"Plebeian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that's speckled Like a common milking-maid's, Whom the sun hath freckled. Then the Wild-Rose is a flirt; And the trillium Lily, In her spotless gown, 's a prude, Sanctified and silly. By her cap the Columbine, To my mind, 's too merry; Gossips, I would sooner wed Some plebeian Berry. And the shy Anemone— Well, her face shows sorrow; Pale, goodsooth! alive to-day, Dead and gone to-morrow. Then that bold-eyed, buxom wench, Big and blond and lazy,— She's been chosen overmuch!— Sirs, I mean the Daisy. Pleasant ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... reached the age when the financial phase of the question was appreciated, and his prejudice was not unnatural, for unconsciously, especially at first, Mr. Hearn had treated them all as inferiors. He now was learning to know them better, however. There was nothing plebeian in Adah's beauty, and he would have been untrue to himself had he not ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... common people I mean are not only to be found low down in the social scale; they crawl and swarm all around us—even in the highest social positions. You have only to look at your own fine, distinguished Mayor! My brother Peter is every bit as plebeian as anyone that walks in ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... enters, is such a courtly seigneur that he seems to bring the eighteenth century with him; you feel that his sedan chair is at the door. He stoops over MAGGIE's plebeian hand.] ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... she seemed contented as long as I remained with her. There was plenty of milk and cream, and she caught a great many mice. She was far too dainty to eat them, but she had an inherent pleasure in catching mice, just like her more plebeian sisters; and she enjoyed presenting them to Mr. McGinty or me, or some other ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... petticoat with big feet showing underneath, sitting on a tub and cutting up some vegetables. She had her hair bunched up like an onion, a fashion which, as we all know, appealed to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, or at any rate to the plebeian Dutch. I must also tell you the name of this squire before I go any further: his name was ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the Lord Mayor of Dublin, a Baronet, and a Knight. It appears that the members are mostly men of the middle classes, who labor in some profession or trade for a living. Only two men with titles are on the list. The plebeian calling and humble origin of so many of the new Irish members has thrown the English aristocrats into a frightful state of mind, and the landed gentry who are to be rubbed against by these mudsills in St. Stephen's have lashed themselves into a fury upon the subject. To ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... so great and good! Hail, ye plebeian underwood! Where the poetic birds rejoice, And for their quiet nests and plenteous food Pay with their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... was perhaps the Count of Narbonne, knight of honor of one of the daughters of Louis XV., Minister of War under Louis XVI. The most rigid, the most precise etiquette prevailed in the Imperial residences. The high dignitaries and marshals concealed their plebeian names under pompous titles of princes and dukes. Madame de Mailly, the widow of a marshal of the royal period, had been admitted to the rank and privileges of the wives of the grand officers of the crown, and had figured as a marshal's widow, at the reception of January ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... For the Avenue as the expression of the city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for "the likes of him." He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... wheeling through the air on the approach of a storm, and exhibits unmistakable signs of exultation when it is going to thunder. It is not a bird of song, but is unsurpassed as a screamer. To the common Kite, a plebeian member of the genus, has been ascribed an attribute which in fact belongs exclusively to this Banner species. The Kite, according to Dr. FRANKLIN, draws the lightning from the clouds, but this, in reality, is the proud prerogative of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... heavy loads grumbled slowly along, so slowly that it was nearly evening, and their shadows preceded them by rods when they reached the little prairie town. They stopped to water their teams; and Ole, true to the instincts of his plebeian ancestry, went in search of a glass of beer. He returned, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is noble, and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... doubt, was the unwitting cause of much unhappiness to many a young lady in her teens. Hook pere was an organist at Norwich. He came up to town, and was engaged at Marylebone Gardens and at Vauxhall; so that Theodore had no excuse for being of decidedly plebeian origin, and, Tory as he was, he was not fool enough to aspire ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... own part I think a little warm drink before going to bed upon a night when owls hoot and chimnies are to be blown down, prepared by the small hands that one loves, and that all admire; where a dimple takes place of what in a plebeian hand is a knuckle, and the round fingers taper gently off toward points that are touched with damask and bordered with little rims of ivory; where bright eyes beam with kindness as well as wit; and words fall in silvery tones from a beautifully-formed mouth, like the renewal of life upon the soul ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... later, gives four points of departure from the Cambridge polity by the Reforming Synod. First, occasional officiations of ministers outside their own churches were authorized; secondly, there was a movement to revive the authority and office of ruling elder and other officers; thirdly, "plebeian ordination," or lay ordination, ordination by the hands of the brethren of the church in the absence of superior officers, was no longer allowed;[d] and fourthly, there was a variation from the "personal and public confession" in favor of a private examination by the pastor of ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say This is Iesabel; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... from the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me the feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and he is a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this man was obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody else, that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look on ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... were driven to extortion. Cities became bankrupt, pledged their revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis. Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and Baglioni ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast; which boasted itself an aristocracy, and was an oligarchy of plebeian ignorance and meanness; which either dulled men's brains or chilled their hearts. In the presence of this system, Harry Dudley lingers long enough to rescue a slave and to die by the furious hand of the master,—a man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... extensively worn in Southern than in Northern Europe; more, as it is, in Southern England than in Northern Scotland. Hence, although we find many iron skull-caps, like hats, used by the military in the fifteenth century; and although we find traces of hats even in the plebeian costumes of the middle ages—yet we look upon the Spanish and Italian hat of the sixteenth century, as the more immediate origin of its degenerate successor, the actual chapeau. We need not trace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... country which had produced a Charles Fox, who took at the passing of the Separation Act so opposite a view of human nature. Doubtless, the habitants are precisely, even at this day, as Sir James represented them to be. But it was superlative impudence in a man of plebeian extraction to say that he could not associate with members of Parliament, who followed the occupation of shopkeeping for a living. It surely was enough for Buonaparte to have stigmatized England as a nation of shopkeepers. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Gibbon has called attention to the extreme respect paid to long descent in the Roman Empire, and to the strange fact that, in the fourth century, no ingenuity of pedigree makers could deny that all the great families of the Republic were extinct, so that the second-rate plebeian family of the Anicii, whose name did appear in the Fasti, enjoyed a prestige far greater than that of the Howards and Stanleys in this country. Our own peerage consists chiefly of parvenus. Only six of our noble families, it is said, can ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of than the whole body of those Ixionides—not bad fellows, here and there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish fun. Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely parted at one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the better comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... says in his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget that there was a large class excluded ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence which we lead ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... plebeian rabble Dare assail my name at Rome, Where my noble spouse, Octavia, Weeps within her widowed home, Seek her; say the gods bear witness— Altars, augurs, circling wings— That her blood, with mine commingled, Yet shall mount the throne ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... no hereditary distinction before he distinguished himself; whilst on the other hand the tramp and the street-walker may have as "royal" blood in their veins as any lineal princely personage. It is records, therefore, that differentiate "civilized" from uncivilized people, blue blood from plebeian; and as we see millions of people living without records to-day in various parts of the world, notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Mannering?' echoed the Baronet, considerably shaken in his opinion. 'My good sir,' apart to Glossin, 'the young man with a dreadfully plebeian name and a good deal of modest assurance has nevertheless something of the tone and manners and feeling of a gentleman, of one at least who has lived in good society; they do give commissions very loosely and carelessly and inaccurately in India. I think we had better pause till Colonel ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it. Try as I may, it is impossible for me to keep it long before my eyes; for that thought is at once obliterated by her beauty, her grace, her virtue, and modesty, which tell me that, beneath that plebeian husk, must be concealed some kernel of extraordinary worth. In short, be it what it may, I love her, and not with that common-place love I have felt for others, but with a passion so pure that it knows no wish beyond that of serving her, and prevailing on her to love me, and return in ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... shame. People boast here of the equality of our institutions, and then try their best to break up the social level. In a genuine Aristocracy, where they have endeavored to preserve a gulf-stream of noble blood in the midst of the plebeian Atlantic, and a man holds his distinction by the color of the bark on his family tree, and the kind of sap that circulates through it, there is no danger of any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by. She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted her soul—if she had one. Her flavor was that ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of tying up, never so skilfully set about, there is likewise no possibility of prospering; but the Behemoth-Briareus snaps your cords like green rushes. Tie up? Alas, Messieurs! And then, as for your chivalry rapiers, valour and wager-of-battle, think one moment, how can that answer? The plebeian heart too has red life in it, which changes not to paleness at glance even of you; and 'the six hundred Breton gentlemen assembled in arms, for seventy-two hours, in the Cordeliers' Cloister, at Rennes,'—have to come out again, wiser than they entered. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... that the Venetian girl has done the deed," said Manutoli, whose opinion was no doubt in some degree warped by his desire that the criminal should turn out to be a foreign plebeian rather than a Ravenna noble. "After all Leandro is not the man to do such a deed. He is such a poor creature. Besides, it seems to me that the girl's motive for hate was the stronger. I don't know that wounded vanity has had many such crimes to answer ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... up for the inferiority of his birth on account of the plebeian origin of his mother Tii,* by his marriage with Nofrititi, a princess of the pure solar race.** Tii, long accustomed to the management of affairs, exerted her influence over him even more than she had done over her husband. Without ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and best families in the country, if there is any connection between good blood and fine features and a noble expression. Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic one. His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance. One day she informed us that she came of a different and better class than her husband's. She was the daughter of a small tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband was nothing but a ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunitian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, perhaps, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... regret to say, is often spoken of as a "profession," and while we may accept the plebeian word "journalism," as describing a daily labor, I sincerely desire to enter a protest against its designation as a profession. It seems entirely proper to me that this word be relegated to the pedagogue, the chiropodist, and the barn-storming actor who so boldly assert ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... were at first only separated into two ranks; the Patrician and Plebeian; but afterwards the Equites or Knights were added; and at a later period, slavery was introduced—making in all, four classes: Patricians, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... slavery, and since we have found the courage to point our cannon more directly against the heart of that, they may rejoice so far; but do they desire to establish the subordination of any government to the rights of the very meanest of its subjects? Are they in love with our plebeian heresy, that all the magnificent civil machinery of nations is but so much base clay in the hands of the multitude of royal potters? We are now testing the practical possibilities of democratic theories; and there are those who would a thousand times rather see these shattered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the Opposition, Addison with the Ministers. Steele, in a paper called the Plebeian, vehemently attacked the bill. Sunderland called for help on Addison, and Addison obeyed the call. In a paper called the Old Whig, he answered, and indeed refuted, Steele's arguments. It seems to us that the premises of both the controversialists ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... memories of the nectar of his fatherland, shall chant in rhyme the virtues of his national drink. Yet though its merit has inspired neither of the sister graces, poetry and song, to strike the lyre in its honor, it has had, none the less, an important mission to perform. To its plebeian sister beer, as a healthful beverage, wine must yield the palm. As a common drink, suited to human nature's daily need, it has never been surpassed. If it has nerved no hand to deeds of daring, or struck the scintillating sparks of genius from the human ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human progress, that ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... allusion to that peculiar phase of Australian life—nobblerising; but, if I am not mistaken, the impression left on your mind will be that the nobbler is either of aristocratic champagne or plebeian beer. But there are two other liquids—whisky and brandy—which play an important part in nobblerising. The quantity of spirits drunk in Australia is appalling. Whisky is the favourite spirit, then brandy, and rarely Schiedam, schnapps, or gin. And what about drunkenness? Statistically ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... obsolete emotions exposed to the eager ears of twelve perfect strangers. It is customary nowadays for unmarried elder sons of our most aristocratic families to express their appreciation of the qualities of fascinating bachelor girls over the sensible, though plebeian, telephone.} ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... hand holding some object now lost, which was probably a mirror. The left arm is raised, and with the left hand she presses a lotus lily to her breast. The body is easy and well formed, the figure indicates youth, the face is open, smiling, pleasant, and somewhat plebeian. To modify the unwieldy mass of the headdress was beyond the skill of the artist, but the bust is delicately and elegantly modelled, the clinging garment gives discreet emphasis to the shape, and the action of the hand which holds the flower is ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the communication between him and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on a level. The haughty air of the Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched in all these plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still vague and indistinct in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Across the Chasm, At Anchor, Honored in the Breach, Magnificent Plebeian, A Beautiful ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... in which the population at large have any voice in governing, always has been, and probably always will be divided, the upper and the lower; or, as they were called in those days, the patrician and the plebeian. Sylla was the patrician; the higher and more aristocratic portions of the community were on his side. Marius was the favorite of the plebeian masses. In the contests, however, which they waged with each other, they did not trust to the mere influence of votes. They relied much more upon the soldiers ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... the room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were times when Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would fly into a rage—when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence. But Mrs. Carr was one of those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the thinnest ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... out of the church with his aristocratic nose elevated even beyond its usual angle. He was so offended by the plebeian tastes of his pastor that he almost failed to notice Banker Lindsley who passed him in ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one of the great men; I was a poor plebeian, whose chief misfortune, at that time, consisted in my not having a father or a great-grandfather a better man than myself! His money did the work, and I was bought and beat out of my election, which ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Raleigh, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Southampton, the Duke of York, and no end of others with equally sonorous titles. As for mere lords and baronets, and such small deer, there was nothing so plebeian present, and they were evidently looked upon by the distinguished assembly, like small beer in thunder, with pity and contempt. The ladies, too, were all duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... they kept their word, too. They shot him that same evening, on very little other charge than his own name! If I have retained the old sound of my name, I have given it a more plebeian spelling, which is, perhaps, just as much of an alteration as any man need submit to for a period that will pass away ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... lead to endless disputes and tumults, and to drive the nobles into dangerous and desperate courses. In instance whereof might be cited the case of Rome itself, wherein the tribunes of the people being vested with this authority, not content to have one consul a plebeian, insisted on having both; and afterwards laid claim to the censorship, the praetorship and all the other magistracies in the city. Nor was this enough for them, but, carried away by the same factious spirit, they began after a time to pay court to such men as they thought able to attack ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... yet sensitive mouth, wore the ordinary dinner clothes of civilisation. The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... readiness and vivacity of mind; a circumstance which determined his father to breed him up to the "magistracy," as it was termed in France—a profession midway, as it were, between the career of arms peculiar to the noble, and the labours of the bar confined to persons of plebeian origin, and from which many of the greatest men, and nearly all the distinguished statesmen of France took their rise. Montesquieu entered with the characteristic ardour of his disposition into the studies suited for that destination; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Albemarle or Carteret and the Charleston set, the former being from Virginia, while the latter was, as we have seen, a little given to kindergarten aristocracy and ofttimes tripped up on their parade swords while at the plough. Of course outside of this were the plebeian people, or copperas-culottes, who did the work; but Lord Shaftesbury for some time, as we have seen, lived in a baronial shed and had his arms worked on the ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... of him we shall hear much. A sharp contrast to Chrysantas, the Peer, with his pointed plebeian similes. His speech important again for Xenophon's sympathetic knowledge of children and also ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Pomptine land the matter was pressed by Lucius Sicinius, plebeian tribune, on the people, who now attended in greater numbers, and more readily aroused to the desire of land than they had been. And mention having been introduced in the senate regarding war against the Latins and Hernicians, the matter was deferred in consequence ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... a good sound drubbing from the enraged father, and has been kicked out of the house, and the outraged mamma has locked the young lady in her chamber, and repelled the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... him and pointed him out for an example. "I've a new chum, up here," Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... shall be set the no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic shall be cleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its bosom ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of those two silly children until I heard of it from their grandfather's lips; nor could have believed he would sanction such folly. They ought to make Elsie stay where she is, and if young Leland dies it will but rid the family of a prospective plebeian alliance." ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... country he is regarded as plebeian, just a common cur, he is by no means a mongrel. That he is of ancient lineage is proved by the fact that he always breeds true to type. He yields to the Pekinese Spaniel the claim to be the Royal dog of China, yet his ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks." ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Driffield, when the moment at last arrived for showing the guests to their rooms, had passed off safely, Lucy throwing out an agitated 'Thank you!' when Lady Driffield had even gone so far as to open a door with her own bediamonded hand, which had Mrs. Grieve's plebeian appellations written in full upon the card attached ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... known that Lady Macbeth was the personification of crime, it would still have seemed to him a profanation to bring her into contact with the plebeian commonness ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... in his hatred of Clay. In proportion as Clay rose in the estimation of his countrymen, did Randolph's hate increase. Clay sprang from the plebeian stock of his native Virginia. He had come as the representative of the rustics of Kentucky. He was not sanctified by a college diploma. He boasted no long line of ancestry, and yet he had met, and triumphed over, the scions of a boasted line—had bearded the aristocrat ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... a rough sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs," sometimes,—a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... are two remedies, and only two, available; failing one of these, something must, soon or later, give way with a crash. Either the anachronistic tradition must make suicidal concessions, or the better-class people must drown all plebeian Australian males in infancy, and fill the vacancy ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... pronounce before them all, that Marcius was condemned to die by the tribunes of the people, and bid the Aediles take him to the Tarpeian rock, and without delay throw him headlong from the precipice. When they, however, in compliance with the order, came to seize upon his body, many, even of the plebeian party, felt it to be a horrible and extravagant act; the patricians, meantime, wholly beside themselves with distress and horror, hurried with cries to the rescue; and persuaded them not to despatch him by any sudden violence, but refer the cause to the general suffrage of the people. But when ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... stockholders could be made out, during which time the public impatience rose to a pitch of frenzy. Dukes, marquises, counts, with their duchesses, marchionesses, and countesses, waited in the streets for hours every day before Mr. Law's door to know the result. At last, to avoid the jostling of the plebeian crowd, which, to the number of thousands, filled the whole thoroughfare, they took apartments in the adjoining houses, that they might be continually near the temple whence the new Plutus was diffusing wealth. Every day the value of the old shares increased, and the fresh ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... exclaimed, "Why, certainly," and proceeded to climb up on the car, from whence he cast down with remarkable celerity more than enough chunks to fill their baskets. Then as though not caring to linger any longer amid such plebeian company, he hastened across the network of tracks and was lost ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... amiable nobleman for not writing a book about them, is unbounded, and they put him down (why, it is difficult to say) as the aristocratic, and therefore impartial champion of Demus. Whenever we fell into the bilious moods to which our plebeian nature is addicted, we were gravely admonished of his bright example, and assured that to speak evil of the Republic was the infirmity of vulgar minds. There is, it would appear, a sympathy betwixt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... de Blanc!'" began my sister; "'L'honorable A. Declouet'; 'Le comte Louis le Pelletrier de la Houssaye'! Ah!" she cried, throwing the packet upon the table, "the aristocrats! I am frightened, poor little plebeian that ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity with Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian in his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens or wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might happen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of Lorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less chaste than beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and lived not far ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... spirits were John van der Dors, the commander, better known by his Latinized name of Dousa; and Peter van der Werf, the burgomaster. Plebeian names these, but loftier natures never possessed the hearts of kings or nobles! Beside their deeds, the chivalry of knighthood looks trivial and mean. Under the management of these two men every precaution was adopted for the defense ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... prerogatives in order to marry a physician of the name of Dr. Willim, who had attended her father in his last illness. She could not, however, bring herself to descend to the social level of her husband, who is of plebeian origin, and a mere commoner, but thought that she had done enough in that direction when she contented herself with the name and title of Baroness Kirchbach, which she now bears. Of late years she has become a convert to socialism, much to the dismay ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... of Baron Benoni here," said the count severely, but hurriedly. "Your observations are beside the mark. The objections to the alliance, as you call it, are that you are a man of the people,—I do not desire to offend you,—a plebeian, in fact; you are also a man of uncertain fortune, like all singers: and lastly, you are an artist. I trust you will consider these points as a sufficient reason for my ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... in presidential awe, To give the song-smit generation law; Who wield Apollo's delegated rod, And shake Parnassus with your sovereign nod; A pensive Pilgrim, worn with base turmoils, Plebeian cares, and mercenary toils, Implores your pity, while with footsteps rude, He dares within the mountain's pale intrude; For, oh! enchantment through its empire dwells. And rules the spirit with Lethean spells; By hands unseen aerial harps are hung, And Spring, like Hebe, ever fair and ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... knocking; she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of high tea at six was ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... loaded themselves with the sacred things, that they might secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... the three last chapters, or the three last lines, or the three last words, just before death, with pure mind, his soul will be saved." "Deo gratias ago," said Sechnall. Colman Ela recited it in his refectory thrice. Patrick stood in the middle of the house, when a certain plebeian asked, "Have we no other prayer that we could recite except this?" And Patrick went out afterwards. Cainnech, on the sea, in the south, saw the black cloud of devils passing over him. "Come here on your way," said Cainnech. The demons ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... he would not consent to be a good boy. This would be quicker and better than summoning an officer. But the manager got the big stone in the pit of his stomach just as he had raised his hand to beckon, and he and his dignity collapsed together, with a most plebeian grunt. As he had not closed the door, he quickly rolled inside, where he lay on the floor with his hands on his stomach and listened to the joyous yelps of the crowd outside. This was too much ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... These are plebeian models, but sometimes artists' friends recommend amateur models—a broken-down gentleman or some other poor relation—and when you are drawing social modern subjects, of course these are really of more use than the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... much," echoed Gwenda. Will was in danger of losing his head as well as his heart. To have his name (from which, by the by, he had dropped the plebeian "s") bracketed with Miss Gwenda Vaughan's was a state of things which, though occasioned only by a simple coincidence, elated him beyond measure. He had indeed, he thought, stepped out of the old order of things and made his way into a higher grade of life by an easy bound. He was ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... return from exile, and certainly before Mme de Sable's retreat to Port Royal in 1659. It is very noticeable in La Rochefoucauld's letters to Esprit—most of which belong to the year 1660—that he treats the academician—who was of plebeian birth and not many months older than himself—with extreme deference. The Duke adopts the style of a pupil to a master, and he submits his sketches or experiments in maxim-making to Esprit for a severe criticism, which he accepts, and for advice, which he adopts. The probability seems to be that ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... among South Americans of his class. Though on the present voyage sailing from Buenos Ayres, he had avowed himself a native and resident of Chili, whose inhabitants had not so generally adopted the plain coat and once plebeian pantaloons; but, with a becoming modification, adhered to their provincial costume, picturesque as any in the world. Still, relatively to the pale history of the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed something so incongruous in the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the energy and business skill which characterize the French women, they are at least no more indolent and easy-going than their male companions. The women of the nobility are often less educated than their plebeian sisters, and for the most part lead a very narrow and petty existence, which produces little but vanity and selfishness and discontent. There are exceptions, however, and here and there may be seen a gentlewoman ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... sings. And at last to become a duchess, and to have the duke whom I have loved a long while, and be received and admired by everybody. To be rich on my own account and through my husband; to be able to say that I am not a plebeian by birth, like all the celebrities—that is the life, that is the happiness I desire. If I can become his wife without being a cantatrice, I shall be equally well pleased, but I believe that is the only way I shall be able ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... fishermen, however, got over the difficulty by always calling the father Jemmy and his son Young 'un; but this did not suit Vince and Mike, with whom there had always been a feud, the fisherman's lad having constantly displayed an intense hatred, in his plebeian way, for the young representatives of the patricians on the isle. The manners in which he had shown this, from very early times, were many; and had taken the forms of watching till the companions were below cliffs, and then stealing to the top and dislodging ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... sign of truth and beauty. They proposed to adapt to poetry the ordinary language of conversation, such as is spoken in the middle and lower classes, and to replace studied phrases and a lofty vocabulary by natural tones and plebeian words. In place of the classic mould, they tried stanzas, sonnets, ballads, blank verse, with the roughness and subdivisions of the primitive poets. . . . Some had culled gigantic legends, piled up dreams, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... immediately took up his residence in the capital. He saw that his son cut a fine figure in the highest circles of society, and expressed his gratification in the most emphatic terms. If he had known, however, that Ralph was in the habit of visiting, with alarming regularity, at the house of a plebeian merchant in a somewhat obscure street, he would, no doubt, have been more chary of his praise. But the Colonel suspected nothing, and it was well for the peace of the family that he did not. It may have been cowardice in Ralph that ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... love Great Britain at all; at least my people do not, and I do not. A common language! It has been made the vehicle of an incessant torrent of abuse and misrepresentation of our men, our manners, and our institutions, and even our women—it might be vulgar to designate our plebeian girls as ladies—have not escaped it; and all this is popular, and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... afford to pay for swearing as well as e'er a justice in the county, and repeated his challenge of the wager, which our adventurer now accepted, protesting, at the same time, that it was not a step taken from any motive of pride, but entirely with a view to punish an insolent plebeian, who could not otherwise be chastised without a breach of the peace. Twenty guineas being deposited on each side in the hands of Mr. Elmy, Prickle, with equal confidence and despatch, produced a canvas bag, containing two hundred and seventy pounds, which, being spread ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... sorrow; but one could never picture it in a ball-room. It was a face of girlish, saintly purity, of fairest loveliness—a face where innocence, poetry, and passion all seemed to blend in one grand harmony. There was nothing commonplace about it. One could not mistake it for a plebeian face; "patrician" ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... affects one like music; it is melody to the eye as the song is to the ear; it is visible harmony. This bird cannot do an ungraceful thing. It has the bearing of a bird of fine breeding. Its cousin the robin is much more masculine and plebeian, harsher in voice, and ruder in manners. The wood thrush is urban and suggests sylvan halls and courtly companions. Softness, gentleness, composure, characterize every movement. In only a few instances among our birds does ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... death and discussing esthetic canons over a cup of tea in a little chamber nine feet square, there was a radical difference." But it must also have appealed keenly to his fancy that he, a veritable upstart, by birth a plebeian and by habit a soldier, should ultimately set the lead in artistic fashions to the greatest aristocrats in the empire in a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a low bush with prickly leaves growing like a juniper. The contrast of its very brilliant yellow pea shaped blossoms with the dark green of its leaves is very beautiful. It grows in hedges and on commons and is thought rather a plebeian affair. I think it would make quite an addition to our garden shrubbery. Possibly it might make as much sensation with us (Americans) as our mullein does ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... glorious Incarnation of the Son of God, the Signory was composed of fourteen Magistrates chosen from among the hosiers, butchers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and stonemasons, who together formed a Great Council known as the Mount of the Reformers. They were a plebeian band, rough and hard as the bronze She-Wolf, emblem of their city, which they loved with an affection at once filial and formidable. But the People, which had set them up over the Commonwealth, had suffered another body to continue in existence, though subordinate to them, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the Cardinal, "of an aged man of no plebeian mien or bearing, albeit most shabbily attired in the skins, now fabulously cheap, of the vermin that torment us; who, professing to practise as an herbalist, some little time ago established himself in an obscure street of no good repute. A tortoise hangs in his needy shop, nor are stuffed alligators ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... he found Desiree standing where he had left her. Glancing at her, he scratched his grey head in a plebeian way, and ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... the Maine settlers in 1634, and proved thoroughly unsuitable and undurable; but probably no china—not even Delft ware—came over on the Mayflower. For when the Pilgrims made their night trip through the Delft-producing cities, no such wares were seen on the tables of plebeian persons. Early mentions of china are in the estate of President John Davenport in 1648—"Cheney L5," and of Martha Coteymore ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... policy that the nobility, by degrees, became annihilated, as we now see them. The pen and the robe people, on the other hand, were exalted; so that now things have reached such a pretty pass that the greatest lord is without power, and in a thousand different manners is dependent upon the meanest plebeian. It is in this manner that things hasten from one extreme to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern customs welling up from below, at least not until the plebeian element won the support of the founders of the empire, and finally overwhelmed the nobility. At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the sexes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, made the father ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... closed immediately, yet Eudoxia Pence had a clairvoyant sense of what was going on behind that rather plebeian partition of black walnut and frosted glass. She knew how they must all be hesitating, fumbling, floundering—snared by a problem wholly new and unfamiliar, and readily falling victims to intimidation from the humblest source. The entire situation was as clear as sunlight in the gesture with which ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... his thanks. "Before this time to-morrow, the skill of the American doctors, as they will insist upon calling you, will be so magnified, that there is no disease that they will not insist you can cure. Two branches of business are now offered you—that of a professional gentleman, and the more plebeian one of a storekeeper." ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... upon a closer glance unexpected imagination. I once saw him coming through a little pine grove near The Wayside with my father; it was after our return from England. He was so short, sturdy, phlegmatic of exterior, and plebeian, that I was astonished at my father's pleasure in his company, until I noticed a certain gentleness in his manner of stepping, and heard the modulations of his voice, and caught the fragrance of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... All free citizens, whether patricians or plebeians, were called to defend the State, and were enrolled in the army. The equites, or cavalry, took the precedence in the army, and was composed of the wealthy citizens. There were eighteen centuries of these knights, six patrician and twelve plebeian, all having more than one hundred thousand ases. They were armed with sword, spear, helmet, shield, greaves, and cuirass. The infantry was composed of the classes, variously armed, of which, including equites, there were one hundred and ninety-four centuries, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument! At its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed away from their families forever into the hands of wealthy plebeian parvenus! By a few strokes Dives's splendid mansion, and Croesus's magnificent country-seat, and Phaeton's famous fast horses become the property of others. At its tap human beings have been sold ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... come the aristocrat," answered Mikhalevich good-humoredly; "but rather thank God that in your veins also there flows simple plebeian blood. But I see you are now in need of some pure, unearthly being, who might rouse you ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... was from early times a plebeian element in the population of the city, though forming at first no part of the political people. Their origin is not very certain, nor their original position in the city. Historians give different ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... majesty, remonstrating, that he was the representative of a very ancient and honourable family, which had been allied to the crown; and requesting that, if he could not be favoured with the species of death which in cases of treason distinguishes the nobleman from the plebeian, he might at least, out of consideration for his family, be allowed to suffer in the Tower, rather than at the common place of execution; but this indulgence was refused. From his return to the Tower to the day of his execution, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took in a plebeian inventor with more grace—and finality. Often the flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow, but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the Prince of Kingsland—poor little Sybilla Silver! My good Mr. Parmalee, what an absurd idea! You do me proud even to hint that, the blue blood of all the Kingslands could by any chance flow in these plebeian veins! Oh, no, indeed! I am only an upper servant in that great house, and would lose my place within the hour if its lordly master dreamed I was here talking ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... them to the guests, a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shopkeepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant livery ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... either inalienable or innate. The history of mankind shows that it has been constantly alienated from them; and if we pass in review the population of the world, from the oldest to contemporary times, and from savages tribes to the most highly civilized nations, we find the plebeian bowing before the patrician, the poor man serving the wealthy. The conception of human equality before the law is not a congenital endowment, but an accomplishment, arduously acquired and easily forfeited. The first impulse of weakness in the presence of strength is to bow ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... etiquette prescribed a scratch on the door, like that of a pet animal; the knock was too rough and plebeian ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... he wrote for Nicocles, king of Cyprus. Still, from all that appears, the compensation thus received was honorary or gratuitous merely. Among the early institutions of Rome, the relation of patron and client, which existed between the patrician and plebeian, bound the former to render the latter assistance and protection in his lawsuits, with no other return than the general duty, which the client owed to his patron. As every patrician could not be a sufficiently ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... and consul, of plebeian birth, author of several laws intended to minimise the distinction politically between patrician and plebeian, in office ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... well, really now, Katsey Cavanagh is a splendid girl, a fine animal, no doubt of it; all her points are good, but, at the same time, Mr. Burke, a trifle too plebeian ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... expected that," said Mrs. H. B. Donnell, in a tone which implied that gratitude in children was not to be looked for in this degenerate age. "That boy has such plebeian tastes, Miss Shirley. When he was born I wanted to call him St. Clair . . . it sounds SO aristocratic, doesn't it? But his father insisted he should be called Jacob after his uncle. I yielded, because Uncle Jacob was a rich old ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... After this, Mutines and such others as had rendered any services to the Roman people were introduced into the senate, and all received honorary rewards in fulfilment of the consul's engagement. Mutines was also made a Roman citizen, a proposition to that effect having been made to the commons by a plebeian tribune, on the authority of the senate. While these things were going on at Rome, Marcus Valerius Messala, arriving on the coast of Africa before daylight, made a sudden descent on the territory of Utica; and after ravaging ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... was the latter time of the republic, a few years after the fell democratic persecutions of the plebeian Marius had drowned the mighty city oceans-deep in patrician gore; after the awful retribution of the avenger Sylla had rioted in the destruction of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... yielded. We were standing side by side in the silence of the morning, the dimness fading round us, the air taking a golden tinge. My surroundings were plebeian; my costume was comic; yet I felt ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... was put in training for the difficult office he required of a horse. One of the men was sent for Frank, and in the mean time my friend was shown some gaunt and graceful thoroughbreds, and taught to see the difference between them and the plebeian horse. But Frank, though no thoroughbred, eclipsed these patricians when he came. He had a little head, and a neck gallantly arched; he was black and plump and smooth, and though he carried himself with a petted air, and was a dandy to the tips of his hooves, ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... to the boy. He still sat, rather dazed and white, looking disgustedly at his injured arm. "Say," she began hesitatingly; she wished she knew his name—"say" was so plebeian; "—are you too badly hurt to ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God. His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... affectation, nor can it either conceive or bring forth, unless it has been steeped in the vast flood of literature. Every word that is what I would call 'low,' ought to be avoided, and phrases far removed from plebeian usage should be chosen. Let 'Ye rabble rout avaunt,' be your rule. In addition, care should be exercised in preventing the epigrams from standing out from the body of the speech; they should gleam with the brilliancy woven into the fabric. Homer is an example, and the lyric poets, and our Roman ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... considered plebeian; the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made"; these betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to the shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... decemvir and patrician in 451 B.C.; outraged Virginia, a beautiful plebeian damsel, whom her father, on discovering of the crime, killed with a knife snatched from a butcher's stall, rousing thereby the popular rage against the decemvir, who was cast into prison, where he put an end ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... heedless young man; "I am one of a profession which the world has never been able to do without, and will far less endure to want for half a century to come; and my good old uncle may tack his good estate and his plebeian name to your apron-string if he pleases, Mary, and you may wed this new favourite of his if you please, and you may both of you live quiet, peaceable, well-regulated lives, if it pleases Heaven. My part is takenI'll fawn on no man for an inheritance which ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... disease with all despatch. That the physicians of Napoleon did otherwise is evidence that at the beginning of the century the disease in question enjoyed a very different status. At that time itch, instead of being a most plebeian malady, was, so to say, a court disease. It enjoyed a circulation, in high circles and in low, that modern therapeutics has quite denied it; and the physicians of the time gave it a fictitious added importance by ascribing to its influence the existence of almost any obscure ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,—"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day. To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these usually take place in the last ineffable ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... muscular in their strength; it is still stranger, what can have weakened these too delicate Tuscans so. As they are very rich, and might be very happy under the protection of a prince who lets slip no opportunity of preferring his plebeian to his patrician subjects; yet here at Leghorn they have a tender frame and an unhealthy look, occasioned possibly by the stagnant waters, which tender the environs unwholesome enough I believe; and the millions of live creatures ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... that shoot aloft, worked by the gnomes from the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or domestic elves, that dance into tradesmen's houses of a night, and play all sorts of undignified tricks. They were very civil ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see," said Nattie merrily, taking account of stock. "Two pounds of steak—the first cut of the sirloin, I think you said?—waiting, expectant of making glad our hearts, on the rocking-chair, potatoes in plebeian lowliness under the table, tomatoes and two pies on your trunk, Charlotte Russes—delicious Charlotte Russes—where? Ah!—on your bonnet-box, in a plate ordinarily used as a card receiver, and sugar, butter, et cetera, and et cetera lying around almost anywhere, and the figs, oranges and ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from his own order—the patrician—from the violation of the daughter of Virginius, of the plebeian order; nor did Sextus Tarquinius of the royal order, apprehend any from the violation of Lucretia, of the patrician order—neither would have been punished by their own order, but they were both punished by the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... by the side of the burgesses a second community in Rome: out of the clients arose the Plebs. This change of name is significant. In law there was no difference between the client and the plebeian, the "dependent" and the "man of the multitude;" but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of the politically privileged class; the latter ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Nothing is known of sacks or bags. To any spectator at Buffalo this becomes immediately a matter of course; but this should be explained, as we in England are not accustomed to see wheat traveling in this open, unguarded, and plebeian manner. Wheat with us is aristocratic, and travels always in ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... so-called polite society, are relegating a great many of our old Anglo-Saxon words into the shade, faithful friends who served their ancestors well. These self-appointed arbiters of diction regard some of the Anglo-Saxon words as too coarse, too plebeian for their aesthetic tastes and refined ears, so they are eliminating them from their vocabulary and replacing them with mongrels of foreign birth and hybrids of unknown origin. For the ordinary people, however, the man in the street or in the field, the woman in the kitchen or ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... quite safe, for Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties, retired on the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at ten. She never read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as they were with unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends, regarding Alexina's gay disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old Maria," and sympathetic with youth, would have been ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... creatures, however, and Silvia on rare occasions managed to break parole and make adroit escape from surveillance. Then she would speed to the top of the boundary wall that separated the stable precincts from an alluring alley which was the playground of the plebeian progeny ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... "The English nation have very queer and plebeian ways about them; it's very plebeian to take the least notice of servants, except to ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade |
