"Rankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rests, are of a character peculiar to itself. The whole has a charming effect. But severe criticism compels one to admit that the body of the church is defective in fine taste and unity of parts. The style is not only florid Gothic, but it is luxuriant, even to rankness, if I may so speak. The parts are capriciously put together: filled, and even crammed, with ornaments of apparently all ages: concluding with the Grecian mixture introduced in the reign of Francis I. The buttresses are, however, generally, lofty and airy. In the midst of this complicated and corrupt ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... intermixed with it, to counteract the bad effects of it. And a sort of madness often seizes them: this may be known by their tumbling about; their heels upwards, and hopping in an odd manner into the boxes. This distemper is supposed to be owing to the rankness of their feeding; and the general cure is the keeping them low and giving them the prickly herb called tare-thistle to eat as much as possible. They are also subject to a sort of scabby eruption, which is seldom removed. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... garments befitting his daily occupations of working on the farm and lounging among the moors after rabbits and game. Still, I thought I could detect in his physiognomy a mind owning better qualities than his father ever possessed. Good things lost amid a wilderness of weeds, to be sure, whose rankness far over-topped their neglected growth; yet, notwithstanding, evidence of a wealthy soil, that might yield luxuriant crops under other and favourable circumstances. Mr. Heathcliff, I believe, had not treated him physically ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... tainted. It is the reductio ad absurdum of the idea of aristocratic society. It is divorced from the real body of democracy. It sets no authoritative standard of taste. If anything could reconcile the British Radical to his House of Lords, it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks of individual caprice, that rule in a country where there is no carefully polished noblesse to set the pattern. George William Curtis puts the case well: "Fine society is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away like ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... true happiness, they whom satiety fills, Who, flung on the rich breast of luxury, eat of the rankness that kills. Ah! little they know of the blessedness toil-purchased slumber enjoys, Who, stretched on the hard rack of indolence, taste of the sleep that destroys, Nothing to hope for, or labour for; ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... honest equality. The principles of our forefathers become suspected to us, because we see them animating the present opposition of our children. The faults which grow out of the luxuriance of freedom appear much more shocking to us than the {88} base vices which are generated from the rankness of servitude. Accordingly, the least resistance to power appears more inexcusable in our eyes than the greatest abuses of authority. All dread of a standing military force is looked upon as a superstitious panic. All shame of calling in foreigners and savages in a civil contest ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock |
