"Formal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... apostle—passing as it were by its front door—should have given the go-bye to a region so important as the Munster Decies. Perhaps he sent preachers into it; perhaps there was no special necessity for a formal mission, as the faith had already found entrance. It is a little noteworthy too that we do not find St. Patrick's name surviving in any ecclesiastical connection with the Decies, if we except Patrick's Well, near Clonmel, and this Well is within a mile or so of the territorial frontier. ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... know who it was and what was the occasion of it (it being then about eleven o'clock). Mrs. Hayes answered that it was her husband, who was going a journey into the country, and pretended to take a formal leave of him, expressing her sorrow that he was obliged to go out of town at that time of night, and her fear least any accident should attend him in ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... buy them there at home just the same, sir, if you like,' he answered, for the first time using the formal 'sir' in addressing me. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... and he were growing almost formal towards each other. She had lost her taste for being read to in the evenings and had developed a habit of pleading a headache and going early to bed. Sometimes, catching her eye when she was not expecting it, he surprised ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... does not make men more humane than they would be without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that the spirit of the pilgrim fathers, which had oscillated to the other extreme, and had again crystallized into a formal antinomian fanaticism, reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full without exception of large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... no mistake about the situation; still harping on the Irish Land Bill; but, thank a merciful Providence, this is the last night. JOHN MORLEY, who never shrinks from call of duty, rises, and makes one of those formal, official, somewhat tiresome protests, recapitulating objections which everyone only too familiar with through this gruesome spring and saddened summer. Then SAGE OF QUEEN ANNE'S GATE cracks a few jokes; MORTON appears on scene; attempt made to Count Out; talk kept ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... was as far removed from her old-time people and society as an inhabitant of Saturn, or an angel. She accepted him under her excitement, as she would have accepted them. No waiting for an introduction, no formal getting-acquainted talk, no reserve. She looked into the devoted, interested eyes above her, and ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... and a march past on the Fox Hills was organized for his benefit. The balloon detachment was ordered to take part in it. Balloons, being an unrecognized part of the army, were not hampered by any of those regulations which prescribe the etiquette to be observed on formal occasions. Lieutenant Ward, who was in command of the detachment, resolved that he would march past in the air, at an altitude of about three hundred feet, in a balloon attached to the balloon wagon. The weather was fine and calm, and the balloon sailed by in state, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... against Serbia, July 28, 1914. During the few days intervening between the dispatch of the ultimatum to Serbia and the formal declaration of war, Serbia and Russia, seeing the inevitable, had commenced to mobilize their armies. On the last day of July, Germany as Austria's ally, issued an ultimatum with a twelve hour limit demanding that Russia cease mobilization. They were fond of short term ultimatums. ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... Graves, refolding the will, "is purely formal. It is dated May 15th, three years ago. Your brother, Captain Warren, evidently realized, although no one else seems to have done so, the precarious state of his health, and prepared, as every careful person should, for ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... taste in which they are disposed, are advantageously seen in a bird's-eye view as in the Engraving, which represents the tortuous beauty of the parterres, and the pools, fountains, and statues with characteristic accuracy. The formal avenues, radiating as it were, from the gardens or centre, are likewise distinctly shown, as is also the canal formed by Wolsey through the middle avenue. The intervening space, then a parklike waste, is now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... detention at the wharf, until after dark, I received my first impressions of the city in walking down to the Custom-house on the morning after our arrival, which was Sunday. I am afraid to say, by the way, how many offers of pews and seats in church for that morning were made to us, by formal note of invitation, before we had half finished our first dinner in America, but if I may be allowed to make a moderate guess, without going into nicer calculation, I should say that at least as many sittings were proffered us, as would have ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... whether Mr. Gryce had thought it best to put a watch over my movements, but taking it for granted that it would be like him to do so, I made a couple of formal calls on the avenue before I started eastward. I had learned Mrs. Boppert's address before leaving home, but I did not ride directly to the tenement where she lived. I chose, instead, to get out at a little fancy store I saw in ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... minds, temporarily at least, of preconceived ideas of formal church organization and earnestly seek to understand the real signification of that church of which Christ was himself personally the founder. A few texts make this point clear: "And hath put all things under his [Christ's] feet, and given him to be the head over ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... primitive arrangements of the background provided for the play called for a girl to stand behind each tree in the formal garden scene as support. In her admiration of Betty, Bobby had unconsciously edged after her to keep her in sight, and the startled audience saw the heroine being persistently pursued by a pretty boxwood tree. Bobby was recalled to herself, the tree became rooted in its place, ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... this document at Simancas Seville, or Rome. For the bulls of May 3 and 4 our translation is made from the Latin text given in Heywood's Documenta selecta et tabulario secreto Vaticano (Roma, 1893), pp.14-26; that contains also photographic facsimiles of the original bulls. Certain formal ecclesiastical phrases which Heywood only indicates by "etc." have been, for the sake of completeness, translated in full in the first bull. The bulls are also published in Raynaldi's Annales ecclesiastici (Lucae, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... ascribed the disasters of Prussia. Since then, Frederick William, like Alexander, was a daily guest at Napoleon's table, but he sat there in silence, sad, and absorbed in his reflections, taking but little part in the conversation, and, when he did so, assuming a cold, formal manner, while Alexander and ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... artillery, he resorted to an ingenious stratagem to capture the post without sacrificing his own men. Accordingly he mounted a pine log, fashioned as a cannon, elevated on its own limbs, and placed it in position to command the houses in which the Tories were lodged. Colonel Washington then made a formal demand for immediate surrender. Colonel Rugeley fearing the destructive consequences of the formidable cannon bearing upon his command in the log barn and dwelling house, after a stipulation as to terms, ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... any of the Christian or the Mohammedan denominations in the sense that it opposes the acceptance of the petrified idea of Deity, so conventional and formal that it carries no inner conviction of the believers. Faith dies out whenever one comes to stick to one's fixed and immutable idea of Deity, and to deceive oneself, taking bigotry for genuine faith. Faith must be living and growing, and the living and growing faith should assume ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... this we rashly judge that what they express is all there is of them. We have never considered the difficulty of transferring all the utterances of humanity from their first and native mediums to foreign ones. It is easy to learn the daily wants of life or the formal details of business in a new language. Here words have a uniform sense. But the nice shades and turns of thought which appear in the happiest and most delicate jets of wit and humor, and which form the great staples of pleasant social intercourse, depend upon ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... committee of arrangements for the meet to be held at Eagle Park, where I understand you are going to contest. I came to see how near you were ready, and to get you to make a formal entry of your machine. Mr. Gunmore ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... occasion to give him the book, Hobson," he said, as the constable was about to hand the Testament to one of the fishermen. "This is a private investigation, not a formal magisterial sitting, and there is no occasion, at this stage, to take any ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... appears in time, the only reason for the marriage is at an end. We shall be as good friends as ever; without the encumbrance of a formal tie to bind us. ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... of the Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which pervade ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he had ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... brief hot weather creeps on. Stables follow for the cavalry, and work in the lines for the infantry. Next comes orderly-room for the adjutants and others; and twice a week durbar. The durbar in an Indian regiment takes the place of the formal orderly-room of a British regiment. It is held in the open, under the trees, or at any convenient spot; and the underlying principle is that any man in the regiment may be present to hear, and, when called ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... ladies were ready enough to talk, and Mr. Collins seemed neither in need of encouragement, nor inclined to be silent himself. He was a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal. He had not been long seated before he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of daughters; said he had heard much of their beauty, but that in this instance fame had fallen short of the truth; and added, that he did not doubt her seeing them all in due time ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... we need not be much disturbed by our apparent differences and misunderstandings. After all, they are the necessary result of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral and intellectual freedom? We want no formal and artificial unity: to us change, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life. Just as the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prized before all things their political and intellectual independence, so is ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... suddenly recovered from his liquor. The blustering chatter had been cut off as soon as they started up the stairs. Since then the little man had spoken not one word. Of the unsteadiness, the blinking, the rocking to and fro, nothing remained. He had marched to his place with a formal precision. There was the same manner, a correctness exact and staccato, about ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... the cheque for the increased amount, and tried to compose a civil note to inform her that the time for the usual rise had arrived. To begin with, he did not know how to address her. 'Dear Madam' sounded too formal, and he did not dare to say 'Dear Miss Wharton.' So he pushed the cheque on one side, and began opening his letters ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... a shrug of his shoulders. Fortunately, Mrs. Kimball appeared at this moment and they motored to the Plaza for luncheon, which was a somewhat formal and unsatisfactory affair, in spite of all his efforts to make it otherwise. The young man could not but feel that Mrs. Kimball shared her daughter's views—was, in fact, their author—and that in the eyes of his future mother-in-law ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... questions of comparative mythology. We must keep to criticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... democratic State-rights men. Democracy was State rights, and State rights was democracy, and it is so to-day. Your resolutions breathe it. The Declaration of Independence embodied the sentiments which had lived in the hearts of the country for many years before its formal assertion. Our fathers asserted the great principle—the right of the people to choose their own government—and that government rested upon the consent of the governed. In every form of expression it uttered ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... Clay Manor, a good, old, formal family, were mounting the stairs in solemn procession—they were always among the early arrivals—they heard a piano and a tenor ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Connaught, and the result was, that he found the potato crop affected in localities where people thought the blight had not reached. Mr. Buller's was a private letter to the Premier in anticipation of a more formal report from the Society, because, as he says, he "did not wish a moment to elapse" before informing him of the extent of the fearful malady, in order that no time should be lost, in adopting the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... days he had been merely formal in this cult of the person. Piety was appeased with external rites and symbols, with changes of vestment, excessive lustrations, and the like. Now he had grown earnest, uncompromising, in his religion; and consistency entailed a further step. Clearly his person, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... 1264.—The king of France Louis IX., afterwards known as St. Louis, was the justest and most unselfish of men. In 1259 he had surrendered to Henry a considerable amount of territory in France, which Henry had been unable to reconquer for himself; and was well satisfied to obtain from Henry in return a formal renunciation of the remainder of the lands which Philip II. had taken from John. Yet, well-intentioned as Louis was, he had no knowledge of England, and in France, where the feudal nobility was ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... didn't you think of it sooner?" Then without asking for any affirmation or confirmation of his promise, you will embrace him joyfully and take him back at once to his own room, considering this agreement as sacred as if he had confirmed it by a formal oath. What idea do you think he will form from these proceedings, as to the fulfilment of a promise and its usefulness? If I am not greatly mistaken, there is not a child upon earth, unless he is utterly spoilt already, who could resist this treatment, or one who would ever dream ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... happiness was a part of himself, as fragrance is inherent in the summer time. The evil of the last days had fallen from him, and the reaction was equivalently violent. Nor was he conscious of the formal resignation he was now making of his dream, nor did he think of the distasteful load of marital duties with which he was going to burden himself; all was lost in the vision of beautiful companionship, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... The formal introduction to each other of the (till then) personally unacquainted uncle and nephew; the full developing to the astonished mother and son of the fact, already inferred from what they had just witnessed, that this, their eccentric kinsman, was no other than the foster-father ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... people in the same simple spirit. With one and all she was at home, for all were to her, by no merely formal phrase, "dearest brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus." One knows not whether to be more struck by the outspoken fearlessness of the woman or by her great adaptability. She could handle with plain directness ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... took his bag, placed him in the back seat, and spread a duster for him. They turned through a pillared gateway, Renaissance style, passed a gardener's lodge, with hothouses flashing in the reclining sun, and fled noiselessly along the macadam road that twined through a formal grove. All at once they were before the house, red brick and marble, with wide-flung porte-cochere and verandas, beyond which could be seen immaculate lawns, and in the middle distances the sluggish gray of ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... With rods, and as the cruel deed was done, Perpetua stood white with quivering lips, And her eyes filled with tears. While yet his cries Were mingling with the curses of the crowd, Hilarianus, calling name by name, Gave sentence, and in cold and formal phrase Condemned us to the beasts, and we returned Rejoicing to our prison. Then we wished Our martyrdom could soon have followed, not As doubting for our constancy, but some Grew sick under the anxious long suspense. Perpetua again was weighed upon By grief and ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... formal call was made on the factor, Mr. Bell, by the professor, armed with a letter of introduction from the head of the company in London, and escorted by three or four of the party. A rather gruff reception, ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... the matter to him; for he never dreamt that her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone, that to get him from the mouth of her antagonist she literally took him out to dance country dances last night at a formal ball, where there was no measure kept in laughing at her old, foul, tawdry, painted, plastered personage. She played at pharaoh two or three times at Princess Craon's, where she cheats horse and foot. She is really entertaining: I have been reading her works, which she ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... then, to present in full summary these views, is thus built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is born the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this order be conceived as known in its principles ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... "After Captain Hobson took formal possession, and became governor, nine colonies were founded at various times between 1840 and 1862, in the most favorable situations. These formed the nucleus of nine provinces, four in the North Island and five in the southern island, with a total population ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... claim to be a history of pre-Conquest Literature. It is an attempt to increase the interest which Catholics may well feel in this part of the great 'inheritance of their fathers.' It is not meant to be a formal course of reading, but a sort of talk, as it were, about beautiful things said and sung in old days: things which to have learned to love is to have incurred a great and living debt. I have tried to clothe some ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... patient; for I will not let him stir Till I have used the approved means I have, With wholesome syrups, drugs and holy prayers, To make of him a formal man again: 105 It is a branch and parcel of mine oath, A charitable duty of my order. Therefore depart, and leave ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... reduce the whole of Human life to one element alone, to reconstruct all history on the basis of Economics, as already said, ignores the fact that every concrete reality must have a material and a formal side,—that is, it must have at least two ultimate elements—all reality as opposed to abstraction consisting in a synthesis. The attempt to evolve the many-sidedness of Human life out of one of its factors, no matter how important that factor may be, reminds one of the attempts ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... general use. In October, 1645, the King of Poland sent a magnificent embassy, with an escort of four hundred cavaliers, to Paris to demand in marriage the hand of Marie-Louise de Gonzague, daughter of Charles I, Duke of Mantua, and Catherine de Lorraine; a formal entry into the city was arranged, and the Parisians were much impressed with the grand costumes of the Polish nobility,—"their stuffs were embossed with gold and silver, and precious stones glittered from every portion of their adornment, whilst the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... Talbot," he continued, with his charming smile and a manner as free from perplexity as if he was announcing a formal visit to his grandmother. "I have just decided to go to Paris at once. The train leaves Victoria at 8.15. Lord Fairholme will take you home, and you will both, I am sure, be able to convince Sir Hubert that to yield too greatly to anxiety just now ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... did not even know her name. Well, that was of no moment; Dawson was a small place, and—Saturday was not far off. He had heard about those official parties at the Barracks and he made up his mind to secure an invitation sufficiently formal to permit him to attend ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... who becomes a specialist on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it into the think works ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... arrival of Mr Franklin, it was evident that this Court, while it treated us privately with all civility, was cautious of giving umbrage to England, and was therefore desirous of avoiding an open reception and acknowledgment of us, or entering into any formal negotiation with us, as ministers from the Congress. To make us easy, however, we were told that the ports of France were open to our ships as friends, that our people might freely purchase and export, as merchandise, whatever our ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... theologians. They were trained dialecticians. They were noted for their controversial powers, for their constant appeal to definition, for the mechanical precision of their arguments. These mental qualities, excellent in themselves, do not conduce to sound theology. Formal logic effects clarity of thought often at the expense of depth. It treats thoughts as things. Procedure, that is proper in the sphere of logic, is out of place in psychology and theology. Concepts such as person and nature must be kept fluid, ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... with the bright promise of Spring. A few weeks more, and its formal walks would wend a riot of flowers. Now its sunlight made amends for what it lacked in beauty of growing things; and its air was warm and fragrant and still in the shelter ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... in front, it is rather too much shut in. These defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the Archeveche, which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual formal alleys of the jardin francais. I must add that I appreciated these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... overhanging balconies, till we reached a tea-house, kept by a closely shaven bonze, or priest. He seemed very pleased to see us, and bowed and shook hands over and over again. He placed his whole house at our disposal, and a very clean, pretty, and well-arranged house it was, with a lovely little formal garden, ornamented with mimic temples and bridges of ice, fashioned by the hard frost, with but little assistance from the hand of man. Bits of wood and stone, a few graceful fern-leaves and sprays of bamboo, and a trickling stream of water produced the most ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... yellow silk cushions softened the formal angularity of the wide cane-seated couch and low, square chairs. There was a deep crystal bowl of midsummer flowering roses on the table, laden with books, by which Claire often sat long hours reading poetry and volumes written by modern poets and authors of whom her husband ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for some reason returned no answer to either application, but left for Paris, where he stayed six weeks, returning to find another letter from Chatterton written with considerable dignity and restraint—a last formal demand to have his manuscript returned. Whereupon, amazed at the boy's 'singular impertinence,' the great man snapped up both letters and poems and returned them in a blank cover—that is to say without a word of apology or explanation. He might ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... one group arrived at His throne from separate places, but linked together by their contradictions. He heard the limping effort to be formal as before a king or a court of justice. He heard the anxious fear break through the petition; He heard the selfish eagerness trembling in the pious phrases ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... combined this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma. He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated with the military firmness of a Napoleon. It was he who established the censure of the press, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... ideas to artists, when they see them curious and docile, if they are treated with that respect and deference which is so justly their due. Into such society, young artists, if they make it the point of their ambition, will by degrees be admitted. There, without formal teaching, they will insensibly come to feel and reason like those they live with, and find a rational and systematic taste imperceptibly formed in their minds, which they will know how to reduce to a standard, by applying general truth to their own purposes, better perhaps than those to whom ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... lost—the remainder of the pleasing duty it had been predestined I was to have the honour to perform, we glided through couples darting in various directions for similar objects, until, finding ourselves in a formal procession sufficiently near to the lady in question, we proceeded, at a funereal pace, towards our doom, which proved to be a most delightful one. Seated in obedience to the orders I had received, we found ourselves exactly opposite "le Prince," who had, of course, on his right ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... platform opens, and a thin gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with velvet collar, walking, too with a slight stoop, goes up to the desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white waistcoats.... 'Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow—that is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,' said a young ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... at half-past twelve o'clock, as the friend of the family; but for his supper he paid, as did the other guests. I rather fancy that on week days he had no particular dinner; and indeed there was no such formal meal given in the house of Michel Voss on week days. There was something put on the table about noon in the little room between the kitchen and the public window; but except on Sundays it could hardly be called a dinner. On Sundays a real dinner was served in the room up-stairs, with soup, ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... which took place in Parliament, demonstrating the necessity of some change—the moderation and caution of the one proposed—several undoubted and very great improvements in details, and, above all, a formal recognition of the principle of agricultural protection, still further allayed the fears of the most timorous. To us it appears, that the simple principle of a scale of duties, adapted to admit foreign corn when we want ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... along somehow, my angel, to your prayers, and so on. Sit down, please do.... Now, you know, you shouldn't forget all about your neighbours, my darling. My dear fellow, why are you so formal in your get-up? Evening dress, gloves, and so on. Can you be going ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... soldier's? If a new poem were published, what renown like the poet's? He began works in literature, which promised great excellence, to throw them aside in disgust. All at once he abandoned the decorous and formal society he had courted; he joined himself, with young and riotous associates; he plunged into the wildest excesses of the great city, where Gold reigns alike over Toil and Pleasure. Through all he carried with him a certain power and heat of soul. In all society he aspired to command,—in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... by Mahayanist Sutras such as the Lotus and the Happy Land, which are however of respectable antiquity. As in India, each sect selects rather arbitrarily a few books for its own use, without condemning others but also without according to them the formal recognition received by the Old and New Testaments ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was authorized by the law to assign the defaulter as a bonds man to his creditor—that is, the debtor was obliged to pay by his own labor the debt which he was unable to pay in money. Or if a man incurred a debt without such formal contract, the rule was still more imperious, for in that case the law itself fixed the day of payment; and if after a lapse of thirty days from that date the debt was not discharged, the creditor was empowered to arrest the person of his debtor, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... cut a Royal Highness's first tooth, and broken him of sucking his thumb, and held a cold buttered knife against his bruises to prevent their discoloring, one does get out of the way of being very formal ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Lepidus, who had already raised up war in great part of Italy, and held Cisalpine Gaul in subjection with an army under Brutus. As for the rest of his garrisons, Pompey subdued them with ease in his march, but Mutina in Gaul resisted in a formal siege, and he lay here a long time encamped against Brutus. In the meantime Lepidus marched in all haste against Rome, and sitting down before it with a crowd of followers, to the terror of those within, demanded a second consulship. But that fear quickly ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... are a peculiar people. They wish to refer everything to ultimate philosophical causes; hence the fruitless debates of the Frankfort Convention, in which all manner of prospective Constitutions were tried by the formal rules of philosophy and ethics. Such questions as "What is a Federal state?" were angrily debated, and the changes rung ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... uncle passed into the next chamber to consult. They stayed there closeted about an hour; at the end of which period they had come to a good understanding, and my uncle and I set our hands to the agreement in a formal manner. By the terms of this, my uncle bound himself to satisfy Rankeillor as to his intromissions, and to pay me two clear thirds of the yearly income ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Thorn"—he began, and stopped. In America it is more formal to begin without the preliminary "my;" in England the "my" is indispensable, unless people are on familiar terms. John knew this, and reflected that Joe was English. While he was reflecting his ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... room! I, Protazy Baltazar Brzechalski, known under two titles, once General of the Tribunal, commonly called Apparitor, hereby make my apparitor's report and formal declaration—claiming as witnesses all free-born persons here present and summoning the Assessor to investigate the case in behalf of His Honour Judge Soplica—as to an incursion, that is to say, an infringement of the frontier, a violent ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... from Harriet, again forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter, and concluding with formal condolences. It nearly drove ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room into which we were shown was that ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... left, a distinguished Dean of the Thistle, gave me a few moments' discomfort by telling me that the old custom of 'rounds' of toasts still prevailed at Lady Baird's on formal occasions, and that before the ladies retired every one would be called upon for ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he used this formal term when excited, "it is the most marvellous Cypripedium in the whole earth, and, sir, I have discovered it. A healthy root of that plant ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... to the Royal Charles Hostel at Worcester. He slept not at all that night, and next morning was early at the court, for Tryst's case would be the first. Anxiously he sat watching all the queer and formal happenings that mark the initiation of the higher justice—the assemblage of the gentlemen in wigs; the sifting, shifting, settling of clerks, and ushers, solicitors, and the public; the busy indifference, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gayly enough for Adelaide Howard Hyde when she made her bridal tour to her new home; and cold as she found the aspect of that house, with its formal mahogany chairs, high-backed, and carved in grim festoons and ovals of incessant repetition,—its penitential couch of a sofa, where only the iron spine of a Revolutionary heroine could have found rest,—its pinched, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... also had enabled men to get to know chaplains. Large numbers of men in ordinary life are very seldom brought into contact with religion. They have the crude notion of it which they carried away as unfledged boys from Sunday School, and a sort of formal bowing acquaintance through the conventions of later life. In the war, when their minds and affections were put to a severe strain, it was a revelation to them to find that there were principles and relationships of divine origin which enabled the ordinary human will easily ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... Bishop Grandisson, quoted by Dr. Oliver in his Monasticon Diæcesis Exoniensis (p. 11), which, in an account of the submission of the parish of St. Buryan to the bishop, after a certain quarrel between them, states that a formal submission was made by the principal parishioners in French and English (the names are given, thirteen in number), and by the rest in Cornish, interpreted by Henry Marseley, the rector of St. Just, and that after this the bishop preached a sermon, which was ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... of this matter, which was soon involved in another and greater controversy between the Crown and the Church, was that the Popish lords, after a formal submission to the Courts of the Church, were absolved from their excommunication and restored to their former positions. No one believed that there was any sincerity in the transaction either on the part of Huntly and his friends, or of the King and ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead; those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... left, the chief promised to let Tom know the result of the formal report as soon ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... hypothesis that memory has for its mechanism special vibrations of the protoplasm, and the acquired capacity to respond to such vibrations once felt upon their repetition. I do not think that the theory gains anything by the introduction of this even as a mere formal hypothesis; and there is no evidence for its being anything more. Butler, however, gives it a warm, nay, enthusiastic, reception in Chapter V (Introduction to Professor Hering's lecture), and in his notes to the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... formal and politely brief. He brought with him the amusing interpreter to inquire if the Spirit had found comfort in the hospitality of his people, and more particularly if the war dance of the preceding night ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... if your road lies that way; but don't let us make formal engagements. I love to think that I am drifting at will through this land of gardens and apple blossom. And, just think of it—three cathedrals in one day—a Minster for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with Tintern Abbey ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... wandering about, and particularly when they got localized in England—where before they had been but a roaming people on account of their struggles with the Britons—the necessity of greater organization probably became obvious to them at once, and the Witenagemot readily assumed a somewhat more formal form; and that resulted in representation. For we are talking of early England; that is, of the eastern half of what is now England, the Saxon part; obviously you couldn't put all the members even of East Anglia in one hall or in one field to discuss laws, so they invented representation. All ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Lebanon; they had expected his challenge and warning in the vernacular; but here was something which struck them with consternation —first, the giant of Manitou in the post of command, looking like some berserker; and then the formal reading of that stately document in the name of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... expedients. Unless the men were hopelessly lost they should be able to follow our trail. They might be almost anywhere out in that awful scrub. The only course open to them would be to climb thorn trees for the night. Next day we would organize a formal search for them. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... just going away after thanking both her teachers in a quaint, formal manner, when ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... too readily believed that this wrong was formal, not real. But the price laid down in certain countries for getting a dispensation, exceeded the means of almost every peasant. In Scotland, for instance, the demand was for "several cows:" a price immense, impossible. So the poor young wife was at their mercy. Besides, the Courts of Bearn ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... degrees into affection. Helene, who, though she did not consider Edward faultless, was apt to find his faults more alluring than the virtues of some others, had at last the satisfaction of knowing that her mother inclined to take a like view of them; and her now impatient lover was made glad by a formal acceptance from Madame DeBerczy of his ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... love you, Monsieur," and she gave the appellation its most formal sound. "And soon I shall begin to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas |
