants making their appearance, they were directed to conduct the patient to his apartment. The mercer suspecting that he was the dupe of artifice, grasped a poker, with the intention of effect-ing, at all hazard, his liberation from "durance vile," but his efforts had no other result than that of confirming his trammels, and he was presently bound over to keep the peace, under the guarantee of a straight-waistcoat! ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... if it was a cog in a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, or suggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get it into a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkering and verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call the man who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit an artist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern. The place looked sordid and miserable, and Hilda sitting in the middle of it, still in the yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous. Stephen stood in the doorway grasping the handle, saying nothing, and an instant passed before she knew with certainty, in the wretched light, that it was he. Then she sprang up and made a step toward him ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... was given, and they all arose and departed. Amelia hoped George would soon join them there. She began playing some of his favourite waltzes (then newly imported) at the great carved-legged, leather-cased grand piano in the drawing-room overhead. This little artifice did not bring him. He was deaf to the waltzes; they grew fainter and fainter; the discomfited performer left the huge instrument presently; and though her three friends performed some of the loudest and most brilliant new pieces of their repertoire, she did not hear a single note, but sate ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could set back the clock, and give her what this girl had. Time had "done her in," as it "did in" every woman, one by one. And she saw herself going down the years, powdering a little more, painting a little more, touching up her hair, till it was all artifice, holding on by every little device—and all, to what end? To see his face get colder and colder, hear his voice more and more constrained to gentleness; and know that underneath, aversion was growing with the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... offered to draw his sword upon himself, I was prepared to have despised him for supposing me such a poor novice, as to be intimidated by an artifice so common. But this resolution, uttered with so serious an air, of accompanying me in to my friends, made me ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... was powerful (almost too loud sometimes) and most persuasive; he was eloquent and impassioned, but he used little gesture or any artifice to engage attention. He commenced with a rhapsody—startling in the sudden flow of its eloquence, thrilling in its higher tones, tender and compassionate (almost to tears) in its lower ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... course the origin of these displays. "Look at me," say these youthful beginners in womanly artifice, without reflecting whether or not it be to their advantage to show so very much of themselves. (Amplify and correct ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... animals, these three elements which constitute it may be clearly seen. Although such a truth, precisely because it is evident, may appear simple to those who seek truth from the clouds, or by means of logical or tortuous artifice, yet such are the characteristics of true science. For the new facts which she interprets and classifies appear old as soon as they are understood, although they ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... valid for us. The failure of classicistic art in a non-classical age, of "Pre-Raphaelitism" after Raphael, is a failure in this—the artist has never lived even imaginatively in the world he depicts. His belief is an artifice and a sham, and he cannot impose upon us with his pretense. But once we have accepted the artist's postulates, then we are prepared to follow him in his conclusions. In the Homeric world, we shall not balk at the intercourse between gods and men; in mediaeval painting ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... addressed only to the idea. The prayer consists of two parts; a commemoration, followed by an effusion. By a commemoration M. Comte means an effort of memory and imagination, summoning up with the utmost possible vividness the image of the object: and every artifice is exhausted to render the image as life-like, as close to the reality, as near an approach to actual hallucination, as is consistent with sanity. This degree of intensity having been, as far as practicable, attained, the effusion follows. Every person should compose his own ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... harm in their saying so. It was an artifice of benevolence. You saw the bull, and had not seen the sheep. So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and, having heard their dying cries, he cannot ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... Due praise; nor must we, Quin, forget thee there. His words bore sterling weight; nervous and strong, In manly tides of sense they roll'd along: Happy in art, he chiefly had pretence To keep up numbers, yet not forfeit sense; No actor ever greater heights could reach In all the labour'd artifice of speech. 950 Speech! is that all? And shall an actor found An universal fame on partial ground? Parrots themselves speak properly by rote, And, in six months, my dog shall howl by note. I laugh at those who, when the stage they tread, Neglect ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... maid and her elderly innocence became, in his eyes, a fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious little world. It was a paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece of priest's or woman's craft. Was the duel a myth, or did they merely want to frighten him? But these petty creatures, impudent and teasing as flies, had succeeded in wounding his vanity, in rousing ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... American Oregon are, therefore, excluded from the gold district, except such, as resorting to the artifice of denying their country, succeed in passing for British subjects. The persons at present engaged in the search of gold are chiefly of British origin, and retired servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, who, being well acquainted with the natives, and connected by old acquaintanceship ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... (with Engravings). 4. Jacques van Artevelde. 5. Literary Relics of James Thomson and Allan Ramsey. 6. A Word upon Wigs. 7. The Income Tax. 8. Paris after Waterloo. 9. Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban: Concealed Lands; Richard of Cirencester; Artifice of a Condemned Malefactor; Billingsgate and Whittington's Conduit. With Notes of the Month; Review of New Publications; Reports of Archaeological Societies, Historical Chronicle, and OBITUARY; including Memoirs of the Earl of Belfast, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... covering slabs, or use them, like glass, to fill an aperture in the wall, he can, by piercing them with holes, obtain points or spaces of intense blackness to contrast with the light tracing of the rest of his design. And we may expect to find this artifice used the more extensively, because, while it will be an effective means of ornamentation on the exterior of the building, it will be also the safest way of admitting light to the interior, still totally excluding both ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Beaupere, always watchful, always alert, detected a possible opening—a chance to set a trap. Do you think he jumped at it instantly, betraying the joy he had in his mind, as a young hand at craft and artifice would do? ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... friend, and knew that he could at all times boldly maintain that he had not concealed his name from us, We-re-murrah being as much his name as Wat-te-wal, though we had never known him by it. On apprising him some time afterwards, that we had discovered his artifice, and that it was a meanness we did not expect from him, he only laughed ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... when the gentleman, with no such malicious intentions as those of "Cymon" in the above fable, made the answer simply as above; and we all laughed to think how little Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix had profited by her artifice ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... visited every possible and impossible factory. Unpractical and reserved as she was on ordinary occasions, she could be full of artifice and coquetry whenever she wished to gain access to a steam bakery and particular as she generally was about her toilette, she would come away again sooty and grimy if thereby she could procure for Rafael some insight into mechanics. She shrank ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... My ancestor's artifice was very successful when the race was run on two sides of a hedge, backwards and forwards; but if a louis d'or and a bottle of brandy had depended on my reaching the tinker-mother before the clergywoman, I should have lost the wager. We hurried after her, however, as fast as we were able, keeping ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... we have not to authorise the bondage of the Africans. For neither do they consent to be our slaves, nor do we purchase them of their conquerors. The British merchants obtain them from Africa by violence, artifice, and treachery, with a few trinkets to prompt those unfortunate people to enslave one another by force or stratagem. Purchase them indeed they may, under the authority of an act of the British parliament. An act entailing upon the Africans, with whom we are not at war, and ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... jostle her delicate emotions out of delight into disgust. She is therefore a severer personal critic. Male peccadilloes are female crimes. A wet-blanket presence that she could not tolerate may refresh him. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the spotless and loving Eugenie de Guerin was horrified ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... he was already gathering a force of two thousand men and would put himself at their head in order to capture Kohlhaas. He administered to Sir Otto von Gorgas a severe rebuke for the misleading and ill-considered artifice to which he had resorted to rid the vicinity of Wittenberg of the incendiary. Nor can any one describe the confusion which seized all Saxony, and especially the electoral capital, when it was learned ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... filled with grief in view of the victories of his generals, and pretended that they acted without his orders. He employed every artifice to deceive indignant Christendom, and appointed prayers and processions throughout Spain for the recovery of the pope's liberty, which one stroke of his pen could have secured. Thus it was, that the most Catholic and bigoted prince in Europe seized the pope's person, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... shallow artifice, and hoisting the engine-driver on his own petard). Who would not risk a paltry L2 to gain L1000? Oh, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... that he was sometimes inclined to think that the final perseverance in the siege was not a little indebted to several valuable bets of his own, he well knowing at the time, and from information which himself alone possessed, that he should certainly lose them. Yet this artifice had a considerable effect in suspending the impatience of the officers, and in supplying topics for dispute and conversation. At length, however, the two French frigates, the sailing of which had been the subject of these wagers, left the great harbour on the 24th of August, 1800, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
