"High life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A curious glimpse of high life at Quebec, in the good old days of Lord Dalhousie, is furnished in a letter addressed to Delta, of Blackwood's Magazine, by John Galt, the novelist, the respected father of our gifted statesman, Sir ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... here the other day,' said Mrs. Smirk to Mrs. Smooth, in the well-known 'great-deal-more-meant-than-said' style. 'Oh such a charming man! Such ease! such manners! such knowledge of high life!' Puff had been at his old tricks. He had resuscitated Lord Legbail, now Earl of Loosefish; imported Sir Harry Blueun from somewhere near Geneva, whither he had retired on marrying his mistress; and resuscitated Lord Mudlark, who had broken his neck many ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery, and brilliantly illuminated ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the rule of modern high life not to drink to any body; but that I might have the satisfaction for once to look the duchess in the face, with a glass in my hand, I with a respectful air addressed her,—'My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink your grace's good health.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... their teeth, and plastic surgeons looked forward to the day when they must play upon some other form of human credulity. As a subject for the press it rivalled strikes, prohibition, German reparations, Lenin, prize-fights, censorship and scandalous divorces in high life. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... were received as men from the dead. Of course the papers were full of sketches of their strange adventure, and wood-cuts of icebergs and seals covered the paper-stands for a week; and then a horrible murder, and a delicious bit of scandal in high life, closed the brief ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized quarter—who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops, where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these balconied upper stories—who, what, ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... etiquette, the pleasures, the exigencies of colonial "courtship in high life," let one of the actors speak for himself through the pages of his diary. Judge Sewall's first wife was Hannah Hull, the only daughter of Captain Hull of Pine Tree Shilling fame. She received as her dowry her weight in silver shillings. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... his own and the present, thought Dickens to be vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr. Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends, thought that Dickens committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right enough; but "He was a good ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... tables a number of ladies and gentlemen were seated, some still toying with the savory viands and drinking rare vintages of Champagne, whilst others idly watched the dancers or discussed the latest court news and high life scandal. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... live in the city, as he is so wealthy; Mary will have an opportunity of tasting the fascinations of high life. I shall introduce her to a clique of great refinement at once. Don't you think Saratoga the most delightful place in the world, Miss Wyllys? I am never so happy as when here. I delight so much in the gay world; it appears to me that I breathe more freely in a crowd—solitude ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... in an Inn, yet I never taste beer, I never smoke, chew, or use snuff; I am seen in high life, yet I'm true to my wife, And now ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... life, as you say, ma'm; that is, nothing in high life, I'm sure, ma'm; nay, I dare a'most venture to swear. Would you believe it, Mr. Talbot is one of the few young gentlemen of Eton that has not bespoke from me a fancy dress for this ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... devotion are filled; and these are the only books they ever read. The coldness of their constitution occasions a species of regulated gallantry, which is rather the effect of an opinion that it is an appendage of high life, than the result ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... however, proper to remark, that as his habitual meekness and command of his passions prevented indecent sallies of ungoverned anger towards those in the lowest state of subjection to him, by which some in high life do strangely debase themselves, and lose much of their authority, so the natural greatness of his mind made him solicitous to render their inferior stations as easy as he could: and so much the rather, ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... join the fashionables at the Springs, it would at lest be supposed that they had gone some where into the country, and thus they hoped to escape the terrible penalty of losing caste for not conforming to an indispensable rule of high life. ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... elaborate high saddles and embroidered trappings rather the worse for wear were being led up and down the walk. As we neared the door there was a strong smell of rosewater and native perfumes and hookah tobacco—the indescribable odour of Eastern high life. There was also a general air of wasteful and tawdry dowdiness, if I may coin such a word, which one constantly sees in the retinues of native princes and rich native merchants, ill contrasting with the great intrinsic value of some of the ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... has reviewed with a master-hand almost every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and Thackeray left hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but so great have been the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) since then, that, could Balzac come back to his beloved Paris, he would feel like a foreigner there; and Thackeray, who was among us but yesterday, would have ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... though somewhat uninstructed person. But our feelings ought not to be wrought upon in this way. We "had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, than such a Roman" as is not at least distantly acquainted with that brilliant character in high life who careers so conspicuously amid the constellations which constitute the upper ten thousand of super-mundane society. And now some inquisitive individual may be impatient to interrupt our eloquence with the question, "What are you going ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... leisure, and are averse to much personal attention to business. They dislike care, profound thinking and deep impressions. The young men are volatile, gay, dashing and reckless spirits, fond of excitement and high life. There is a fatal propensity amongst the southern planters to decide quarrels, and even trivial disputes by duels. But there are also many amiable and noble traits of character amongst this class; and if the principles of the Bible and religion ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... place that has not a clean-shaven lawn and beds of unvarying circles, pyrethrum, calceolaria, and geranium, and brakes of rare roses, and glass-houses with orchids worth fifty pound each, which is a garden in high life, full of luxury, extravagance, weariness. As Kate entered, a moss rose which wandered at its will caught her skirt, and the General cut a blossom which she fastened in her breast, and surely there is no flower so winsome and ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... kind of greatness in existence. You smile, sir, but let me tell you there are no feuds more furious than the frontier feuds, which take place on these "debatable lands" of gentility. The most violent dispute that I ever knew in high life, was one that occurred at a country town, on a question of precedence between the ladies of a manufacturer of pins and a ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... development "Precaution" was a compromise between the purely fashionable novel and that collection of moral disquisitions of which Hannah More's Coelebs was the great exemplar, and still remained the most popular representative. As in most tales of high life, nobody of low condition plays a prominent part in the story, save for the purpose of setting off the dukes, earls, baronets, generals, and colonels that throng its pages. A novelist in his first production never limits his creative ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the few ideas nature had given them, and yet were celebrated for wonderful pretty gentlemen; young ladies extolled for their wit, because they were handsome; illiterate empty women as well as men, in high life, admired for their knowledge, from their being resolutely positive; and women of real understanding so far from pleasing the polite million, that they frightened them away, and were left solitary. When we quitted ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... antiquity of his family gave him high social rank. On his Potomac farms he had hundreds of slaves, and at his Mount Vernon home he was like the prince of a wide domain, free from dependence or restraint. He was fond of equipage and the appurtenances of high life, and although he always rode on horseback, his family had a "chariot and four," with "black postilions in scarlet and white livery." This generous style of living, added perhaps to his native reserve, exposed him to the charge of aristocratic ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... laughed at her, finding nothing so ridiculous as the high life she thought she was leading. I would interrupt her description of a ball to inquire about her husband and her father-in-law, both of whom she detested, the one because he was her husband, and the other because he was only a peasant; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... have gathered, I should think the story might be something like this: that, some time previous to the murder, this Herriot had come to Albany, got into company above his true place, dashed away a while in high life, gambled deeply, and, losing all his own money, and running up a large debt to this, and other friends of Brush, gave them his obligations and absconded. But coming there again, for some purpose, a year or two after, with a large sum of money, it was thought, which had been ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... complaint somewhat in vogue in high life—he had a sudden fit of convenient deafness. He said a few words in a cold voice to Mrs. Meadowsweet, crushed the little Bells by his icy manner, and took the first opportunity ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... chemist received, soon afterward, a prescription of a soothing nature to make up for Mrs. Yatman. The day after, Mr. Yatman purchased some smelling-salts at the shop, and afterward appeared at the circulating library to ask for a novel descriptive of high life that would amuse an invalid lady. It has been inferred from these circumstances that he has not thought it desirable to carry out his threat of separating from his wife, at least in the present (presumed) condition of that ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... best marble-stone to the other one, as he've done, and weeped his fill, and thought it all over, and said to hisself, 'T'other took me in, I knowed this one first; she's a sensible piece for a partner, and there's no faithful woman in high life now';—well, he may do worse than not to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... I to blame, then? Who took her to balls, and theatres and races—to every place where a young girl ought NOT to be taken? Who initiated her into what you call high life? and who used her as a discreet and easy chaperon? Who married her to a wretch who is a disgrace to the title he bears, and who has completed the work of demoralization you began? And what is your daughter to-day? Her extravagance has made her notorious even among the shameless women ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Parturition is not a disease, it is a natural process, but is more frequently unfortunate in high life than amongst the middle class of females; which may be owing partly to fear, with which the priests of LUCINA are liable to inspire the ladies of fashion to induce them to lie in in town; and partly to the bad air of London, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... reduced to this material expression, how dull and beggarly does not life become,—mere atomic integration and disintegration, the poor human pneumatic-machine purring along the dusty road of matter, bound and helpless and soulless as a clanking engine! No high life, in individuals or nations, is to be hoped for, unless it is enrooted in the infinite spiritual reality,—in God. It is forever indubitable that the highest is not material, and no argument is therefore needed to show that when spiritual ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... boots, countrymen, gamekeepers, peasants, and others," as they have it in the play-bills. Truly admirable, and excelling the rest, are "Boz's" sketches—actually "living pictures"—of the fashionable footmen at Bath, beside which the strokes in that diverting piece "High Life below Stairs" seem almost flat. The simperings of these gentry, their airs and conceit, we may be sure, obtain now. Once coming out of a Theatre, at some fashionable performance, through a long lane of tall menials, one ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... box at some small theatre, behind the grating where forbidden, shamefaced pleasure conceals itself,—those were the only memories bequeathed to her by that liaison of two weeks, that loveless sin, wherein not even her pride had succeeded in satisfying itself by the notoriety of a scandal in high life. The fruitless, ineffaceable stain, the senseless fall into the gutter of a woman who cannot walk, and upon whom the ironical pity of the passers-by weighs heavily ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... procession, still in progress at midnight, of Jenkins' guests, the whole body of the fashionable physician's patients; the very flower of society, a large sprinkling of politics and finance, bankers, deputies, a few artists, all the jaded ones of Parisian high life, pale and wan, with gleaming eyes, saturated with arsenic like gluttonous mice, but insatiably greedy of poison and of life. Through the open salon and the great reception-room, the doors of which had been removed, he could see the stairway and landing, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were women. That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in the very breath that she condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most miserable stuff," confesses that "she was such an old fool as to weep over" it "like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady's Fall"—the handsomest ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... more than too much raising her hopes and her views, which the natural vivacity of her disposition would render but too easy to effect. The town-acquaintance of Mrs. Mirvan are all in the circle of high life; this artless young creature, with too much beauty to escape notice, has too much sensibility to be indifferent to it; but she has too little wealth to be sought with propriety by men of ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... difficult matter to discuss. Naturally if this woman sees the Prince talking to that one, this one is going to eat vinegar," which gives us a glimpse of some of the domestic difficulties in Chinese high life. However it is a fact worth remembering that the Manchu prince does not receive his full stipend from the government until he has five concubines, each of whom is the mother ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... has ever occurred in this town—is really, and without exaggeration, a tragedy in high life. The lady who was strangled by a brute's clutch, was a woman of the highest culture and most estimable character. Her sister, who is supposed to have been the unconscious cause of the crime, is a young girl of blameless record. Of the man who ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... chosen friends, with whom she corresponded on terms of perfect confidence, were among the best people in London—not the circulators of club-house canards, the pickers-up of second-hand gossip from the society papers, but actors in the comedy of high life, arbiters of fashion and taste, born and bred ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... baroness, for the simple reason that the baroness was a hearty good friend to her from first to last. Believe that or not, as you please. For five years she traveled about all over the Continent with these card-sharpers in high life, and she might have been among them at this moment, for anything I know to the contrary, if the baroness had not caught a Tartar at Naples, in the shape of a rich traveling Englishman, named Waldron. Aha! ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Mr. May began with his "social" cuts for Punch, selecting "low life" for the most part, as Mr. du Maurier chose high life, and making for every picture as careful a study from Nature as ever Charles Keene did—and probably as many of them. Furthermore, he prefers to seek out his jokes for himself. When he was in New York and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which remained for more than two hundred years ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... more of thy stupid explanations,' cried he; 'go and inform her we have company. Were that Scotch hag to be forever in my family, she would never learn politeness, nor forget that absurd poisonous accent of hers, or testify the smallest specimen of breeding or high life; and yet it is very surprising, too, as I had her from a Parliament man, a friend of mine from the Highlands, one of the politest men in the world; but that's a secret.'" [Footnote: Citizen of the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... does not degrade woman. On the contrary, it ennobles her and brings out all the strong attributes of true womanhood. To their credit be it said, the women are almost a unit for ability, honesty and integrity wherever found, in high life or low life. A man must walk straight in Wyoming, for the women hold the balance of power and they are using it wisely and judiciously. The cause of education is their first aim. They are making our schools the model of the country, and, too, they can make a dollar go much further than ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... length of their whiskers and the delicacy of their limbs prior to excoriating them, and dwelling on the flavour of their crashed bones. 'Tis a beautiful scene, and ten thousand times more piquant than the humours of a Servants' Hall, or the most grotesque and glorious moments of high life below stairs. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... soon forgotten, and Mole began to relate adventures of himself which would have done credit to Baron Munchausen, while Figgins, not to be outdone, told wonderful stories of high life in which he ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... not the drawling bores that we find in fashionable novels, though their affected freaks are occasionally introduced to contrast with unsophisticated humility, and thus exhibit the deformities of high life. The whole work is, however, light as gossamer: we had almost said that a fly might read it through the meshes, without endangering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... toasts, and such as thought themselves assembled for the sake of the 'marriage in high life,' were taken by surprise when Lord Fitzjocelyn rose, and began by thanking those assembled for assisting in doing honour to the event of the day—the marriage of two persons, for each of whom he himself as well as those most dear to him felt the warmest respect and gratitude for essential ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the group is the floriated fish, whose general form has evidently been based on that of the dolphin. When Hogarth ridiculed the taste for virtu, which the fashionable people of his own era carried to a childish extent, and displayed its follies in his picture of "Taste in high life," and in the furniture of his scenes of the "Marriage-a-la-mode," he exhibited a somewhat similar absurdity in porcelain ornament. In the second scene of the "Marriage" is an amusing example of false combination, in which ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... unhemmed; facts which disturbed her even during the ceremony. A quiet time throughout; and after a sober feast, a tearful farewell, Mrs. Gamaliel Bliss departed, leaving a great void behind and carrying joy to the heart of her spouse, comfort to the souls of the excited nine, destruction to the "High Life Below Stairs," and order, peace, and plenty to the realm over which she was to know a long ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... when our travelled gentry only brought back with them that disregard of Christianity which they had learned in Paris and Rome, and when Voltaire's works were found on the toilet of every woman in high life. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... gossip, which would have for the reader as much interest as the presentation of some of the ephemeral weeds of that period. But Mr. Strahan's blue eyes were really animated as he ventured perilously near a recent scandal in high life. His budget of news was interspersed with compliments to his hostess, which, like the extract on his handkerchief, were too pronounced. Mr. Lane regarded him with politely veiled disgust, but was too well-bred not to second Miss ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... were in their freshest and proudest leaf. A church tower rose appropriately in a corner of the park, and on the other side of the deer-fence beyond the lake a herd of red deer were feeding. Doris could not help feeling as though the whole scene had been lately painted for a new "high life" play at the St. James's Theatre, and she half expected to see Sir George Alexander walk out ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... receptions, dinners, matinees, morning calls, drives, visits and shopping; how fast one crowded upon the other, leaving scarcely an hour of leisure to the devotee of fashion who attended to them all. How astonished Helen was to find what high life in New York implied, ceasing to wonder that so many of the young girls grew haggard and old before their time, or that the dowagers grew selfish and hard and scheming. She would die outright, she thought, and she pitied poor little Katy, who, having once returned ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity." Whether read for the satire or the story, the adventures of Gulliver proved equally fascinating. They "offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... French society in after years, I was absolutely astonished at the change which seemed to me to have taken place in the beauty of high life. I shall not hazard my reputation for gallantry, by tracing the contrast more closely. But evil times had singularly acted upon the physiognomy even of the nobles. The age of the roturier had been the climacteric of France. Generals from the ranks, countesses from the canaille, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... never wore pretty, dotty, transparent veils, as Nan Drury did, and the words "Herbert Dodd"—save that she had sounded them at him there two or three times more like a Meg Merrilies or the bold bad woman in one of the melodramas of high life given during the fine season in the pavilion at the end of Properley Pier—were dreadfully, were permanently, seated on her lips. She was grim, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... (1795), "Lady Godiva's Rout" (1796), "High Change in Bond Street" (1796), "A Modern Belle at Bath" (1796), and "A Fashionable Mamma" come into this class, as well as "Following the Fashion," "Characters in High Life," and many others. It was the epoch when English ladies' waists seem to have risen nearly to their arm-pits, and when their hair towered up correspondingly into a forest of feathers; and all the above prints—as ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... anything I don't want," said Mr. Wiseman loftily. "I've learned a few things, too, but I've never made use of what's come to me officially to get me pushed along. You'll hear something in a day or two," he said mysteriously, "and in high life, too, in a manner of speaking—that is, if you can call old Minute high life, which ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... the postillion; "all I was going to say was that you agreed to run away together, you from college, and she from boarding-school. Well, there's nothing to be ashamed of in a matter like that, such things are done every day by young folks in high life." ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... do? Let us hope not. Let the pampered daughter of wealth and social fame, who goes astray, share the pitiless fate of the beggar who does likewise, or, better still, let the beggar be shown such mercy, and justification and pardon as is granted her sister in high life. In the sight of God crime is the one color, why not so with men? If anything, vice repels far more forcibly, when attired in its velvets and silks, than when it looks out from scanty rags, which after all, may be turned more easily to sack ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... much to relate of a gloomy and disastrous nature, that it is with a feeling of momentary relief we turn to something of a more pleasing complexion, and record the first, and indeed only nuptials in high life that took place in the infant ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... it and substituted a forged one in its place, which adjudged the whole of Mr. Brooks' millions to himself. It was a terrible and very daring accusation directed against a gentleman who, in spite of his many wild oats sowed in early youth, was a prominent and important figure in Irish high life. ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... when they did nothing. Instead therefore of finishing George's shirts, we now had them new-modeling their old gauzes, or flourishing upon catgut. The poor Miss Flamboroughs, their former gay companions, were cast off as mean acquaintance, and the whole conversation ran upon high life and high-lived company, with pictures, taste, Shakespeare, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... unsophisticated little girls won to her by her frankness and kindness, and dazzled by her goodness and greatness. How she awoke Fiddy's laugh with the Chit-Chat Club and the Silence Stakes. What harmless, diverting stories she told them of high life—how she had danced at Ranelagh, sailed upon the Thames, eaten her bun at Chelsea, mounted one of the eight hundred favours which cost a guinea a piece when Lady Die became a countess, and called upon Lady Petersham, in her deepest mourning, when she sat in her state-bed ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... it, coming back here for this gold. You've got the whip hand now, and I'll let it go at that; but when they've got ye on the gallows, which they will, remember what Thirkle told ye, sitting here in the thick of it, which ye think ye'll spend for high life in London. Before ye ever get it to London ye'll find it's another tune ye'll play. Maybe ye think ye can fill a ship with gold and sail to the dockhead and lift it out and let it go at that—they'll take the gold ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... white veil floating about her, and the Baron de Sigognac radiant with happiness. The Marquis de Bruyeres was one of his witnesses, and a most brilliant and aristocratic assemblage "assisted" at this notable wedding in high life. No one, who had not been previously informed of it, could ever have suspected that the lovely bride—at once so noble and modest, so dignified and graceful, so gentle and refined, yet with as lofty a bearing as a princess of the blood royal—had only a short time ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... for lodging at a lordly mansion in South Carolina and being repelled by the mistress. At the next house he learned the cause of her irritation—her only daughter had just given birth to a Negro babe. After making diligent inquiry he failed to find another such instance in high life, but in South Carolina districts where the black population was densest and the poor whites most degraded 'these unnatural unions were more frequent than anywhere else' (III, 29). In every case, however, he says it was a woman of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... but dubious).-"A novel! But every subject on which novels can be written is preoccupied. There are novels of low life, novels of high life, military novels, naval novels, novels philosophical, novels religious, novels historical, novels descriptive of India, the Colonies, Ancient Rome, and the Egyptian Pyramids. From what bird, wild eagle, or barn-door fowl, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he had met with at the Court of Vienna, and having till then seen nothing of high life, the Abbe de Vermond admired no other customs than those of the imperial family; he ridiculed the etiquette of the House of Bourbon incessantly; the young Dauphiness was constantly incited by his sarcasms to get rid of it, and it was he who first induced her to suppress an infinity of practices ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Roberts calls the modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a distinguished English journalist, with a handle ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... accommodating our tastes and humors, I resolved to free myself from her thraldom. Another powerful reason for this measure was the dislike with which the king regarded her; not that she was deficient in birth or good breeding, but amidst the polish of high life she occasionally introduced the most vulgar and provincial manners, a fault of all others most offensive to the king, whose disgust was further excited by the undisguised avidity with which, at every opportunity, she sought to turn her admission to the king's private society to ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... each other "for better or for worse, forever and for aye" and started down time's rugged stream of years. George Washington, then Chief Magistrate, performed the ceremony, and what he joined together time has not put asunder. It was not a wedding in high life, such as shakes the foundation of fashionable society today, but rather more like the swearing away of a verdant country couple, in some Gretna Green, with no other capital than youth, health and trusting confidence. We have had some domestic discords; once a very serious family ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... guests which had not yet come to an end at midnight; all the clients of the fashionable physician; the fine flower of society; a strong political and financial element, bankers, deputies, a few artists, all the jaded people of Parisian "high life," wan-faced, with glittering eyes, saturated with arsenic like greedy mice, but with appetite insatiable for poison and for life. The drawing-room being thrown open, the vast antechamber of which the doors had been removed to be seen, laden with flowers at the sides, the principal staircase ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Palace dansants, and young Edington, and old lady Condor, all of a sudden ... and getting away with it as if you were an old hand at the game. Say, if you're that apt I'll give you a post-graduate course in high life that'll make your hair curl forty-seven ways. I don't mean anything vulgar or common ... you understand. I'm a gentleman, Miss ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... she, with a sigh, "what egotists we are in high life! We expect heaven to shield and sustain us in our grandeur, and never a thought do we return ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the wing, between the two towers, there was another large room behind it, which also belonged to her. Darnley's apartments were very similar to the queen's, only they were in the story below. It was the custom in those days, as it is now, indeed, in high life, for the husband and wife to have separate ranges of apartments, with a private passage connecting them. In this case the private passage leading from Darnley's apartments to Mary's was in the wall. It was a narrow stairway, leading up to Mary's bedroom, and the door where it came out was very ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... out of the question 't will be that ye go to Greenwood. I will resign my post, being now rich enough, and we'll all go to London, where I'll take a big house, and ye shall be my guests. Once let the girl taste of high life, with its frocks and jewels and carriages, and all that tempts the sex, and she'll quickly see their ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... visit it had been Ralph who had given her permission to interview Molly Tooney, and she regarded her with great interest. La Fleur's long years of service had given her many opportunities of studying the characters of mistresses, in high life as well as middle life, but never had she seen a mistress like this school-girl, with her ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... as I was able to understand, he has a very important case on hand—a sort of romance in high life; and I think he wants your assistance to unravel it; it seems ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... veritablement.' But Steele had already touched this subject in 'Spectator', No. 88, for June 11, 1711, 'On the Misbehaviour of Servants,' a paper supposed to have afforded the hint for Townley's farce of 'High Life below Stairs', which, about a fortnight after 'The Logicians Refuted' appeared, was played for the first time at Drury Lane, not much to the gratification of the gentlemen's gentlemen in the upper ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Agnes answered: "Yes, I was Sarah Agnes Morris; once for three months your grandmother's hired girl, and afterward adopted by a lady who gave me what education I possess, together with that taste for high life which prompted me to jilt your Uncle Joseph when a richer man than ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... know the rest. The papers the next day were full of the elopement in high life. They told how the Scrappe divorce had been granted at five o'clock in the afternoon the day before, how Colonel Scrappe and Mrs. Van Raffles had sped to New York in the automobile and been quietly married at the Little Church Around the Corner, and were now sailing down the bay on the ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... then, having exhausted the workable heredity to be found there,—used up that racial stream,—they must go elsewhere. There you have the raison d'etre, probably, of the thirteen-decade period. It takes as a rule about four generations of such high life to deplete the racial heredity for the time being,—which must then be left to lie fallow. So now, America not being discovered, and there being no further eastward to go, we must jump westward the width of two continents (nearly), and (that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... is traditional in many countries. Women of fashion scarcely ever appear at a soiree or ball without wearing a camellia or an exotic orchid on their breast or in their head-dress, and so, too, gentlemen of "high life" do not go out without a boutonniere of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... might marry the milliner if she was very young and madly beautiful, but Lorena Jane was neither. She remembered also that beautiful though the milliner or bailiff's daughter, or housekeeper's niece might be, it was only the villain in high life who married her. Then the marriage always turned out at last to be a sham, and the milliner generally died ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Mr. Malone is a Pressman. He will have it all in his rag to-morrow, and sell an extra dozen among our neighbors. 'Strange story of high life'—you felt fairly high on that pedestal, did you not? Then a sub-title, 'Glimpse of a singular menage.' He's a foul feeder, is Mr. Malone, a carrion eater, like all of his kind—porcus ex grege diaboli—a swine from the devil's herd. That's ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of those women whose beauty is so striking and imposing, that they seem to kindle up, even in the most prosaic apartment, an atmosphere of enchantment. All the pomp and splendor of high life, the wit, the refinements, the nameless graces and luxuries of courts, seemed to breathe in invisible airs around her, and she made a Faubourg St. Germain of the darkest room into which she entered. Mary thought, when she came in, that she had never seen anything so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... humble and grateful, simple-hearted and right-minded, easily led, being conceived according to Rousseau and the idylls performed at this very epoch in all private drawing rooms.[1341] Lacking a knowledge him they overlook him; they read the steward's letter and immediately the whirl of high life again seizes them and, after a sigh bestowed on the distress of the poor, they make up their minds that their income for the year will be short. A disposition of this kind is not favorable to charity. Accordingly, complaints arise, not ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Colin Clout came home again. I could not get away, no matter how closely I watched the country life, from images and dreams which had all too royal blood, for they were descended like the thought of every poet from all the conquering dreams of Europe, and I wished to make that high life mix into some rough contemporary life without ceasing to be itself, as so many old books and Plays have mixed it and so few modern, and to do this I added another knowledge to my own. Lady Gregory had written no Plays, but ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... making a home for her son and daughter, from the moment she took her pen in her hand she became a creature of passion. She thought the English novel deplorably wanting in that element, and the task she had cut out for herself was to supply the deficiency. Passion in high life was the general formula of this work, for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted circles. She adored, in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted for her the romance of the world or, what is more to the point, the prime material of fiction. Their beauty and luxury, their ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... lucky stars, Annabelle, that I am such an easy-going fellow as I am known to be, or else high life in London would be aroused by gossip of another divorce. I'll forgive you; but don't ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... lemon and orange of the south, culminated at this point. Baltimore gathered figs, raisins, almonds and juicy grapes from Spain. Wines and brandies from France; teas of various flavor, from China; and rich, aromatic coffee from Java, all conspired to swell the tide of high life, where pride and indolence rolled and lounged in magnificence ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... other excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the "Moral Pitfalls of Paris," or the "Vampires of High Life in Vienna." The invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a moral and virtuous slant. Thus was afforded to the appreciative reader a double satisfaction, physical and ethical, pruriency ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Is reckon'd positive hypocrisy; The noble votaries of fashion Are ignorant of the tender passion. A shepherd, if his nymph doth alter, Killeth woe by means of halter: But in high life, if ladies prove Indifferent to an ardent love, What does the enamour'd title do, But set about and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... and people of fashion? Those pleasures I recommend to you; I will promote them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be called pleasures), of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... What have you been doing?" Mrs. Willoughby asked, perfunctorily. Though it was late in the morning she was still in bed, sitting up in a dressing sack, and turning the pages of a weekly publication that dealt in news of local high life. Its chief item, to-day, was the announcement of a dance she was to give shortly—at the club, as usual—and she had just finished for the second time the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... disappeared, the rise of monotheistic belief was accompanied by a transformation of the conception of the future of the soul; it was to be no longer the inert earthly thing of the old theories but instinct with a high life that fitted it to be the companion of divine beings and the sharer of their knowledge and their ideals.[1697] This conception led to the belief in the possibility of a nonmagical friendly intercourse ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... immediately to Eagle Park, attend to the funeral of my uncle, and the poor little boy who had paid so dearly for his intended advancement, and take charge from my uncle's legal adviser, who remained in the house. The "dreadful accident in high life" found its way into the papers of the day, and before dinner time a pile of visiting cards was poured in, which covered the table. The next day a letter arrived from the First Lord, announcing that he had made out my commission as post-captain, and trusted that I would allow him the ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. In that case, ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life. Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest preparation for receiving the happy revelations ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... lookin' for a place like that," said Brevoort, suddenly loquacious. "We sure aim to see this town. We just been paid off—we was workin' for the Bar-Cross—and we figured on seein' a little high life a-fore we went to punchin' again. Is that hotel you was speakin' about open ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... of Palaces is hardly to be seen at its best in September, for the Viceregal Court is now at Simla, and with it all the government officials and high life. Two months later and Calcutta is more brilliant, in at least one particular, than any city in the world. Every evening in "the season" there is a turn-out of splendid equipages on the bund road known as the Strand, the like of which is not to be seen elsewhere, East or West. It is the Rotten ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... picture of open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be found any week-day evening, when the weather is fair, on the grassy stretches which the Park rises into somewhat beyond the sacred close of high life. This space is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion as embowering foliage gives. There are no trees on any side for many acres, and the golden-red sunset glow hovers with an Indian-summer ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Avenue leaps up with a spurt of high life. In the window of a hotel dining room a gentleman sat eating his lunch, stevedoring a buttered roll with such gusto that one felt tempted to applaud. There are the white pillars of a bank and the battleship gray of the Salvation Army headquarters. Beyond Broad, the avenue ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... thirty or thirty-five years, remarkably well made, light-haired, wearing a full beard, with a bright eye, and pleasing face. Mixing on intimate terms with the men who make up what is called high life, and with whom pleasure is the only occupation, he was very popular with them all. They said he was a man that could always be relied upon, at all times ready to render you a service when it was in his power, a pleasant ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... she returned to England in 1784. The prince on her return declared the continuance and repeated the sincerity of his attachment, with, it would appear, more success. Their intimacy for some time was known only to the initiated in high life; they moved and met in the same society, apparently on terms rather of formal than familiar acquaintance. The secret was divulged shortly before the prince's quarrel with the king, and base advantage was taken of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... brilliant ball-rooms and moonlit conservatories," said Esther evasively. She did not care to rob Dutch Debby of her ideals by explaining that high life was not all ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and the lepidi homines. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged as a kinsman. About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... excessive discipleship of costume. It is a simple truth that you all know, although the pulpit has not yet uttered it, that much of the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... think I'll have it done up ship-shape, marriage in high life; papers all full of it; lovely appearance of the bride—ha, ha, ha! I'll save you all further trouble about her—a husband is better than a father in such a case. If that Italian comes round it'll ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... carvers are known by name. A French artist, Jean Labraellier, worked in ivory for Charles V. of France; and in Germany it must have been quite a fashionable pursuit in high life; the Elector of Saxony, August the Pious, who died in 1586, was an ivory worker, and there are two snuff-boxes shown as the work of Peter the Great. The Elector of Brandenburgh and Maximilian of Bavaria both carved ivory for their own recreation. In the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison |
