"Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The vulgar psychology, which answers the purposes of M. Guyot (La Tyrannie socialiste, liv. III, ch. I.), is content with superficial observations. It declares, for instance, that if the laborer works twelve hours, he will produce evidently ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... active fancy from the brain is sent, And stands on tip-toe for some wish'd event, 350 I hate those careless blunders, which recall Suspended sense, and prove it fiction all. In characters of low and vulgar mould, Where Nature's coarsest features we behold; Where, destitute of every decent grace, Unmanner'd jests are blurted in your face, There Yates with justice strict attention draws, Acts truly from himself, and ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the "Vicar of Wakefield," boastful for her aristocratic connections and delicacy of taste, but vulgar at bottom. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... as she spoke, the effect of her appearance was spoiled. Her voice was hoarse, a low-pitched rasp, husky, throaty, and full of brutal, vulgar modulations. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... world-embracing an organism, persistently maintained in action for an anti-social end. There is something Roman in the colossal proportions of Loyola's idea, something Roman in the durability of the structure which perpetuates it. Yet the philosopher cannot but agree with the vulgar in his final judgment on the odiousness of these sacerdotal despots, these unflinching foes not merely to the heroes of the human intellect, and to the champions of right conduct, but also to the very angels of Christianity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... not believe in the government of the lash. If any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph taken of yourself when you are in the act, with your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear, like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind. Have the picture taken. If that little child should die, ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... to their lovers is upon this sort. Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of "civilised" life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. And you ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... dislike what Dido giues in charge, Commaund my guard to slay for their offence: Shall vulgar pesants storme at what I doe? The ground is mine that giues them sustenance, The ayre wherein they breathe, the water, fire, All that they haue, their lands, their goods, their liues, And I the Goddesse of all these, commaund ...
— The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage • Christopher Marlowe
... or mother wit, as it is called, about the Spaniards, which renders them intellectual and agreeable companions, whatever may be their condition in life, and however imperfect may have been their education: add to this they are never vulgar, nature has endowed them with an inherent dignity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... a step to overtake him. All in good time. She no more doubted him—she no more doubted that in due time he would ask her to be his wife—than she doubted what her answer would be when he did so. Between them there had been no vulgar philandering; no word of what might have been, what yet might be, had passed their lips. Yet, deep in their hearts was guarded an unspoken compact which—she would have staked her life ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... means it is that all sort of justice passes in the world for a low-spirited and vulgar virtue, far below the dignity of royal greatness—or at least there are set up two sorts of justice; the one is mean and creeps on the ground, and, therefore, becomes none but the lower part of mankind, and so must be kept in severely by many ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... then condensation of moisture from the warmer air circulating around the fruit occurs, just as moisture gathers upon the outside of an ice-pitcher in summer. This explains the whole matter; and the vulgar notion of fruits "sweating" should be dispelled ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... mere vulgar fortune-hunter. He must be genuinely in love with the nice English Girl. And that's ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... for a cab, and the pair of friends drove to Vernou's house on the second floor up an alley in the Rue Mandar. To Lucien's great astonishment, the harsh, fastidious, and severe critic's surroundings were vulgar to the last degree. A marbled paper, cheap and shabby, with a meaningless pattern repeated at regular intervals, covered the walls, and a series of aqua tints in gilt frames decorated the apartment, where Vernou ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... substance in unequal proportions happen to meet, a current of imponderable passes from one to the other, producing a kind of attraction, and tending to adhere. The operation takes place instantaneously when the force is strong and much condensed. Thus the vulgar who call things after their effects and not from their causes, term the action of this imponderable love at first sight; the wise define it to be a phenomenon of ambericity. As regards my own opinion about the matter, I have long ago told ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... character and milieu, they disdain the adventitious aids of eloquence and theatrical splendor, and speak to us with the directness, often with the bluntness, of nature herself. Hebbel was no naturalist, in the sense of one who seeks but to reproduce phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... small bronchial tubes compose the largest portions of the lungs. These, when once inflated, contain air, under all circumstances, which renders their specific gravity much less than water; hence the vulgar term, lights, for these organs. The trachea and bronchial tubes are lined by mucous membrane. The structure of this membrane is such, that it will bear the presence of pure air without detriment, but not of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... girl of color in her room was subjected for a time to such indignities as only the vulgar are capable of inflicting. Her complaints pained her fond father, but his counsel was, "Daughter, I am sending you to school for your benefit; see to it that you are punctual in attendance, that you do not offend in your demeanor and cope with the best of them in your ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... think it as vulgar as Hurl-Gate, aunty?" To me it always seems the most vulgar to be straining ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... part of their character. These, however, were popular divinities which the Druids ostensibly worshipped, and popular notions which they ostensibly adopted, in conformity with the prejudices of the vulgar. The Druids well knew that the common people were no philosophers. There is reason also, to think that a great part of the idolatries were not sanctioned by the Druids, but afterwards introduced by the Phoenician colony. But it would be impossible to say how far the primitive Druids accommodated ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... could command. Miss Bertha, having already arrived at the age of discretion, found that to match this against the wealth of young Potestatem Dedimus Smith was as well as she could hope to do, and accepted him upon condition that the vulgar Smith should be changed ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... discourse, I said that we in England were not ashamed to call things by their proper names; and that we considered it a great mark of ill-breeding to go round about for a substitute to a common word, the vulgar import of which a well bred and modest woman ought ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Custis, stubbornly, "is to see that he pays this check. Oh, my dear money!"—she pressed it to her heart—"how delightful it is to see you again. Science, love, glory, ideas: how vulgar they are without money. With this check paid, I think I shall never read a book again; and as for the bog ores, why, I shall scream if there is an iron article in the house. Vesta, this house, I believe, is yours now? I had forgotten. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... scholars, wanderers in the market place, vagrants, barbels, mushrooms, dolts, asses, a growling herd, with unwashed feet, break into the sacred precincts of theology, bringing nothing along with them but an impudent front, some vulgar trifles and foolish scholastic technicalities, unworthy of respect even at the crossing of the highways. This is the unworthy, vagrant, voluptuous race, fitter for the hog sty (haram) than the altar (aram), that basely prostitute divine literature; these are they who fill the pulpits, creep ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... impatient gesture of her small hand—"I can't sit still. Every pulse seems throbbing. He has opened up all the old wounds, and——" She pauses and then turns upon her husband two lovely flashing eyes. "Why, why should he suppose that I am vulgar, lowly born, unfit ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... and all the course of nature be quite perverted, than that in so great beauty and neatness as in you is there should be one drop of gall or malice. They say, indeed, that hardly shall a man ever see a fair woman that is not also stubborn. Yet that is spoke only of those vulgar beauties; but yours is so excellent, so singular, and so heavenly, that I believe nature hath given it you as a paragon and masterpiece of her art, to make us know what she can do when she will ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... preliminary acquaintance with the English of his day — or of his copyists' days. Despite this complacent assurance, the obvious fact is, that Chaucer in the old forms has not become popular, in the true sense of the word; he is not "understanded of the vulgar." In this volume, therefore, the text of Chaucer has been presented in nineteenth-century garb. But there has been not the slightest attempt to "modernise" Chaucer, in the wider meaning of the phrase; to replace his words ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the stage? A funeral was not the less a warning to the living because it was rounded off with a feast. Nor was Jesus on the Cross robbed of any of the majesty and silent eloquence of vicarious suffering by the vulgar levity of those who bade him 'Take good eyd (heed) to oure corn, and chare (scare) awey the crowe'. The strong sentiment of reverence set limits to the application of this humour. Only minor characters were permitted to express themselves in this way. The soldiers at the Sepulchre, the Judaeans ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... vulgar building, with a beautiful garden, for his garden was Burton's pride. Even in the sodden wet the flowers, not wholly beaten down, showed how well cared for and excellent their quality. The sward was even and trim, and the fruit-trees on the side of the house had yielded ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... low by Fate opprest!— 25 Perhaps, O Kettle! thou by scornful toe Rude urg'd t' ignoble place with plaintive din. May'st rust obscure midst heaps of vulgar tin;— As if no joy had ever seiz'd my breast When from thy spout the streams did arching fly,— 30 As if, infus'd, thou ne'er hadst known t' inspire All the warm ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... says that fools build houses for wise men to live in, though "the greatest part of Rome sooner or later came into his hands," as Plutarch observes. He was of that sordid, avaricious character which covets wealth merely for the desire to be considered rich, for the vulgar popularity that accompanies that reputation, and not for ambition or enjoyment. He was said to be uninfluenced by the love of luxury or by the other passions of humanity. He was not a man of extensive learning, though he was ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and well-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo. Two lions' heads conjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowed from the vulgar meaning of their name. Many members of the house held important office during the three centuries preceding the birth of the famous general, Bartolommeo. He was born in the year 1400 at Solza, in the Bergamasque ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... himself redden slightly, and looked curiously at the man. This vulgar parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of Bodine's, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect. As he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... have been rightly named Scripture theologians; but it is a strange infatuation to think that this designation characterises them as evangelical. If indeed we here understand "evangelical" in the vulgar sense, the term may be correct, only in this case it means exactly the same as "Catholic." But if "evangelical" signifies "early-Christian," then it must be said that Scripture theology was not the primary means of preserving the ideas of primitive Christianity; ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... aims and mistaken ambitions; a few yards of beaded curtains which separated it from another room gratified Moona with the satisfactory sensation that her surroundings were Oriental. As a matter of fact, the decoration was so commonplace and vulgar that to attempt to describe it would be painful to the writer whilst having no sort of effect on the reader, since it was almost indescribable. From the decorative point of view, the room was the most unmeaning of failures, the most complete ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... least a glimmering of sense and she must soon perceive for herself how disgraceful the whole unfortunate affair would seem to outsiders." She paused. "There is something that I do not quite understand about Willa. You are sure, Mason, that she has no vulgar, clandestine ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... to Shakespeare's complying with the vulgar Notions of Spirits amongst the English at that Time, so far from being low, it adds a Grace and a Naivete to the whole Passage, which one can much easier be sensible of than know ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... in days gone by, when I insisted upon reading to her about the peculiar people who made it a matter of faith to eat bread and cheese at the Eucharist—Epiphanius is to me positively entertaining, and Pagitt's Heresiography is none the less instructive because it is a vulgar catch-penny little book, made up, like Peter Pindar's razors, to sell. To me it seems that to dismiss even the wildest and foolishest opinion which makes way, as if it were a mere absurdity that does not deserve notice, is to show a certain flippancy and shallowness. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... mind to move in Charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of Truth. This condition, says he, is Heaven upon Earth; and although what touches truth may better befit the philosopher who uttered it than the vulgar and unlearned, for whom perhaps it is a counsel too high and therefore dangerous, what comes before should surely be graven by each of us on the walls of our hearts. For any man who lived in the days that ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... call'd the Gods, with vulgar spite, To vindicate his helpless right; But bow'd his comely head Down, as upon ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... said Sidonia, 'that there is no error so vulgar as to believe that revolutions are occasioned by economical causes. They come in, doubtless, very often to precipitate a catastrophe; very rarely do they occasion one. I know no period, for example, when physical comfort was more diffused in England ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... in vulgar squabbles, more and more stormy, a connection so romantically begun. Lauzun, disappointed in his hope of a magnificent alliance, considered himself despoiled by the Princess's donation, and, finding himself after ten years' captivity ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Leander; 'I make it always a condition that the head of every department shall be appointed by myself. I take Pellerini with me for the confectionery. How often have I seen the effect of a first-rate dinner spoiled by a vulgar dessert! laid flat on the table, for example, or with ornaments that look as if they had been hired at a pastrycook's: triumphal arches, and Chinese pagodas, and solitary pines springing up out of ice-tubs surrounded with peaches, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... face a screen of feathers hung,— A moscader, or fan for flies, 'tis called in vulgar tongue; From the feathers of the peacock's wing 't was fashioned bright and fair, And glistened like the heaven above when all ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... spite of democracy. The children of the republic are entitled to something better. A generous education, a well-directed education, should be the birthright of each one of them. Democracy may even intensify natural inequalities. The man who cannot say no to cheap and vulgar temptations falls all the lower in the degree to which he is a free agent. In competition with men alert, loyal, trained and creative, the dullard is condemned to a lifetime of hard labor, through no direct fault of his own. Keep the capable man down ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... double life. Don't you know it's wrong, wicked, vile? I can't really believe it of you. Why, you're my own brother! The honor of our name rests upon you. The—the idea that you should fall a victim to the wiles of a low, vulgar—" ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... sickened. To the physician called in attendance, after much shrewd questioning on his part, I revealed my secret. With a jocose laugh he left me, but in a half-hour returned, accompanied by a somewhat vulgar-looking female, whom he introduced as the mother of Evelyn Afton—the name of her for whom my life was ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... himself with a vulgar, arrogant and uncouth set of people. All of the princes and leading Judeans who were taken to Babylon had been forced to sell their estates and properties at whatever price they would bring. These were bought up by anyone that came along and created a class of newly-rich ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... sensual delirium is conceived an elysium of carnal bliss, where half-nude nymphs display their charms and invite to sensual enjoyments. Thus we see how this habit makes the spiritual faculties subservient to morbid passion, and by what means elevating influences are prostituted to vulgar and base-born creations. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 1-1/2d. is "the only way to avoid unmanageable fractions." But why avoid them? Is there not a certain glow of triumph in taming such a fraction? "Ladies and gentlemen, the fraction now before you is one that for years defied all efforts of a refining nature: it was, in a word, hopelessly vulgar. Treating it as a circulating decimal (the treadmill of fractions) only made matters worse. As a last resource, I reduced it to its lowest terms, and extracted its square root!" Joking apart, let me thank OLD CAT for some very kind words of sympathy, in reference to a correspondent ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... intended as a reproach, may sound in modern ears much more like approval. 'He copied vulgar nature with zeal, and some of his figures seem alive.' Roubiliac constantly had recourse to the living forms about him; Flaxman preferred instead to turn to the antique. We hear of Roubiliac's fondness for modelling the arms of Thames watermen and the legs of chair-porters: in each ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... barren of interest until his eyes fell on that sketching figure in the pink dress. For he respected one of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking a vulgar love-affair. He was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare with him in which one finds anything to say to a little milliner. He wanted the means, not ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... downright enmity, between friends and kinsfolk, his memory registers; the number will be considerable, and what a vastly greater number of everyday "misunderstandings" may be thence inferred! Verbal contention is, of course, commoner among the poor and the vulgar than in the class of well- bred people living at their ease, but I doubt whether the lower ranks of society find personal association much more difficult than the refined minority above them. High cultivation ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... herself and train so far as the way lay through the fields; but when they should approach the city she desired that he would no longer be seen in her company, for she feared the remarks which rude and vulgar people might make on seeing her return accompanied by such a gallant stranger; to avoid which she directed him to stop at a grove adjoining the city, in which were a farm and garden belonging to the king. After allowing time for the princess and her companions ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the multitude with superstition and enthusiasm. They taught them to believe that they were the distinguished favorites of Heaven; that celestial doctrines had been revealed to them, too holy to be communicated to the profane {34} rabble, and too sublime to be comprehended by vulgar capacities. Princes and legislators, who found their advantage in overawing and humbling the multitude, readily adopted a plan so artfully fabricated to answer these purposes. The views of those in power were congenial ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded that when the benefits of vegetable diet are mathematically proved, when it is as clear that those who live naturally are exempt from premature death as that nine is not one, the most sottish ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... which I then occupied was different to what I now fill, but my good wife has had no ambition to change her style of dress or living with our change of circumstances, from the feeling that she might appear out of place. In fact, my dear madam, you will understand that she is not vulgar, and is essentially free from all vulgar ambition. Here I must bring the sketch of my early life to a conclusion, remarking that what my brother and I did, hundreds of others have done in this province, and thousands ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... much-abused effect. Variations of Tempo, the ritardando, accelerando, and tempo rubato, are all legitimate aids demanded by Expression. But unless their use is determined by sound judgment and correct musicianly taste, the effect speedily becomes vulgar and monotonous. Knowledge, and a taste formed in good schools, must be the guide of the vocalist in the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... to break the stupid little thing—it wouldn't break. Finally, she had to drag her glove over. I saw, after that, she couldn't stand this place a moment longer, and, indeed, she jumped up and turned away while I went through the vulgar act of ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... was prepared for any crimes. Good children would not associate with her, and consequently she had to choose the worst for her companions and her friends. She learned wicked language; she was rude and vulgar in her manners; she indulged ungovernable passion; and at last grew so bad, that when her family afterwards removed to the city, the House of Correction became her ignominious home. And there she ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... mother's act out of the sphere of vulgar crime, by the characteristic method of making her tell her story: and show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is too fond of long, imperfectly balanced sentences, with as many awkward twists and turns as the winding stairways of her ancient turrets. Nobody in the novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the pleasantest and the most terrible weapon employed by wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and violent men who have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the happy hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are never to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these words: "I have a headache." If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if he tries to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... much as hinted at that: no wonder the writer hadn't been flattered! I asked Corvick what he really considered he meant by his own supersubtlety, and, unmistakeably kindled, he replied: "It isn't for the vulgar—it isn't for the vulgar!" He had hold of the tail of something; he would pull hard, pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker's strange confidence and, pronouncing me the luckiest of mortals, mentioned half a dozen questions he ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... justifiable, but absolutely essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would have deemed it downright profanation. How little is it in the power of the most finished actor to change the character of his features! How ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... yet poor Edwin was no vulgar boy: Deep thought oft seem'd to fix his infant eye. Dainties he heeded not, nor gaude, nor toy, Save one short pipe of rudest minstrelsy: Silent when glad; affectionate, though shy; And now his look was most ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... in truth, dates far back in that remote region commonly called the fabulous age, in which vulgar fact becomes mystified, and tinted up with delectable fiction. The eastern shore of the Tappan Sea was inhabited in those days by an unsophisticated race, existing in all the simplicity of nature; that is to say, they lived by hunting and fishing, and recreated themselves occasionally with a little ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... poor woman that needed help or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love to know if perhaps in the Tresor at Rheims there was some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But the Tresor at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that pauvre sire, are more thought of than relics of ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... vulgar melodrama of the message which struck him most forcibly with a sense of distaste and disgust, and then he flicked the piece of paper impatiently and said, 'I don't believe a word of it!' His face was white, however, as he turned to the servant ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... R. Lounsbury, The Text of Shakespeare, 275. "But the attack upon Mrs. Haywood exceeded all bounds of decency. To the credit of the English race nothing so dastardly and vulgar can be found elsewhere in English literature. If the influence of 'The Dunciad' was so all-powerful as to ruin the prospects of any one it satirized, it ought certainly to have crushed her beyond hope of any revival. As a matter ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... This jovial but vulgar manner of being introduced to the widow, in the presence of her other suitors, put the finishing touch to the ploughman's confusion and annoyance. He felt ill at ease, and stood for some moments without venturing to turn his eyes on the fair ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... as the best adapted to the understanding of the people, took quite a different view of them, and explained the mythological legends as allegorical representations of general physical and moral truths. Thus, while Jupiter, to the vulgar mind, was the god or the upper regions, "who dwelt on the Summits of the highest mountains, gathered the clouds about him, shook the air with his thunder, and wielded the lightning as the instrument ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... none of those abominable "round games," which, unless they descend to vulgar romping, are the dreariest attempts at conviviality possible to conceive; none of those dreadful and much-to- be-avoided exactions and remissions of "forfeits," that plunge everybody into embarrassing situations, and destroy, instead ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... matron hurriedly, "and don't stand talking to vulgar cabmen and calling them by their Christian names. Your name is Charles Newcome, I ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... pauses to prove to itself its superiority over that of the vulgar. I make a parenthesis in my ill-temper in favor of my vanity, and I bring together all the evidence which my ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... the "greatest literary genius in America." The reception given by the public to the "long, dirty, straggling tales" of the novelist disgusted him. "I ask nothing," he wrote in April, 1823, "of a people who will lavish their patronage on such a vulgar book as "The Pioneers." They and I are well quit. They neglect me, and I despise them." In a later letter he returned to this work. "It might do," he said, "to amuse the select society of a barber's shop or a porter-house. But to have the author step forward on such stilts and ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... phases of the Divine Nature. Ancient polytheism had, it may be surmised, to a great extent this origin, the various names and titles of the Supreme, which designated His different attributes or the different spheres of His operation, coming by degrees to be misunderstood, and to pass, first with the vulgar, and at last with all but the most enlightened, for the appellations ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... feathers for the darts of Cupid! —that was how the once poetic man to himself expressed himself! He was laying in store of weapons, he said! For when a man will use things in which he does not believe, he cannot fail to be vulgar. But Lady Joan saw no vulgarity in the result—it was hid in the man himself. To her he seemed a profound lover of poetry, who knew much of which she had never even heard. Once he contrived to spend a whole afternoon with her in the library, for of the outsides of books, their ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... such good grounds for his assertion, could finde no better entertainement among the wiser sort, and upper end of the World; 'tis not likely then that this opinion which I now deliver, shall receive any thing from the men of these daies, especially our vulgar wits, but misbeliefe or derision. It hath alwaies beene the unhappinesse of new truths in Philosophy, to be derided by those that are ignorant of the causes of things, and reiected by others whose perversenesse ties them to the contrary ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... words reached the King, he sent for that courier and said to him, "O thou that seeketh thine own ruin, art thou not the bearer of a letter from King to King, between whom are secrets, and how cometh it that thou goest forth among the folk and publishest Kings' secrets to the vulgar? Verily, thou meritest retribution from us, but this we will forbare, for the sake of returning an answer by thee to this fool of a King of thine; and it befitteth not that any return to him reply but the least of the boys of the school." Then he sent for the Wazir's son, who came ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... which he had cast an ineffaceable shadow,—a life instinct with truth, beauty, and brightness, just opening out as it were into the bloom of fulfilled promise. He had not "betrayed" her in the world's vulgar sense of betrayal,—he had not wronged her body— but he had done far worse,—he had robbed her of her peace of mind. Little by little he had stolen from the flower of her life its honey of sweet content,—he had checked the active impulses of her ambition, and as they ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill." (Descent of Man, p. 98.) A quotation from the Principles of Political Economy (Vol. 1, p. 389) will give an idea of Mr. Mill's point of view: "Of all the vulgar methods of escaping from the effects of social and moral influences on the mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing diversities of conduct and character to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... whole of London seemed to have broken loose in a rage of contempt and loathing which was whipped up and justified each morning by the hypocritical articles of the "unco guid" in the daily this and the weekly that. In the streets one heard everywhere the loud jests of the vulgar, decked out with filthy anecdotes and punctuated by obscene laughter, as from the mouth ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... marry whom I choose," said Betty, chin in air, "and it won't be you." ("I don't care if I am vulgar and brutal," she told herself, "it serves ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... them to maintain the balance of historic truth undisturbed, at least by undue partiality for either of the two great rival powers; whose high public stations introduced them to the principal characters of the day, and to springs of action hidden from vulgar eyes; and whose superior science, as well as genius, qualified them for rising above the humble level of garrulous chronicle and memoir to the classic dignity of history. It is with regret that we must now strike into a track unillumined by the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... era. Indeed it needed no stimulus from without to whet his ambitious cravings. That seventh consulship which superstition whispered would be surely his he had yet to win; and in all his after conduct he seems to have been guided by the most vulgar selfishness, which in the end became murderous insanity. But while he hoped to use all parties for his own advancement—a game in which he of all men was least qualified to succeed—other and abler politicians were bent on using ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... so justly hated, was and is the cause of all my suffering and of yours. You used to wonder how such a man as that, a low, vulgar knave, could gain such an influence over me and sway me as he did. I will ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... me to his cabin. He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... the one had determined the movements of the celestial bodies, and the other the laws of gravitation? What would you have thought of Parmentier passing hours and days in manipulating a rough-looking bulb, that possessed no kind of value in the eyes of the vulgar, but which afterwards, as the potato, became the chief food of two-thirds of the population of Europe? What would you think of Jenner, with his finger on his brow, searching for a means of preserving humanity from the scourge of ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... his presidency, Mr. Lincoln had been constantly subject to the threats of his enemies. His mail was infested with brutal and vulgar menace, and warnings of all sorts came to him from zealous or nervous friends. Most of these communications received no notice. In cases where there seemed a ground for inquiry, it was made, as carefully as possible, by ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... stock, whatever their station, and have had china and carved oak in their possession from one generation to another—forebore even to look at her lest she should be embarrassed by their curiosity. They did the honours of the house with dignity, and without vulgar apology for a state of things that was natural to them, and Ideala at once adapted herself to the circumstances, and burnt her fingers while attending to the baked potatoes, ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... arranging our stump so as to carry it to the best advantage, a vulgar-faced man, with fiery red hair, and wearing on his collar the yellow bars of a Lieutenant, approached. This was Lieutenant Barrett, commandant of the interior of the prison, and a more inhuman wretch even than Captain Wirz, because he had a little more brains than the commandant at Andersonville, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... earth. The shortest way for an immortal soul to read a book is to know and absorb enough other immortal souls, and get them to help. Any system of education which like our present prevailing one is so vulgar, so unpsychological, as to overlook the soul as the organ and method of knowledge, which fails to see that the knowledge of human souls is itself the method of acquiring all other knowledge and of combining and utilising it, makes narrow and ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the rest of the man, for it was both good-humored and handsome. His air was free, and though his manner necessarily partook of the rudeness of a border life, the grandeur that pervaded so noble a physique prevented it from becoming altogether vulgar. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the nurses' exclamations of surprise—"Oh, I say!" "Not I!" "You don't say so!" "What idiocy!" and the like. No doubt those expressions sounded quite proper among the nurses, but on Tommy's lips they seem curiously more vulgar than his natural and rougher expletives. It is, besides, as if one were eavesdropping outside the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... that of a vulgar peasant, the thoughts it expressed were worthy of the noblest, the proudest in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... instead of the set features and serious aspect which you always wear when most entertaining, they present us for ever with a broad grin, and if you have the least smile upon your countenance make you burst into a vulgar horse-laugh: they are generally, indeed, such bad painters, that the daubing would never be taken for you if they had not written 'Lucian' under the picture. I heartily wish the Doctor better luck." Upon which the Doctor's friend makes Lucian reply: "And there is some reason ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... which in youth[26] had spent itself in vicious indulgences, was now employed under the management of Chicheley in desolating France by one of the most unjust wars ever waged by ambition, and in furnishing for vulgar minds matter of declamation on the valour of the English nation. While this scene was carrying on in France, the Archbishop at home, partly by exile, partly by forced abjurations, and partly by the flames, domineered over the Lollards, and ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... prevail as yet concerning them, and the most rude or absurd ideas are entertained in our country of their objects and nature. As in modern Greece, every ruin is now a Paleo-castro or old castle for the vulgar peasant or herdsman, thus all our ruins of the West are Indian forts for the settlers of the Western states; and every traveller gazing at random at a few, exclaims that nothing is known about them, nor their builders. ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... the race, because what he publishes he knows, lives, and is. We open the mind largely to take the sense of such a gospel: it will not appear in details of perception. Plato and Goethe see the same sun, and seem to the vulgar to follow each other; they have more in common than any man can have in privacy; yet if you enter to the entire habit of each, you will justify the making of these two. They are like and unlike, as apples on one and another tree. The great in any time hold in common ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... begun when we began magnifying each other's failings, and soon our brief passion had burnt itself out. Ah, me! with what regret I used to look back to this quiet town, and the stately calm of Oaklands, after one of our vulgar quarrels. I learned too soon that my husband was a gambler, and that my fortune had been a more coveted prize than myself; but fortunately, neither of us could touch anything but the interest until my eldest child ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... Hunt, brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous. On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking; but she had not married, perhaps because there was always a crowd of men around her. She was not fast (though some might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... his making is a wonder, I am saith our [dh]Prophet fearfully and wonderfully made: but a good man if you consider his new making is a wonderfull wonder, as [di]Paul speakes a spectacle to men and Angels, as the vulgar Latine runnes in the 68. Psalme, at the last verse, mirabilis deus in sanctis, O God wonderfull ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys
... here in the cafe, moves brightly in and out. Green satin, and a dance, white wine and gleaming laughter, with two nodding earrings—these are Lotus. And in the painted eyes cold steel, and on the lips a vulgar jest; Hands that fly ever to the coat lapels, familiar to the wrists and to the hair of men. These too are Lotus. And what ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... countries, wherein the imagination can behold new worlds in miniature. I kept gazing lovingly on these marvels of grace and delicacy, these arabesques in which infinite variety is combined with unfailing regularity, and as I remembered with pleasure that you are not, like the vulgar, blind to these adorable coquetries of nature, I gathered a few with the greatest care, even bringing away the bark of the tree on which they had taken root, in order not to destroy the perfection of their designs. I made a little collection, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... risen from the vulgar herd, so seeing that Ch'iu-fang possessed several traits of beauty and exceptional intellectual talents, Fu Shih arrived at the resolution of making his sister the means of joining relationship with the influential family of some honourable clan. And so unwilling ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... most formidable sheet, without gilt or black edging, and consequently very vulgar and indecorous, particularly to one of your precision; but this being Sunday, I can procure no better, and will atone for its length by not filling it. Bland I have not seen since my last letter; but ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... vexed by what she considered a bit of stupid, vulgar, village gossip. "Jack's the most level-headed young man about women I've ever known," she said, trying to speak pleasantly. "If anyone has fallen in love with Mrs. Crofton, it's ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... ascendency, and the spirits of the great deep were let loose against Popery. But the temper of proscription in the two countries exhibited specific differences. Extravagant in both, it became in Ireland vulgar and indecent. In England, it was Tilburina,[90] gone mad in white satin; in Ireland it was Tilburina's maid, gone mad in white linen. The Lords Justices of Ireland, in 1715, recommended the Parliament to put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... historians, Rapin and Carte, the only two who seem not to have swallowed implicitly all the vulgar tales propagated by the Lancastrians to blacken the house of York, warn us to read with allowance the exaggerated relations of those times. The latter suspects, that at the dissolution of the monasteries all evidences were suppressed that tended to weaken the right of the prince ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... is vulgar. Oh! I think these bar rooms are horrid places. I would walk squares out of my way to keep from passing them." "And I object to intemperance not simply because I think it is vulgar but because I know it is wicked; and Jeanette ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... yet allowed the favor he asked, with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her up in his arms. The scorner's chair is filled. I see him, shadow-like, a sad-eyed, blase gentleman, who has been adored by all the beauties of fifteen seasons, and yet speaks of woman with a contemptuous sneer. Great, however, is love; and the vulgar little girl who talks slang will prove to him in our next volume that there is still one peerless beyond all others of her sex. Ah, a wondrous thing is love! On every side of me there are dark, handsome men, with something sinister ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... fashion, or a letter of introduction to a Venetian Ambassador abroad, often proved to be worth more than the gold he abstained from giving. He spoke Latin, he could read Greek, and his taste in poetry was so highly cultivated that he called Dante's verse rough, uncouth, and vulgar—precisely as Horace Walpole, seventy or eighty years later, could not conceive how any one could prefer Shakespeare's rude lines to the elegant verses of Mr. Pope. For the Senator lived in the age when Louis XIV. was young, and Charles II. had been restored ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... as well as the rich, the vulgar as well as the noble, in the event of a tournament, which was the grand spectacle of that age, felt as much interested as the half-starved citizen of Madrid, who has not a real left to buy provisions for his family, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... bedecked with tawdry gems of paste; Parisian robes thy withered limbs conceal; Thy wrinkled cheeks are rouged; in vulgar taste A modern watch-fob ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... of the world in which he lived would appear to have smoked. In Miss Burney's "Evelina," 1778, from the beginning to the end of the book there is no mention whatever of tobacco or of smoking. Apparently the vulgar Branghtons were not vulgar enough to smoke. Such use of tobacco was considered low, and was confined to the classes of society indicated in the preceding chapter. One of the characters in Macklin's "Love a ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... Daw was left alone with Paul, she began to upbraid him with his falseness,—"You vulgar, stuck-up, ugly, awkward deceiver! you have neither honesty enough to live by, nor wings enough to fly with." Whereupon she jumped at him and gave him such a plucking as ...
— The Faithless Parrot • Charles H. Bennett
... Etudes, pp. 9-11, and Entstehung etc., p. 8; I. F. Weidler, Spicilegium observationum ad historiam notarum numeralium pertinentium, Wittenberg, 1755, speaks of the "figura cifrarum Saracenicarum" as being different from that of the "characterum Boethianorum," which are similar to the "vulgar" or common numerals; see also Humboldt, ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... poor Romancer—thou whose printed page, Filled with rude speech and ruder forms of strife, Was given to heroes in whose vulgar rage No trace appears ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... close this part of the subject by remarking on one of the most vulgar and absurd sayings or dogmas that ever yet imposed itself upon the world, which is, "that a Republic is fit only for a small country, and a Monarchy for a large one." Ask those who say this their reasons why it is so, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... preceded the death of Keats by two years and five months].... The fact is, the Quarterly, finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners[14] and of masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote indecently, probably in the indulgence of his ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... were a vulgar burglar I might assist you," he said, "but my branch of the profession does not take me ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... 'cuckoo' the summer draws near, eh, Nat? No, my boy, I think not. To begin with, I believe that it is all a vulgar error about the cuckoo sucking little birds' eggs. Doubtless cuckoos have been shot with eggs in their mouths, perhaps broken in the fall, but I think the eggs they carried were their own, which, after laying, they were on their ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... he and his comrades supposed that 'twas because Guido, being addicted to speculation, was thereby estranged from men. And, for that he was somewhat inclined to the opinion of the Epicureans, the vulgar averred that these speculations of his had no other scope than to prove that God did not exist. Now one day it so befell that, Guido being come, as was not seldom his wont, from Or San Michele by the Corso degli Adimari as far as San Giovanni, around which were then ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... veritable cul-de-sac, then a centre of Egyptian conquest. Evidently we have still to find the "true Mount Sinai," if at least it be not a myth, pure and simple. The profound Egyptologist, Dr. Heinrich Brugsch-Bey, observes that the vulgar official site lies to the south of and far from the line taken by the Beni Israil, and that the papyri show no route leading to it; whilst many have remarked that the Sinai of the Exodus is described as a single isolated mountain or hill, not as one projection ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... dissolute and fearless assassin of private character, of domestic comfort, and of social happiness; when he is known to be the bosom friend and supporter of the profligate and abandoned libertine, who, from the vulgar debauches of night, hastens again to the invasion of private property. Who, through the robbery of the public revenue, and the violation of private seals, hurries down the precipice ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... speaker addressing a public meeting. What he says is weighty and important. His arguments are powerful and well marshalled, but his speech is uncouth and disagreeable. He says things that are coarse and vulgar. His bad manner vastly takes away from the impression which he desires to make, and which, if his manner had been different, he would have made. Again, two young men serve in a place of business. The one is gentle in his demeanor, meets ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... misfortune. Everybody believed that, and it was commonly understood that General Arnold believed it, too. But would he overcome his enemies by retrieving the past and put to shame their vulgar enthusiasm by rising to heights of newer and greater glory? Or would he yield to the more natural propensities of retaliation or despair? A man is no greater than the least of his virtues; but he who has acquired self-control has ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... we have only to draw closer to them to find that they too have their mystery; and if this seem less visible and less comprehensible, it is only because it lies deeper and is far more mysterious. The desire to live, the acceptance of life as it is, may perhaps be mere vulgar expressions; but yet they are probably in unconscious harmony with laws that are vaster, more conformable with the spirit of the universe, and therefore more sacred, than is the desire to escape the sorrows of life, or the lofty ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... life that touch the heart by their familiarity. He is no disciple of the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. He uses the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the utmost skill to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more of this sustained simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of words, in Goldsmith than in any other modern poet, or, perhaps, than would be attainable or desirable as a standard for every writer of rhyme. In extensive narrative poems, such a style would be ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... but to get his finger in that old man's money-pile, over there, next door!" The voice was vulgar, the words were vulgar—and the plain truth was vulgar! How it rang in Mary Vertrees's ears! The clear mirror had caught its own image clearly in the flawed ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... of fears; I am weary of my life; and I must speak. What unknown misery do you threaten me with? What are your secrets? Ay, I must know them!" And in my turn, I seized his arm, and pushing away the hair from my forehead, I looked him full in the face. "Why am I to avoid the Tracys? Why do vulgar ruffians use your name to terrify me into a marriage with you? Why am I now to be forced into a secret marriage, and at a day's notice? and if your ungovernable passions are not instantly gratified, why are you to plunge into guilt ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... foreseen the collapse of the Athenian empire, and then he and many other adventurous spirits found themselves in a society faded in prosperity, with no scope for energy or enterprise. Such was the somewhat tame and vulgar Athens which succeeded to that of Pericles and Aristophanes, and which could not tolerate the spiritual boldness of Socrates. He tells us himself, in the third book of his "Anabasis," how he was tempted to leave Athens for the East by his friend ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... strange, vexing spasm, that subsided almost immediately. For the most part, McTeague enjoyed the pleasure of these sittings with Trina with a certain strong calmness, blindly happy that she was there. This poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance, his first idyl. It was delightful. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... haue imployment equall to their power and expedition, whereby what notable benefites would growe to her Maiestie, the state, and communaltie, I refer to your perfect iudgementes. And for that I am desirous to auoyde the contradiction of vulgar conceipts, I haue thought it my best course, before I make profe of the certaintie of this discouerie, to lay downe whatsoeuer may against the same be obiected, and in the ouerthrowe of those conceipted hinderances the safenes of the passage shall most manifestly ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... will come into habitual contact with men of every grade, make special associates only of those whose influence on your character is felt to be good. Some men love to tell extravagant stories, to indulge in vulgar wit, to exult in a swaggering carriage, to pride themselves on their coarse manners, to boast of their heroism, and to give utterance to feelings of revenge against the enemy. All this is injurious to young and impressible minds. If you admire such things, you will insensibly imitate ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... big, vulgar barber poles, you know; not over four feet long and about as many inches thick. But it's a brilliant one, and with Barry in evenin' dress he's bound to be some conspicuous luggin' it. Yet I starts him straight up Broadway, me trailin' 25 or 30 ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... Larry's sensitive nerves when at such close quarters; that desperation combined with natural inclination will drive him to flirt with Idonia Goodrich, who will enthusiastically respond; that Mrs. Shuster's mortification may drive her to such vulgar vengeance as will disgust Larry beyond repair; that the lion may not be too moth-eaten to seize his chance and the lady, and that Pat may then scramble down ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... to the vulgar report of the old king's assassination by his brother, but leaves us in the dark in regard to his own opinion of its credibility. "Algunos dicen que le procuro la muerte su hermano el Rey Zagal; pero Dios lo sabe, que es el unico eterno ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... here, deep on their bosoms, are engrav'd The marks of honour! 'twas thro' here their souls Flew to their blissful seats. Oh! why did I Survive the fatal day? To be this slave, To be the gaze and sport of vulgar crouds, Thus, like a shackl'd tyger, stalk my round, And grimly low'r upon the shouting herd. ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... is death, it is the necessarie object of our aime: if it affright us, how is it possible we should step one foot further without an ague? The remedie of the vulgar sort is, not to think on it. But from what brutall stupiditie may so grosse a blindnesse come upon him? he must be made to bridle ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... likely to be misled by their own fancied accomplishments, and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition; by their vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar; and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... as a dull boy. After he had struggled into a place as page, he had been bullied by footmen and had had his ears boxed by cooks and butlers. Ladies'- maids and smart housemaids had sneered at him, and made him feel himself a hopeless, vulgar little worm who never would "get on." But he had got on, in a measure, because he had worked like a slave and openly resented nothing. A place like this had been his fevered hope and dream from his page days, though of course his imagination had not encompassed attendance ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... much concerned. "You must be in a devil of a state!" said he; "though of course it was my fault—damnably silly, vulgar sort of thing to do! A thousand apologies! But you really must be run down; you should consult a medico. My dear sir, a hair of the dog that bit you is clearly indicated. A touch of Blue Ruin, now? Or, come: it's early, but is man the slave of hours? what ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
