"Gentility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... generations the Opp family had been a source of mystery and romance to the Cove. It stood apart, like the house that held it, poor and shabby, but bearing a baffling atmosphere of gentility, of superiority, and ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... minds in all useful knowledge; to render them obedient to their superiors, and gentle, kind, and affectionate to each other; yet did she not omit teaching them an exact neatness in their persons and dress, and a perfect gentility in their whole carriage. ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... supply you with candidates for employment at a cheaper rate than you can obtain the services of a first-class cook. This young man had tried everything that was genteel: he had even aspired to literature: sought employment on the Press, on the Stage, everywhere in fact where gentility seemed to reign. Nor do I think he lacked ability for any of these walks; it was not ability but opportunity that ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... initiative. She still endeavoured to respect the understanding of a girl of whom she had heard that when her father's fortunes were at a low ebb she had retrieved them by good management and personal industry—a girl, too, who through years of toil had preserved sprightliness and perfect gentility. What though this gentility was somewhat cramped by that undue importance given to trifles which is often the result of a remote life; it was still a very lovely thing, a jewel shining all the more purely for its iron setting of honest labour. Sophia fought with the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... recent creation in life, as in letters. Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses. Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but, rather, appropriative, giving a varied placing to images ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... them in Scotland until after the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence. From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire. Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar. I remember going ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... restlessness, superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... him. I had encountered a friend in that overgrown city; I saw a familiar face the first for many months. Without CALCULATING whether he could be of service to me, or whether it was proper to appear before him in apparel more remarkable for its antiquity and simplicity than its gentility, I obeyed the dictates of an honest heart, rushed towards him, and grasped his hand. Perceiving his astonishment, and that he was about to reprove my unauthorized familiarity, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... supplied all her guests with tea and coffee, while Monsieur Philomene went round with the cakes and bread and butter. Madame Desjardins spread her pocket-handkerchief on her lap—a pocket-handkerchief the size of a small table-cloth. Madame de Montparnasse, more mindful of her gentility, removed to a corner of the tea-table, and ate her bread and butter in her black ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... infinitely varied. Sometimes a single felicitous touch brings out the whole type and character, as when the modern author Leonard Merrick hints at shabby gentility by mentioning the combination of a frock coat with the trousers of a tweed suit. Suggestion is very powerful in this field, especially when mental qualities are to be delineated. Treatment should vary with the author's object; whether ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... elements of power which oligarchies possess. The slaveholding education gives elements of control, the bearing and habit of command, and the assertion of superiority. This exercises its influence over weak minds. People doubtful of their own gentility bow to the established aristocracy of slavery. The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me—how long ago it was!—to see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping the new play to success. You ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... attach overmuch importance to the gentility of their Boy's avocation; to fathers who think that because the bank is rich its employes must necessarily become so in time; to friends who criticize the bankclerks of their acquaintance for not settling down—this story ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... distinctions which she would draw between best and second-best, and every-day; to receive her somewhat prolix admonition how he was to demean himself in respect of the wearing of each one; for Miss Emily Sewell was a gentlewoman, and held rigidly to various traditions of gentility which had been handed down in the Sewell family, and which afforded her brother too much quiet amusement to be disturbed. He would not have overthrown one of her quiddities for the world; it would be taking away a part ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... became very monotonous. It is on a higher level, and though tolerably fertile, is deficient in verdure, the olive being almost the only tree met with. Lambesc, like Orgon, which it much exceeds in size, has an air of faded gentility and desertion, and its fine public fountains tell a tale of better days. In this town the states of Provence were convened annually in the reign of Louis XIV.; and it possessed also many of the privileges of a capital in the days of the ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... ordinarily bestowed on them, is required. Foremost in consideration must be the subject of cleanliness. Dirty and coarse hands are no less marks of slothfulness and lowbreeding than clean and delicate hands are of refinement and gentility. To promote softness and whiteness of the skin, mild emollient soaps, or those abounding in oil or fat, should alone be adopted for common use; by which means the tendency to contract chaps and chilblains, and roughness ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... appearances than by their intrinsic worth. Their education is conducted mainly with the view of pleasing and attracting the admiration of others, rather than of improving and developing their qualities of mind and heart. They are imbued with notions of exclusiveness, fashion, and gentility. A respectable position in society is held up to them as the mark to be aimed at. To be criminal or vicious is virtually represented to them as far less horrible than to be "vulgar." Immured within the bastile of exclusivism, woman is held ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... sisters-in-law. Neither struck her fancy particularly, perhaps because there was nothing particular to strike it. The Misses Harper were, like most female branches of "county families," vegetating on their estates from generation to generation in uninterrupted gentility and uniformity. Of the two, Agatha liked Mary best; for there was great goodnature shining through her fearless plainness—a sort of placid acknowledgment of the fact that she was born for usefulness, not ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... purifications of women, and such other meetings, where 'it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent'. But, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived at home 'with hard and pinching diet'. Wheaten bread was at this time a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer's loaf, according to Tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature—or I thought so—to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood,—from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... people, I cannot tell, but great feet had been the fashion there time immemorial, and the higher the family the larger were they. It was, therefore, the aim of everybody above the degree of shepherds, and such-like rustics, to swell out and enlarge their feet by way of gentility; and so successful were they in these undertakings that, on a pinch, respectable people's slippers ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... a feeling which pervades the popular mind in the metropolis on the subject of the duty which respectable people owe to respectability. It is impossible for a housekeeper in a neighbourhood having any claims to gentility, to escape the recognition of this feeling in the lower class of industrials. If you have a broken window in the front of your house, the travelling glazier thinks, to use his own expression, that you have a right to have it repaired, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... it in opulence. All honest, jog-trot men, who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and politics, and are praised: men, sir, who, had they been bred cobblers, would all their lives only have mended shoes, but never made them." "Finding" (says George) "that there is no great degree of gentility affixed to the character of an usher, I resolved to accept his proposal; and having the highest respect for literature, hailed the antiqua mater of Grub Street with reverence. I thought it my glory to pursue a track which Dryden and Otway trod before me. Alas, Dryden struggled with indigence ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... husband you were. No! I can't forget how my mother lived and died. You call it nonsense. Well, I call it something else. You took a most effective way to punish my poor mother for having the temerity to marry an English gentleman. Thank God, I have my mother to look back to for my own ideas of gentility." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... see, is unabating. A new generation of little maidens is springing up around us, are they, too, destined to follow the beaten track their elders have trodden so unworthily? Will they be taught these nice discriminations between wealth and no wealth? Must they, too, meet a struggling gentility with a haughty, overbearing carriage, and elbow out less independent aspirants, whom some capricious fortune has brought within their contact? Does one little star in the vault above shine less brightly or twinkle less gladly because myriads of others ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wrapped up between the broad-gauge and the narrow-gauge, like a hare in a bottle-spit. The opening of the line to Rugby affords a new short way to London. The population will henceforward increase at the expense of its gentility, but the police and sanitary arrangements before alluded to, will always make Leamington a favourite with invalids, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... not tell me that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have caused you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... bewildering dream. As the great floating palace, all aglitter and aglow with splendors of paint and upholstery hitherto unknown, swung from her moorings out into the stream, Dan quite forgot the gentility of his surroundings and the elegant Dud Fielding at his elbow, and waved his hat with a wild "Hurrah" to half a dozen Wharf Rats who were fishing off ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... remained. It was tied with pink packthread instead of ribbon. Cannie undid the string. It was a book, not new, bound in faded brown; and the title printed on the back was "The Ladies' Manual of Perfect Gentility." ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... looked like a cheap swell. In his dress he caricatured the fashion, and exhibited a sort of pretentious gentility which betrayed his innate vulgarity. He stared in wonder when a boy with a bundle under his arm started from his seat, and hurried toward him with the greeting: "How ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... with flying streamers, was sitting by the fireside spinning. She had heard the news of Pete as Philip passed through to Sulby, and was now wondering if it was not her duty to acquaint Uncle Peter. The sweet and natty old gentlewoman, brought up in the odour of gentility, was thinking on the lines of poor Bridget, Black Tom when dying under the bare scraas, that a man's son was his son in ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... are unbearable in the impertinent equality with which they treat people. For, in short, there ought to be a certain subordination in things; and what puts me out of all patience is that a town upstart, whether with two days' gentility to boast of or with two hundred years', should have impudence enough to say that he is as much of a gentleman as my late husband, who lived in the country, kept a pack of hounds, and took the title of Count in all the deeds that ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an appendix containing an apologia for Lavengro, a great deal more polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In the first place, it was ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... of the men and women can be studied in intermittent flashes as they pass under the strong glare of the lights. The utter absence of men and women of gentility makes the procession seem like the invasion of the Huns into the Empire. Among the thousands there are descendants of those very men who made the legions of Rome flee in terror. The torch of progress is again in the hands of the uncultured, and as history proves the race is ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... book. As I read his article in THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh. But he is writing for Catholics and Established Church people, and high-toned, antiquated, conservative gentility, whom it is a delight to him to help you shock, while he pretends to shake his head with owlish density. He is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lamp-post before the door, so he knew the house from its neighbours. Baker's Terrace as a whole was a defeated aspiration after gentility. The more auspicious houses were marked by white stones, the steps being scrubbed and hearthstoned almost daily; the gloomier doorsteps were black, except on Sundays. Thus variety was achieved by houses otherwise as monotonous and prosaic as ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... democratic villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege—even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... dense, fragrant orange-groves and rich, fruitful vineyards. A ride of twenty-five miles brought us to Los Angeles, a town with the same beautiful surroundings. It was, at that time, a quaint, old, dilapidated Spanish place, with an air of shabby gentility, but the subsequent tide of immigration and trade has doubtless transformed it. We returned to the coast and took the steamer to San Diego, which, with its arid, sandy waste, has little to recommend it to the visitor, save ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... yet it was as good a career as he could enter upon. The merchant service is not so genteel as the navy, to be sure, but, then, it is really more promising, in a lucrative point of view, and a young man of no family need not mind about the gentility." ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... through the knot-holes in the fence, and over the top of it when they could get there, which wasn't an easy thing to do, as the fence was pretty high. The Knight girls could make faces too, for all their gentility. Their yard had one great advantage over the other: it possessed a wood-shed, with a climbable roof, which commanded Miss Miller's premises, and upon this the girls used to sit in rows, turning up their noses at the next ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... at all," repeated Mrs. Jarley. "It's calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings, like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so life-like, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you'd hardly know ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... scent, the scent of Suburbia, seemed to float between the tall chimneys in the morose atmosphere. The purple chariot, which rolled on and on like the chariot of Fate, drew gradually away from the large thoroughfares into mean streets, whose air of dull gentility was for ever autumnal, and the Prophet, on passing some gigantic gasworks, mechanically wondered whether it might not, perhaps, be that monument to whose shadow Malkiel the First had lived and died. Once, looking up at the black sky, he remarked ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... for many of them are, by a great deal, much more like gentlemen than a number of the merchant skippers or mates in our British ships, whose horny fists and tar-stained dress make few pretensions to outward gentility. ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... place had a dilapidated look that surprised Lindsay. The bell was of that brand you keep pulling till you discover it is out of order. Decayed gentility marked the neighborhood, though the blank front of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... "He ain't a gentleman," Mrs. Bunce had said. And the man certainly was not a gentleman. The old man in the white cravat was very neatly dressed, and carried himself without any of that humility which betrays one class of uncertified aspirants to gentility, or of that assumed arrogance which is at once fatal to another class. But, nevertheless, Mrs. Bunce had seen at a glance that he was not a gentleman,—had seen, moreover, that such a man could have come only upon one mission. She was right there too. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... latterly to be as fine a point of honor as any article in the code of chivalry or noblesse. The arrogance that claims a superiority of class, and the obsequiousness that loves a lord, all this Nietschean "pathos of distance," whether felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its distinction is liberality, that ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... cut your stick, tell us what's up,' said an old Republican colonel, who cared not a rap for Imperial gentility and choice language. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Oriental character they have in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was construed into an unpardonable affront by the justice's lady, who abused the director in the most opprobrious terms for his insolence and ill manners; and retiring in a storm of passion, vowed revenge against the saucy minx who had presumed to vie in gentility with Miss Gobble. The justice entered into her resentment. The gravedigger lost his place; and Suky's lover, young Oakley, was pressed for a soldier. Before his mother could take any steps for his discharge, he was hurried away to the East Indies, by the industry and contrivance ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... not disdained the counting-house, or even the shop; their names are enrolled in the Livery and Companies of London; and in England, as well as in the Italian commonwealths, heralds have been compelled to declare that gentility is not degraded by ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... here, forty years ago, I felt myself an old man, and the building was even then a dilapidated old rookery, and since then we—the house and I—have lapsed physically with the decline of the neighborhood about us, until now our only claims to gentility are perhaps our ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... of doubtful gentility. She had, in her first marriage—I don't think, D'Artagnan, I am telling you anything new—married a lawyer; they thought that 'nauseous;' you can understand that's a word bad enough to make one kill thirty thousand men. I have killed two, which has made people hold ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wasn't a greater lady in the land than Cilly Dennison." Her brother was very different; tall and athletic, and rather handsome, he made no pretensions to be a gentleman. He valued his fine farming and fine cattle a great deal higher than Juniper Hitchcock's gentility. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a lady, whose natural-born gentility poverty might obscure but could not conceal. Years of want and struggling deprivation had dimmed her charms; but they had neither bowed nor bent her stately form, nor quenched the inherent virtue of self-respect, nor deprived ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... her grip on his collar. "That's your look-out, and I should have thought you'd have made sure you knew before you decided on your base perfidy." And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. "Of course—I may mention again—if you too distinctly object to the trouble of looking, you know where to ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... the line for conduct. A high sense of rectitude, a lowly soul, with a pure and kind heart are elements of nobility which will work out in the life of a human being at home—everywhere. "Private refinement makes public gentility." ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... fell into his clutches. They had already vowed vengeance upon him, these sometime brethren of the coast, for his betrayal of their confidence at Panama; they had further resented his honor of knighthood, his cloak of respectability, his assumption of gentility, and now that he hanged and punished right and left without mercy, their anger and animosity were raised to the point of fury, and many of them swore deeply with bitter oaths that if they ever caught him defenceless they would make him pay dearly in torture ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... yield the forfeiture, which he would not: a refusal which in those days was an act of outlawry in a gentleman, as it is now of bankruptcy in a base mechanic; the gentleman having in our wiser times a more liberal privilege of gentility, which enables him to keep his land and laugh at his creditor. Thus the mutual resentments and interests of the king and the abbot concurred to subject the earl to the penalties of outlawry, by which the abbot would gain ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... how he has been at the head of his class, and showing his school tickets, which his mother, with untiring admiration, deposits in the little real china tea pot—which, as being their most reliable article of gentility, is made the deposit of all the money and most ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... altar. Far off its coming shines. I was always impressed by the fact that even with us a well-bred gentleman in reduced circumstances never forgets to keep his beaver well brushed, and I remember that long ago I spoke of the hat as the ultimum moriens of what we used to call gentility,—the last thing to perish in the decay of a gentleman's outfit. His hat is as sacred to an Englishman as ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack—who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new phrase his warning] "that every man of high ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... sport, and have his fist gloved with his jesses.[38] A justice of peace he is to domineer in his parish, and do his neighbour wrong with more right.[39] He will be drunk with his hunters for company, and stain, his gentility with droppings of ale. He is fearful of being sheriff of the shire by instinct, and dreads the assize-week as much as the prisoner. In sum, he's but a clod of his own earth, or his land is the dunghill and he the cock that crows over it: and commonly his race is quickly run, and his children's ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... that having lived a life of such irreproachable gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... enjoyed a more perfect hospitality. I have been in many a richer home where there was not a hundredth part of the true gentility—the gentility of unapologizing simplicity ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... always torn by painful, shameful jealousy when he thought of the Englishman, and his entire nature appeared to change. He could not have called him "Hawtree" or "Mr." for his life; that savoured of gentility and the fervid past when the man was perhaps a picturesque figure, quoting the English classics in the guise of an unfortunate exile. Besides, if he fathomed Poussette's feelings correctly, the latter in his own jealousy of Crabbe might be found ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Let this suffice concerning the Nature and Manners of the People in general: The ensuing Chapters will be spent in more particular accounts of them. And because they stand much upon their Birth and Gentility, and much of what is afterwards to be related hath reference unto it: I shall first speak of the various ranks and degrees of ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... The captain, brawny and respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other passengers pressed in an ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... we were "officers and gentlemen," and thought no small beans of ourselves as such. There were at times absurd manifestations of this same precocious dignity, of which I may speak later; still, as O'Brien said of Boatswain Chucks, "You may laugh at such assumptions of gentility, but did any one of his shipmates ever know Mr. Chucks to do an unhandsome or a mean action?—and why? Because he ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... its vulgarest; and the nex-retrousse, the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like Lawrence, cast a nuance of gentility over every subject of his pencil. Horace—can we not hear him in imagination?—is telling his friends how Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his resignation, as a fete; then he would point out to his visitors a Conversation-piece, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... conserved in pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... off alone, and a curious visit he had. It was not easy for him to guess at the sacredness of those traditions of gentility and superiority that the 'Misses Hepburn' held—not so much for their own sakes as in faithful loyalty to the parents many years dead, and to the family duty that imposed a certain careful exclusiveness on them in deference to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not yet thoroughly persuaded that his style of football wasn't a success. "But for that unfortunate riot, which comes from playing with less cultured colleges," he remarked to a Senior the next spring, "that would have been the most successful exhibition of mental control and inherent gentility ever seen ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... that such a thing is not his place, his excuse is analogous to that of the Hindu servant when he pleads his caste. When an Englishman of birth or profession, which is held to confer gentility, refuses to associate with a tradesman or mechanic; or when members of a secret society exclude all others from their meetings; or when any other social distinction arises, it would present itself to the mind of the Hindu as ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... can err but once.... Enquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined in their youth. [209] Let her not be poor, how generous [20well-born] soever; for a man can buy nothing in the market with gentility. Nor choose a base and uncomely creature altogether for wealth; for it will cause contempt in others, and loathing in thee. Neither make choice of a dwarf, or a fool; for by the one thou shalt beget a race of pigmies, while the other will be thy continual disgrace, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... subsisting on the misplaced indulgence of an undiscerning public, and one who, if gentlemen and ladies (like ourselves) would only condescend to write, would find his appropriate circle in a work-house, unless he escaped it by dying in an hospital. You proceed to——! What, in the name of gentility, can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the centre of a large district, not at all like the retired gentility of Marbridge, very much bigger and busier. Captain Polkington, who had lived quietly so long, felt rather lost and bewildered at first in the bustling intricate streets; there were so many people, especially among the shops, they ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... been beforehand with them, and they be ranked among those who have nothing to show for their honesty but their money, nothing for their religion but their dissembling, or a fat benefice, nothing for their wit but their dressing, for their nobility but their title, for their gentility but their sword, for their courage but their huffing, for their preferment but their assurance, for their learning but their degrees, or for their gravity but their wrinkles or dulness. They had better laugh at one another here, as it is the custom of the world. Laughing ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... noblemen; therefore it was not ambition on her part. He could have married any number of wealthier American girls; therefore it was not avarice on his part. He was a good-looking, stalwart chap with a very fetching drawl, infinite gentility, and a man despite his monocle, while she was beautiful, witty and womanly; therefore it is reasonable to suspect that it must have been love that made ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... have given her the money if I had had it, for the pleasure of having her again; but putting my hand into my trows-ers, found silver only to something like a pound in value, and told her that. Then losing her gentility she said, "I'm damned if you do go, you bugger, till you ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... weather, as if he were perpetually exposed to sun and wind, rain and hail; sharp of movement, evidently of more than ordinary intelligence, and, in spite of his rough garments and fur cap, having an indefinable air of gentility and breeding about him. Brereton had already noticed the pitch and inflection of his voice; now, as Harborough touched his cap to the Mayor, he noticed that his hands, though coarsened and weather-browned, were well-shaped and delicate. Something about him, something ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... intellect; it smoothed away prejudices and upset conventionalities; and the ruddy glow of our sunburnt cheeks was the external token of the healthy natural tone of the feelings within. No; this passion for comfort and gentility in the wilderness, is a bad sign of the generation: it bespeaks effeminacy of character, and a vanity which, however graceful it may be thought in the town, shews mean and ridiculous among the hills, and woods, and waters ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility; And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is ...
— English Satires • Various
... Yeomanry of Georgia. Labour being here the especial portion of slaves, it is thenceforth degraded, and considered unworthy of all but slaves. No white man, therefore, of any class puts hand to work of any kind soever. This is an exceedingly dignified way of proving their gentility, for the lazy planters who prefer an idle life of semi-starvation and barbarism to the degradation of doing anything themselves; but the effect on the poorer whites of the country is terrible. I speak now ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... a fresh consignment packed in sawdust was eagerly watched by the 'Johns.' Of course we were imitating our parents." It was no doubt these cutty pipes which are referred to in one of the sporting books of Robert Surtees as the "clay pipes of gentility." ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... emphasis on the word Master,) "will you be pleased to undo the door?—What ails you?—are you at your prayers in private, to complete the devotion which you left unfinished in public?—Surely we must have a screened seat for you in the chapel, that your gentility may be free from the eyes of common folks!" Still no whisper was heard in reply. "Well, master Roland," said the waiting-maid, "I must tell my mistress, that if she would have an answer, she must either come herself, or send ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... who are to be found now and then painfully earning the bread which is very bitter to them in richer people's houses, and preserving in their little silent souls some fetish in the shape of a scrap of gentility, which is their sole comfort, or almost their sole comfort. Mrs. Copperhead's fetish was the dear recollection that she was "an officer's daughter;" or rather this had been her fetish in the days when she had nothing, and was free to plume herself on the reflected ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... themselves. I said that my country-folk in general had a great many admirable qualities, but at the same time a great many foibles, foremost amongst which last was a crazy admiration for what they called gentility, which made them sycophantic to their superiors in station, and extremely insolent to those whom they considered below them. He said that I had spoken his very thoughts, and then asked me whether I wished to be taken the most agreeable walk ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... that after she had seen Harry lighting a fire to broil chickens' legs in a Chinese temple, under the willow-pattern cannon-ball tree, and heard Henry Ward saying it was not like a lieutenant in the navy, she found herself replying, 'Use before gentility;' and in the enunciation of this—her first moral sentiment—discovered that it ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coffee-stand she broke more than once into a hop of glee. Barney had changed his mind concerning her. A solid sovereign which must be changed and a companion whose shabby gentility was absolute grandeur when compared with his present surroundings made ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Benevolent Fund makes no pretensions to gentility, squanders no treasure in keeping up appearances, that it considers that the money given for the widow and the orphan, should really be held for the widow and the orphan, I think I have exhausted the case, which I desire most strenuously to commend ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... received in the drawing-room of Enterprise House, which was rarely opened nowadays. It had a charming air of slightly old-fashioned gentility, just as its dead mistress had left it, and the rough Northerners came in with an abashed air. John Gaviller, resplendent in the dress-suit, stood by the piano, with the little lady on one hand and the large lady on the other, and one after another the men marched up and made their obeisances. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... together for the space of an hour without biting or scratching one another. There you might have seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other's charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor yet moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons, but free, inartificially happy, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... "The extremes of society approach much more closely to each other than perhaps the Dean of Saint Patrick's expected. The savage is always to a certain degree polite. Besides, going always armed, and having a very punctilious idea of their own gentility and consequence, they usually behaved to each other and to the Lowlanders with a good deal of formal politeness, which sometimes even procured ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Voltaire); and the histories of both the author and the play are curious. The author's real name was Caron, and he had been bred a watchmaker. But he was ambitious; he gave up his trade, and bought a place about the Court, which was among those which conferred gentility, and which enabled him afterwards on one occasion to boast that he could establish a better claim to the rank of noble than most of that body, since he could produce a stamped receipt for it. He married two rich widows. He next obtained the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Lombardies," said Abel, waving a long arm at them. "They are the trees of princesses. When I was a boy they were fashionable. Anyone who had any pretensions to gentility had a row of Lombardies at the foot of his lawn or up his lane, or at any rate one on either side of his front door. They're out of fashion now. Folks complain they die at the top and get ragged-looking. So they do—so they do, if you don't risk your neck every spring climbing up ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... planted the —— fern. His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility. He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed to him so happy and so beautiful an abode, that his heart felt ready to burst with ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... instinctively shuns whatever in the shape of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion, and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true gentleman, that ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Parcel (to her friend—for the sake of vindicating her gentility). Oh, my dear, I do feel so funny, carrying a great brown-paper parcel, in a bus, too! Anyone would take me for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... me: I know you'd save money by it. I've been reckoning what you lay out in omnibuses; and if you'd a chaise of your own— besides the gentility of the thing—you'd be money in pocket. And then, again, how often I could go with you to town,—and how, again, I could call for you when you liked to be a little late at the club, dear! Now you're ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... the nurse, a simpering piece of faded gentility, who did not presume to state her name as a fact, but merely offered it ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were—just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to be unrespectable ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... understand much about titles and nobility, and those sort of things; but I'm sorry she's gone down in the world, for though a little particular about gentility, she's a good sort of woman in her way, and keeps up her character, and earns ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... shop the master, judging by my appearance, which was certainly not exactly that of a gentleman, ventured to observe that it was customary with gentlemen, whom they had not the honour of knowing, to leave a deposit. Although the very proposal was an attack upon my gentility, I made no reply; but pulling out a handful of guineas, laid down two on the counter, and walked away, that I might find another shop at which we might order the livery of Timothy; but this was only as a reconnoitre, as I did not intend to order his liveries until I could ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... was sorry to hear that you lost your purse. Perhaps the finder was more in want than you are, and it may be of service to him, and you can do without it. A little money is sometimes useful. You must bear in mind that it will not be becoming in a Virginia girl now to be fine or fashionable, and that gentility as well as self- respect requires moderation in dress and gaiety. While her people are suffering, she should practise self-denial and show her sympathy in their affliction. We are all pretty well. Your poor mother suffers ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... 'pleased' than otherwise. I have now mentioned all who have done me the honour to notice me and mine, that is, my bear and my book, except the editor of the 'Satirist', who, it seems, is a gentleman—God wot! I wish he could impart a little of his gentility to his subordinate scribblers. I hear that Mr. JERNINGHAM[1] is about to take up the cudgels for his Maecenas, Lord Carlisle. I hope not: he was one of the few, who, in the very short intercourse I had with him, treated me with kindness when a boy; and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... not a landlord. It suits my purpose better, and is in every way more convenient, to rent a small house on a yearly agreement. But if I were a landlord, I would not allow any tenant of mine to do anything that tended to undermine and honeycomb the gentility of the district. I should take a very short method with such a tenant. I should say to him or her: "Now, then, either this stops, or you go out this instant." That would settle it. However, I ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... as Sam—or perhaps, even Langdon—would have been in the same circumstances. I wonder if there is another country where so many gentlemen and ladies are born, or another where so many of them have their natural gentility educated ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Leah, etc. They have also a way of deducing women names out of the mens, as from Charles, Charlotte, from Lowis, Lowisse, from Paul, Pauline, from Jean, Jeane. Thir be much more frequent amongs the baser sort then the gentility, just as it is wt the names of Bessie, Barbary, Alison and others ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Mrs. Church. "This is a nice state of things, I must say. Who minds what a slip of a young lady says?—meaning no offence to you, miss; but I have been spending my money right and left, getting tea that beats all for gentility, and now one of the ladies is off as it were in a flash of an eye. What about ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the bounds of modesty and respect, and he has gradually separated himself from the rabble of bettors and blackguards of whom he was once the most conspicuous, and tacitly asserted his own independence and acquired gentility without ever presuming towards those whom he has been accustomed to regard with deference. His position is now more anomalous than ever, for a member of Parliament is a great man, though there appear no reasons why the suffrages of the blackguards of Pontefract ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... There was that about his humble mien, his tired look, his decayed-gentility clothes, that almost reached the mustard, seed of charity that still remained, remote and lonely, in the empty vastness of my heart, notwithstanding I observed a portfolio under his arm, and said to myself, Behold, Providence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the same time, at Versailles a very beautiful woman, the Countess Lamotte. She traced her lineage to the kings of France, and, by her vices, struggled to sustain a style of ostentatious gentility. She was consumed by an insatiable thirst for recognized rank and wealth, and she had no conscience to interfere, in the slightest degree, with any means which might lead to those results. Though somewhat notorious, as ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... hereafter, let it be Miss Martineau's Deerbrook. It is really very striking; and parts of it are very true and very beautiful. It is not so true, or so thoroughly clear and harmonious, among delineations of English middle-class gentility, as Miss Austen's books, especially as Pride and Prejudice, which I think exquisite; but it is worth reading. The hour and the Man is eloquent, but an absurd exaggeration.—I hold out so valorously against this ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... under the shelter of mighty rocks, passed more ruins. We stopped to examine these older ruins of the ancient O'Ruarkes. A Milesian gentleman showed us through them. It is the correct thing to have a ruin on your place; it is a kind of patent of gentility. If a banshee could be thrown in along with a ruin, a new man would give a great price for an old place. But banshees are getting scarce and decline to be caught. This ruin has been patched over, clumsily but earnestly, so that hardly a speck of the original ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... writers Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "I am utterly wretched now. The simplest gentility—" she paused, but her wish was clear. He restrained himself with difficulty. Drifting slowly across the scattered roofs of the town was the leaden smoke of his mills and fires; as they drove into the main street the thin crash ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however, partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods that he might provide his guest with more ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of encountering the Contessa with a basket containing a couple of mutton cutlets, a ball of wool and some tooth-powder. So she put on her Prince of Wales's cloak, and, postponing further reflection over the bridge-party till a less busy occasion, set forth in unencumbered gentility for the morning gossip. At the corner of the High Street, she ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and unceremonious demand the knight flushed angrily, frowned, made an expressive gesture with his lips and his nose which suggestively indicated that there was something offensive in the air between the wind and his gentility, ending the pantomime by finding a pass and handing it over to his "nigger," then—not deigning to speak—motioned him and it to the threatening figure. As this black man came forward, Brooks, looking at him a moment, cried ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... opinion sufficiently loud to strike upon the tympanum of the poor fellow at the door, I could perceive his dark eyes glisten, and the blood tinge his woe-begone cheeks; his lips trembled with emotion: there was an evident struggle between offended gentility, and urgent necessity. ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... a gentleman who undertakes the care and education of a few backward boys, who are beguiled and trained to study by kind discipline, without the least severity (which too often frustrates the end desired). Situation extremely healthy. Sea and country air; deep gravelly soil. Christian gentility assiduously cultivated on sound Church principles. Diet unsurpassed. Wardrobes carefully preserved. The course of instruction comprises English, classics, mathematics, and science. Inclusive terms, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... more than moral forgery; it is with them an uttering base coin upon false pretences. It is generally the wives and families of professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains, deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... abortive attempt or two made in other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,—remnants of a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's society their dreary ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... were allowed no privileges such as their former habits impelled them to seek. If they played a flute in the hearing of the overseer, they were commanded to be silent instantly. If they dared to put a gold ring on their finger, even that trifling pretension to gentility was detected and disallowed by the jealous overseer. (These things were specified by Mr. G. himself.) They were seldom permitted to associate with the overseers as equals. The only thing which reconciled the book-keepers to this abject state, was the reflection ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... of birth, and the presumption of new men in attempting to found a new system of gentility, Boswell proceeds: "Mr. Thrale had married Miss Hester Lynch Salusbury, of good Welsh extraction, a lady of lively talents, improved by education. That Johnson's introduction into Mr. Thrale's family, which contributed so much to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... netting, stained tablecloth, and hard cane chairs, expanded until she fancied herself in the drawing-room of Blenheim House. Between the landladies there was little enough to choose. Mrs. Raithby Lawrence, notwithstanding her caustic tongue and suspicious nature, had at least made some pretense at gentility. The woman who faced her now—hard-featured, with narrow, suspicious eyes and a mass of florid hair—was unmistakably and ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... within the sacred triangle of gentility (as it was known in Eden Valley), of which the manse, the General's bungalow, and the residence of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe occupied the three angles, my grandmother was the first caller upon the lonely children in the great house ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on his head until I had finished ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... de Lamotte's contemplated visit to Paris, Derues was filled with alarm. If she were living free and independent in Paris she might find out the truth about the real state of his affairs, and then good-bye to Buisson-Souef and landed gentility! No, if Mme. de Lamotte were to come to Paris, she must come as the guest of the Derues, a pleasant return for the hospitality accorded to the grocer at Buisson-Souef. The invitation was given and readily accepted; M. de Lamotte still had enough confidence ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... seem, too; and that is the only agreeable part of the matter. For the customary attentions of your Marquis of Montcalm—I warrant me, Duncan, that he of Lothian would buy a dozen such marquisates—but if the news of the letter were bad, the gentility of this French monsieur would certainly compel him ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'First Class' you find quite a collection of shabby gentility. And you'd never believe what a lot you can get there ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... upon the town in sudden glory, threw all her companions into the shade. Never had such a fine lady of comedy been seen, said the critics; never had an actress (who was not expected to be over-versed in the affairs of the "quality") displayed such gentility, high-breeding and evidence of being—Heaven knew how—quite "to the manner born." Never was woman so bubbling over with humour, said the people. As for Colley, he was delighted, of course, but believing that ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Gentility, now hereditary, was derived from the tenure of land; the idea of it was emphasised by the adoption of surnames and armorial bearings. A close aristocracy was created, somewhat modified by the right claimed by the king of creating nobles. Prelates and abbots ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings to a nicety, take him to the softest ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... pretty, dark-eyed, smooth-cheeked little creatures, with clear skins of burnt umber color, and the reddest mouths in the world, until the girl grows up and her mother tattooes her lips blue, for gentility's sake. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... of mine he may keep it. I know its tenor and I am not eager to know the very words in which my lady says 'No.' HO! HO! HO!" he laughed, "I will go to the Swamp; my scented rival in his perfumed clothing, will hardly wish the smell of the tanning pits to come between him and his gentility." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... The politest of Roman poets has felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by sedentary poets ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... admiration in her clear, honest eye, then taking a coarse towel, she rubbed a large silver spoon, till it shone brighter and brighter, and laid it by the side of my bowl. She had first spread a white napkin under it, to give my simple repast an appearance of neatness and gentility. The bowl itself was white, with a wreath of roses round the rim, both inside and out. Those rosy garlands had been for years the delight of my eyes. I always hailed the appearance of the glowing leaves, when the milky fluid sunk ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to southern electors, became amateur huntsmen, and in New York and Boston the chase was pursued with all the zeal and apparent delight that could have been expected in Guinea or Virginia. Slave-catching was the test, at once, of patriotism and gentility, while sympathy for the wretched fugitive was the mark of vulgar fanaticism. The north was humbled in the dust, by the action of her own recreant sons. Every "good citizen" found himself, for the first time in the history of mankind, a slave-catcher by law. Every official, appointed ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the helpless form of an invalid child, a girl about eleven years old. The room was comfortless. An old, high-colored piece of carpeting half covered the rough floor; its originally gaudy pattern, out of which all but the red had faded, bearing witness to some past stage of family gentility, and serving to ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... Soto. His parents were Spanish nobles, perhaps the most haughty class of nobility which has ever existed. It was, however, a decayed family, so impoverished as to find it difficult to maintain the position of gentility. The parents were not able to give their son a liberal education. Their rank did not allow them to introduce him to any of the pursuits of industry; and so far as can now be learned, the years of his early ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... has just been here—such a pleasing, clever young man, speaking Italian perfectly, and French extremely well. He is the son of some fellah of Lower Egypt, sent to study at Pisa, and has not lost the Arab gentility and elegance by a Frenghi education. We fraternized greatly, and the young hakeem was delighted at my love for his people, and my high opinion of their intelligence. He is now gone to inspect the sick, and is to see me again and give me directions. He was very ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... loved things artistic in design— Order and beauty, all about him. Yet So kind he was, if it befell his lot To dine within the humble peasant's cot, He made it seem his native soil to be, And thus displayed the true gentility. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... he said, my daughter. He had a swiftness of tongue, for which I am myself famous, especially in fortune-telling; but he used the language of gentility, and a shortness of speech which you will observe among those who are accustomed to order what they want instead of asking for it. I had hard work to summon voice to reply to him, my daughter, and I cannot ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... damn!" God damn!—damn the knocking about and pushing! I see at a glance that these people have enough to do. They live on a grand scale, and though food and clothes are dearer with them than with us, they must still be better fed and clothed than we are—as gentility requires. Moreover, they have enormous debts, yet occasionally, in a vainglorious mood, they make ducks and drakes of their guineas, pay other nations to box about for their pleasure, give their kings a handsome douceur ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dine. The place was crowded, and rather shamefacedly (as is the national way) he sat down at a small table opposite a girl in a light-blue blouse and a very big hat, who was eating risotto and drinking lager beer. She assumed an air of exaggerated primness and gentility, keeping her eyes down toward her plate, and putting very small quantities into her mouth at a time. Glad of distraction, Harry watched her with amusement. At last ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope |
