"Painstaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physical superiority, although he was in excellent health and never had experienced a single one of the ailments that commonly dodge the steps of childhood. He could not shine in jumping or leaping or climbing, but in the drill his painstaking attention placed him on a par with everybody else. It was his one chance of feeling himself the physical equal of his schoolmates, and it was the only field of common endeavour outside the lessons where he was not made to feel his ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... for the southward MacNair had told the men to work, therefore they worked unceasingly. Also he had told the women and the children to obey without question the words of the white kloochman, and therefore they absorbed her teaching with painstaking care. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... workingman, but, on the contrary, was comfortably aware of a being like her own, less privileged but more gifted, whose nearness was strength. And no teacher, not to say no woman, could have failed to be pleased at the thorough painstaking with which he followed the slightest of her hints, and the delight his flushed face would reveal when she praised the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the washing of the handful of fine towels with which the painstaking hostess was keeping the guest-room supplied, unwilling to furnish the aristocratic young person upstairs with the coarser articles used by herself and the others. Jeannette, all unaware that the snowy linen ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... After years of painstaking attention to all the details of a child's home surroundings, in the hope that this attention will result in distinct gains to the child's character, it must be very discouraging to notice some fine day ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... a little book on Tennyson, which has, I believe, the merit of containing all the most interesting anecdotes about him, and I also wrote the Rossetti in the Men of Letters Series, a painstaking book, rather rhetorical; though the truth about Rossetti cannot be told, even if it could ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with clouds, she wrote, her pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... much above their own level; they acquire the habits and the tastes, seldom the feelings, of a gentleman. They act the character well; it is carefully studied, and on the whole well sustained; it is a correct and painstaking performance, and the points tell distinctly; but there is throughout that indirect appeal to the audience which marks it to be only acting. They are more studiously aristocratic than the aristocracy, and have a horror of vulgarity which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the idea that his meals did him little good, and his meditations rather less. His conversation—of which there was not a great deal—was designed for the most part to sting. Many years' patient and painstaking sowing of his wild oats had left him at fifty-six with few pleasures; but among those that remained he ranked high ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... at the foot of the bed if there is room; a light quilt or blanket for use upon it; an easy chair, and a clock in good working order are desirable furnishings. Writing materials should be provided. Some careful and painstaking hostesses include a small writing desk, well stocked with paper, pens and ink, postage stamps, even picture postal cards already stamped and ready to be addressed. A new magazine and a few books, and a little basket containing ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the letter. Its beginning was commonplace—"My dear son, Elim"—but what followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained: ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... garden, where the darkness is gathering, and the black smoke which the chimney emits beneath the lowering clouds. Sigismond's window is the first to show a light on the ground floor; the cashier trims his lamp himself with painstaking care, and his tall shadow passes in front of the flame and bends double behind the grating. Sidonie's wrath is diverted a ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... the home can render in the cause of training girls for homemaking is probably close, painstaking study of its own individual girl—her likes, dislikes, aptitudes, and limitations. Home-mindedness shows itself nowhere so much as in the home; lack of home-mindedness shows there quite as much. The results of such study should throw great light upon the ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... aggressively to the accomplishment of some specific undertaking or pursuit, is diligent. The man who quietly and determinedly sticks to a task until it is accomplished, no matter what its difficulties or length, is assiduous. The man who makes steady and painstaking application to whatever ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... has to go to a cheap school,—a good indication that he did not intend to trust to fortune for his future welfare; soon after this we hear that dictionary Worcester is his chief instructor. He could not have found a more amiable or painstaking pedagogue; nor is it likely that the fine qualities of his teacher were ever better appreciated. Hawthorne himself says nothing of this, for it was not his way to express admiration for man or woman, but we can believe that he felt ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... first, is absorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability. Now getting respectable, for a college or university, is called "raising the standard of scholarship." Let this not be misunderstood: painstaking, infinitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a noble aim, well worth the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising the standard of scholarship. Does an educational institution exist for ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... me most forcibly with regard to that of Madrid, which I visited some years ago. The vertebrate specimens were old and wretchedly mounted, the lepidoptera nowhere; but the recently acquired animals were splendidly rendered. The youthful and painstaking amateur will, no doubt, however, do as I did when a boy—viz, pitch upon some professional taxidermist, to whose window he will repair at all available opportunities to learn his style, now and then venturing on some small ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and menus have all been tested at Miss Farmer's School of Cookery. The author wishes to express here her appreciation of the painstaking work of all the members of the staff of the school who have assisted in making this ...
— For Luncheon and Supper Guests • Alice Bradley
... refer very shortly to the botanical interest of the Primula, and that only to direct attention to Mr. Darwin's paper in the "Journal of the Linnaean Society," 1862, in which he records his very curious and painstaking inquiries into the dimorphism of the Primula, a peculiarity in the Primula that gardeners had long recognized in their arrangement of Primroses as "pin-eyed" and "thrum-eyed." It is perhaps owing to this dimorphism that the family is able to show a very ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... there was no more deserving or painstaking class in Ireland than the land agents, and he considered it a great hardship that under the Wyndham Act they obtain ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... home, when they came back, heavily asleep across his bed. Martie, with firmly shut lips, helped him into bed, and made the strong coffee for which he longed. After drinking it, he gave her a resentful, painstaking account of his unexpected return. His face was flushed, his voice thick. She gathered that he ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... existence of these faces bleached by moral or physical suffering; but, then, Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers and pearls and monsters of the deep overlooked or forgotten by the divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is one ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... volumes contain an account of Britain "from its first inhabiting" up to his own day, largely made up by combining the works of previous historians. The Chronicle bears evidence, however, of enormous and painstaking research which makes it valuable even now. Holinshed's style was clear, but not possessed of any distinctly literary quality. Much of what Shakespeare used was indeed but a paraphrase of an earlier ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... governing board of the Bureau of American Republics, composed of the representatives of all the American nations in Washington. That board discharged the duty imposed upon it with marked fidelity and painstaking care, and upon the courteous invitation of the United States of Brazil the conference was held at Rio de Janeiro, continuing from the 23d of July to the 29th of August last. Many subjects of common ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... "Bartimaeus," has in his book Unreality drawn a very sympathetic picture of Bermuda under the transparent alias of "Somer's Island." He, too, has obviously fallen a victim to its charms, and duly comments on the blue birds, which Maeterlinck could find here in any number without a lengthy and painstaking quest. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... information; and the routine of religious thought had been superseded in his instance by an amount of knowledge and feeling on matters theological, unusual at his time of life. Though apparently not gifted with any dangerous vivacity, or fatal facility of acquisition, his mind seemed clear and painstaking, and distinguished by common sense. He was brave ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... sake," I once observed, "couldn't you think of anything more interestingly insane to do than this? It's the slowest, most painstaking work ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... subject will be 'How to Use the Book.' I shall ask you to look out texts on the subjects, and to bring pencils and Bibles that you will not be afraid to mark, and do, dear sisters, let us give to the study of this Book the same zeal and painstaking that we do to our housekeeping, or our gardening or fancy work, then we shall receive a blessing—I am ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... when Sir Samuel Romilly, Mr. Gaselee, and Mr. Hargrave, appeared for the petitioner, and the Crown was represented by the Attorney-General and a junior counsel. A great mass of documentary and genealogical evidence was produced; but after a most painstaking investigation, Lords Erskine, Ellenborough, Eldon, and Redesdale came to the conclusion that Nicholas Vaux, the petitioner, had not made out his claim to the Earldom of Banbury, and the House of Lords, on the 11th of March ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... reverted again to the cause of his imprisonment. As the long, weary hours dragged by, he studied the matter with the utmost care, giving painstaking thought to the slightest details and the most trivial acts. His points were, consequently, well made. They were reasonable, logical, probable. The scheme broadened as he progressed. What he had supposed ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... cord work—and in grotesque zoological forms,—lizards, snakes, hounds, birds, and dragons' heads,—the Irish school attained their highest artistic development. Their art is striking, not for originality, not for its beauty, which is nevertheless great, but for painstaking. Knowing but one style of making a book beautiful, they lavished much time and loving care to achieve their end. The detail is extraordinarily minute and complicated. "I have counted," writes Professor Westwood, "[with a magnifying glass] in a small space scarcely three-quarters of ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... enlargement of the Kiel Canal. Reforms in naval gunnery urged by Admiral Sir Percy Scott were taken up, and plans were made for new bases in the Humber, in the Forth at Rosyth, and in the Orkneys, necessitated by the shift of front from the Channel to the North Sea. But against the technical skill, painstaking organization, and definitely aggressive purpose of Germany, even more radical measures were needed to put the tradition-ridden British navy in ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... possible the exact sites of historical events is with him a sport. The method pursued is that of rigid and scientific inquiry. Paris especially, Marie Antoinette and The Historic Thames in a lesser degree, bear witness to this, which, in a don, we should call minute and painstaking research, but which in our subject we guess to be the gratification ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... death-certificate of Frank Hillery, dated April 16, 1916, and a huge sheet of foolscap paper scrawled with labored characters in wavering lines. At the bottom two signatures were appended, the first in the same painstaking hand as the body of the document, but at the second Willa's breath caught again in her throat and her ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... records was intended for no eyes but his own. Yet painstaking, using ink, he had headed the volume: "A History of ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... eating his breakfast with a careful attention to detail. Anne thought he seemed like a painstaking child not altogether sure of his manners. She thought, too, with her swift insight into the needs of man, that he was horribly hungry. She was not, like Lydia, on the verge of impulse all the time, but she broke out here, and then bit ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... cares for the "tenderfoot" was good to Patches that day, and favored him with many sagging wires and leaning or broken posts, so that he could not ride far. Being painstaking and conscientious in his work, he had made not more than four miles by the beginning of the afternoon. Then he found a break that would occupy him for two hours at least. With rueful eyes he surveyed the long stretch of dilapidated fence. It was time, he reflected, that the Dean ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... a step on the companionway, and then, "Father!" I cried, and leaped up with an eagerness that, boy-like, I thought I concealed with painstaking dignity when I shook ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... thanks to Dr. Paul Carus, editor of The Monist and The Open Court for the opportunity of undertaking this work; to James Earl Russell, LL.D., Dean of Teachers College, Columbia University, for his encouragement in its prosecution; to Miss Caroline Eustis Seely for her intelligent and painstaking assistance in securing material for the notes; and to Miss Lydia G. Robinson and Miss Anna A. Kugler for their aid and helpful suggestions in connection with the proof-sheets. Without the generous help of all five this ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... regarding dietetics; to Miss S. Gertrude Hadlow, Head of the Department of English, Longwood High School of Commerce, Cleveland, for valuable suggestions of material formerly prepared which aided in the preparation of this work; to Mrs. Jessie M. Osgood for painstaking reading of the manuscript; and to the following for the use of illustrative material: The Macmillan Company, D. Appleton and Company, William Wood and Company, The Journal of the American Medical Association, ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... Lodge, Mr. Holland has for a number of years performed a most invaluable service. In this work, his familiar acquaintance with the French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese languages was put to uses the most important, as through the same, and his very intelligent and painstaking management, the colored Masons of Ohio have been fully recognized by, and brought into communication with, the Grand Lodges of France, Peru, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. Mr. Holland has also been appointed the representative in this country of the Grand Lodges of France and Peru, each appointment ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... hospital ship, white haired and uniformed, were disregarding their repast in order to paint directly in their albums, with a childish painstaking crudeness, the same panorama that was portrayed on the postal cards offered for sale at the door of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... upon a painstaking examination of original data pertaining to the "understanding of the import of the * * * clauses of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time the Amendment was adopted"; that is, during the period 1866-1868, Professor ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... reverence; but they are without subtlety, and lack the discriminating phrase. He is, however, deeply read in Elizabethan verse and prose, as his Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, one of his longest, most painstaking, and least successful works, proves; and of all the Elizabethan men of action, Drake is his hero. The English lovers of the sea, and the German lovers of efficiency, have both done honour to Drake. I remember years ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... time there was a little boy whose parents took things very seriously. They answered all his questions with painstaking precision. At a comparatively early age he could prove that fairies were non-existent. At the same time his toys were ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... who married an Abbot Academy graduate, after felicitous compliments to the school, made a graceful, sparkling speech, from which we quote,—"The wise, judicious, painstaking administration of affairs there goes always to the roots of character, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... about the hotel, and ordered from the best local tailor a suit of quiet colour and conservative cut, but of the very best English material. He bought no jewelry except a single small pearl for his necktie. His hat, his shoes, the way he had his neck shaved, all were changed as the result of a painstaking observation such as he had never practised before. He wanted to make himself as much as possible like the men of Julia's kind and class. And this desire modified his manner and speech as well as his appearance. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... seated with you." But he did not mean this any more than his host had meant his remark about the food. In his pack, which an Indian had brought from his horse, he carried some garments of civilization. And presently, after fresh water and not a little painstaking with brush and scarf, there came back to the Padre a young guest whose elegance and bearing and ease of the great world were to the exiled priest as sweet as was ...
— Padre Ignacio - Or The Song of Temptation • Owen Wister
... vessels of the fleet were out of sight naturally encouraged them. Jack observed, however, that the call to parade on deck was answered with more quickness than before, and the exercises were gone through with a painstaking steadiness greater than had been shown since the embarkation. When the men were dismissed from parade Jack remarked this ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... household and of the business. What words can describe the brain that can forget the cruel preoccupations caused by hidden want, by the daily needs of a family and the daily drudgery of a printer's business, which requires such minute, painstaking care; and soar, with the enthusiasm and intoxication of the man of science, into the regions of the unknown in quest of a secret which daily eludes the most subtle experiment? And the inventor, alas! as will shortly be seen, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... kind is especially adapted for high schools, and there are sure to be several painstaking amateurs among the pupils. To possess genuine value from the point of view of the naturalist, the pictures should not be touched up, no matter how much artistic beauty might thus be given to them; they should be ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... detectives handed Fletcher Monk the completed report on the activities of Diana Christy, he read it through thoroughly, savoring each juicy word between puffs of his cigar. The report was excellently constructed. It was painstaking in its detail. It named names, places, times, events, and even recorded certain revealing conversations. It gave the background of each of Mrs. Christy's lovers, even down to their income and place ...
— Heart • Henry Slesar
... at her mother, and received a smile of assent. She then took her lute and sang a romaunt of the day. Although but twelve years old, she was a well-taught and painstaking musician. Her little claw swept the chords with Courage and precision, and struck out the notes of the arpeggio clear, and distinct, and bright, like twinkling stars; but the main charm was her voice. It was not mighty, but it ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Laloo and understood. Freshmen might argue but even the Tennessee Shad wasted no time in producing the coin. There was exactly ten cents in Skippy's pocket after the most painstaking search revealed this last ray of hope in the lining of the threadbare pocket. Only ten cents to stop the deficit in his stomach! The choice was difficult. There was ginger-pop at Bill Appleby's, and jiggers at Al's, pancakes at Conover's, and the aching void ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native laborers—the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a valuable ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... by the teacher to write compositions in which they must not attempt any flights of fancy, but should only state what was really in them. The star production from this command was a composition written by a boy who was both sincere and painstaking. It ran as follows: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... of weeding, cultivating, and harvesting of their crops, the pupils should undertake some work in seed selection. This work not only results in the improvement of the plants grown from year to year, but also helps to train the pupils in painstaking observation and the discerning of minute points of excellence. The ambition to produce, by careful selection and thorough cultivation, a grain or flower better than has been, is aroused, and, as the pupil's interest increases, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... speeches, and that gesture, action, intonation—everything which constitutes a living individuality were in her case not so much the outcome of the feeling proper to the character, as the manifestation of diligent painstaking art which had not yet learnt to conceal itself. The gleam of the smallest spark of genius would have been a welcome relief to the monotony of talent.... It must not be forgotten, however, that a highly artificial play like 'Ingomar' is by no ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... your Service never realize it," Charles Verity returned. "They run in blinkers from first to last.—Not that I underrate their usefulness. They are honest, painstaking, thoroughly reliable, according to their lights. They do excellent journeyman work. But there lies the heart of the whole matter.—Are you content to do journeyman work only; or do you aspire to something greater?—If the former, then you had best forget ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... ambitious and painstaking girl will arrange the stage for a proposal, with untiring patience, months before it actually happens. When she practices assiduously all the morning, that she may execute difficult passages with apparent ease in the evening, ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... Paul places much value upon the gift bestowed upon us, the gift of knowing how we are "to walk and to please God." In the world this gift is as great as it is rare. Though the offer is made to the whole world and publicly proclaimed, further exhortation is indispensable, and Paul is painstaking and diligent in administering it. The trouble is, we are in danger of becoming indolent and negligent, forgetful and ungrateful—vices menacing and great, and which, alas, are ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... I saw that all striving and all painstaking in the working of men is but the jealousy of one with another; this too is vanity and the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a deep thinker. He had no faith in new theories. All his norms and criteria were conventional. His Thesis on the French Revolution was noteworthy in college annals, not merely for its painstaking and voluminous accuracy, but for the fact that it was the dryest, deadest, most formal, and most orthodox screed ever written on the subject. He was a very reserved man, and his natural inhibition was large in quantity and ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... the moving and seat building were accomplished—the last not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking desire to do something—anything!—for "poor Eleanor," as he named her in his remorseful thought. There was never a day—indeed, there was not often an hour!—when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he tried, in ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the long-breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to his brilliant mental endowments. "I did wonder," says Mr. Wendell Phillips, "at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his historical works. In early life he had no industry, not needing it. All he cared for in a book he caught quickly,—the spirit of it, and all his mind needed or would use. This quickness of apprehension was marvellous." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... acquaintance is the author of this book, who honors me in asking that I write these few lines of introduction. His experience is full of interest. I have listened night after night with profit to his sermons, and he has dug his way in the most painstaking fashion out of the darkness of unfaith into the beauty and strength of faith in the Lord ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... precede the glacial cold? did they make their appearance during a warm interglacial period? or was it not until the final retreat of the glaciers that they first wandered into Europe? These questions are far from settled; yet they have been the object of a great amount of painstaking research. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... finding a sale for it, and somehow it yielded even better prices than the year before. She said that others were complaining of a drought, and that the fruit in consequence was generally inferior in size, so that those who, like myself, had been lucky enough, or painstaking enough, to secure a full crop, were doing better than ever. Then our little strawberry-peddler, Lucy Varick, was doing a thriving business. She established a list of customers among the great ladies in the city, who bought large daily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... necessary to support a given weight. Taking that weight at 200 pounds—which would allow for the weight of a man and a very light apparatus—he estimated that 126 square feet would be necessary for support. His pamphlet, published at Basle in 1784, shows him to have been a painstaking student ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... believed in premeditation, and always wrote and corrected his speeches with fastidious care. While such men knew that inspiration might come at the moment of speaking, they preferred to base their chances of success upon painstaking preparation. ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... painstaking investigation on the action of Electric Waves on different kinds of matter, Dr. Bose invented a new type of self-recovering electric receiver, "so perfect in its action that the Electrician suggested its use ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... possible that she was the confederate of these painstaking agents who lurked with sinister patience outside the very gates of the ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... that much of it was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out. Obviously, the place to commence at was that brightly illuminated title-page, the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... address was spoken—as we learn from the painstaking and generous biographer of the United Irishmen, Dr, Madden—"in so loud a voice as to be distinctly heard at the outer doors of the court-house; and yet, though he spoke in a loud tone, there was nothing ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... position he obtained was that of bell boy in a hotel. Later on he learned to be a painter and grainer, then a printer, a reporter, and finally an editorial writer. He was energetic, industrious and painstaking in whatever he undertook to do, therefore always employed. Early in his struggle he realized the need of an education, in the acquirement of which he applied himself with eager diligence. Nature had endowed him with keen ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... an honest, painstaking man, with a large family, and he came to sea for their benefit, after having nearly given up ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... mistaken," she said; "Professor Bottomly is celebrated for the absolute and painstaking accuracy of her deductions and the boldness and the imagination of her scientific investigations. She is the most cautious scientist in America; she would never announce such a discovery to the newspapers unless she were ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... at once. Lowell had received several broad hints, following the inspector's letter, but he was waiting an imperative order before stopping the dancing, because he knew that any high-handed interference just then would undo an incalculable amount of his painstaking work with the Indians. He had figured that he could work personally with Fire Bear after the young medicine man's first ardor in his new calling had somewhat cooled. Then had come the murder, with everything pointing to the implication of the young Indian, and with consequent ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... knowledge of New York and his work increased he was given less and less of the "rough-neck" work to do. He proved himself, in fact, a stolid and painstaking "investigator." As a divorce-suit shadower he was equally resourceful and equally successful. When his agency took over the bankers' protective work he was advanced to this new department, where he found himself compelled to a new term of ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... but there was no breakdown of Edison's faith in ultimate success—no diminution of his sanguine and confident expectations. The failure of an experiment simply meant to him that he had found something else that would not work, thus bringing the possible goal a little nearer by a process of painstaking elimination. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... respectable practice I should be obliged to march with the army of doctors who carry a great array of small weapons, and who find out what is the matter with their patients after all sorts of experiment and painstaking analysis, and comparing the results of their thermometers and microscopes with scientific books of reference. After I have done all that, you know, if I have had good luck I shall come to exactly what you can say before ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... procured otherwise. The fundamental idea was to make a quilt that would withstand the greatest possible amount of wear. Some of the artistic possibilities in both colour and design were often subordinated to the desire to make quilts as nearly imperishable as possible. The painstaking needlework required to produce a quilt deserved the best of material for its foundation. Silks, satins, velvets, and fine linen and cotton fabrics of delicate shades were not favoured as quilt material by the old-time needleworkers, who wrought for service first ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful, courageous labor; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... considerable diversity of practice in this particular, both as to the mode of plowing, times of working the crop, and implements used. The cultivation, however, is as easy and simple as that commonly bestowed on Indian corn or beans, but must be a little more thorough and painstaking. That is all. None need shrink from planting this crop through any apprehension that they will not work it properly. The three essential points are: keep the soil loose, the grass down, and do no harm to the young pods as they ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... a specialty of certain kinds of psychic investigation and while Crookes made a detailed and careful study of materialization Lodge has given equally painstaking efforts to investigations by the use of that class of sensitives known as "mediums." A medium is not necessarily a clairvoyant, and usually is not clairvoyant. A person in whose body the etheric matter easily separates from the physical matter is a medium and can readily be ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... man who, having got back in a mood of contrition, from erratic abandonment to fearful joys, found the soothing routine of professional practice unexpectedly opening anew to him. The highest desire of his soul just now was for a respectable life of painstaking. If this, his first summons since his return, had been to attend upon a cat or dog, he would scarcely have ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... that there was not enough English in the first number. It contains only sixteen pages, and the majority of readers desire to read Esperanto matter, not English. One of our painstaking collaborators has promised to mark all words not to be found in the Textbook, and we will always give their meanings. In this manner we hope to please those who wish to see more in English, ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 2 • Various
... even than his desire for money, and it was a very black crime in his eyes for any one to produce one of his works before the public until it had been brought to the highest possible pitch of perfection. This intense anxiety to do his best, which caused him the most painstaking labour, often pressed very hardly on managers of magazines. He was generally paid in advance, so that his money was safe; and though he could be absolutely trusted to finish sooner or later what he had undertaken, he showed a lofty indifference to the exigencies of monthly publication. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the question is one to be settled only by the painstaking, truth-loving investigation of skilled naturalists. It is the duty of the general public to await the result in patience; and, above all things, to discourage, as they would any other crimes, the attempt to enlist the prejudices of the ignorant, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... was a much longer missive, written in my mother's neat, painstaking hand, and in my mother's language. My story can be advanced in no better way than by translating freely from the original Dutch document, which I still have, and which shows, if nothing else, that Dame Mauverensen had powers of directness ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... it is proper to say here that his volume was printed at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,—a press that, in the words of a writer on matters of typographical style, "maintained the reputation of being one of the three or four most painstaking establishments in the world." Such places are few and far between, unlike the "book and job printing establishments" that, like the poor, are always with us, and where no book ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... work makes rapid progress. In a few months each sister had a novel completed. Charlotte, a grave and quiet study of Belgian life and character, 'The Professor;' Anne, a painstaking account of a governess's trials, which she entitled 'Agnes Grey.' Emily's story was very different, and less perceptibly interwoven with her own experience. We all know at least the name ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... of painting. A pretty little studio was built, and Dora spent long hours in admiring both her husband and his work. He gave promise of being some day a good artist—not a genius. The world would never rave about his pictures; but, in time, he would be a conscientious, painstaking artist. Among his small coterie of friends ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... He believed Kenwardine really was surprised to hear he had nearly been crushed by the block; but the fellow was clever and had begun to talk about the accidents. He must do nothing to rouse his suspicions, and began a painstaking account of the matter, explaining that the guard-rail had got loose, but saying nothing about the clamps being tampered with. Indeed, the trouble he took about the explanation was in harmony with his character and his interest in his work, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... personal valor and bravery—the day of great deeds and of courage most marvelous. To write down a catalogue of all the names that then were glorious, to make a list of all the daring deeds that then were done—this were an impossible task for the most painstaking of statisticians, the most conscientious of historians and chroniclers. For there were men in those days who achieved world-wide fame, such as Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins, Raleigh, Grenville, and Gilbert—but there were also other ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel. If the class were very small, results of some distinctness might doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... houses, now "antediluvian" in their turn; are ready also to climb the scaffold-poles always to be found somewhere about the great church, or dive along the odd, secret passages of the old builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud of, and therefore painstaking about, the place) of architectural periods, of Gothic "late" and "early," layer upon layer, down to round-arched "Norman," like the famous staircase of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... edited with no less painstaking care, and excellence in judgment, by William Allingham, includes an unsurpassed selection of the representative ballads which have won fame and favor for the bards of Britain. In no other form is so rare and pleasing a collection of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... unsettle you, and prevent you from reaping the due advantages of study and self-dependence in youth. I cannot, however, believe that by being open with you I shall now be in any danger of thwarting his plans, for you have already proved yourself a wise, moderate, conscientious man, diligent and painstaking. Forgive me for appearing to praise you. I had no such intention. I was only uttering as a fact to be considered in the question, what upon ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... alike inside and outside of his head, and at last he took all his fragments and with infinite consideration moulded them into unity. So studiously had he wrought that by the time of delivery he had unconsciously committed the whole speech accurately to memory. If so much painstaking seemed to indicate an exaggerated notion of the importance of his words, he was soon vindicated by events; for what he said was subjected to a dissection and a criticism such as have not often pursued the winged words of the orator. When at last the composition ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... and muddy roads that still separated them. Mrs. Aylett also dispatched a billet by the coachman, the graceful burden of which was the same as that of Mabel's petition, and the two long-sundered friends were speedily together; fellow-partakers of a bountiful and painstaking hospitality, which kept them continually in mind that they were ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Library-Keepers. He wrote a History of King's Lynn, which was published in the year of his death, 1738, and several works relating to Norwich, which are still in manuscript; Mr. Gordon Goodwin, the writer of his biography in the "Dictionary of National Biography," says Mackerell was "an accurate, painstaking antiquary, and left work of permanent value." Although he compiled the second edition of the catalogue during his extended tenure of office, his services were either not appreciated, or the members thought that the rule regarding ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... effects as he left" (very much after the manner of my solicitor), one can't help feeling a little let down. Of such indeed are the perils of the Higher Tushery. They should not, however, be allowed to prejudice the consideration of a painstaking narrative which may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... its aspects as a science also; it is in very truth a science of life, a science of the soul. It applies to everything the scientific method of oft-repeated, painstaking observation, and then tabulates the results and makes deductions from them. In this way it has investigated the various planes of Nature, the conditions of man's consciousness during life and after what is commonly called death. It cannot ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... the drawer, and there, side by side, lay two neat but far from voluminous manuscripts, each weighted down by the unused portion of the scratch pad from which the written sheets had been torn. One was in the bold, superior scrawl of a boy, the other ineffably feminine in its painstaking ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... and built themselves a cabin on the river bank near the promontory. Quiet, simple men, suspected somewhat of psalm-singing, and undue retirement on Sundays, they attracted but little attention. But when, through some original conception or painstaking deliberation, they turned the current of the river so as to restrict the overflow between the promontory and the river bank, disclosing an auriferous "bar" of inconceivable richness, and establishing their theory that it was really the former channel of the river, choked and diverted ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a bird, a flower, or an open-air incident, however painstaking and minute the record, teems with literary memories. The sight of the Scotch hills ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... rule; that Free-Trade—after "running-a-muck" of panic and disaster, from the birth of the Republic, to the outbreak of the Rebellion, with whose failure it should naturally have expired—was now reanimated, and stood, defiantly threatening all the great industries of our Land; that all his own painstaking efforts, and those of the band of devoted Patriots who stood by him to free the Southern Slaves, had mainly resulted in hiding from sight the repulsive chains of enforced servitude, under the outward garb ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... rank among the buccaneers beyond occasionally being put in charge of a boat or a small company on shore, but as a recorder of the doings of his companions he proved both careful and painstaking. Dampier had a great regard for him, and in his book he writes: "My ingenious friend Ringrose had no mind to this voyage, but was necessitated to ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... standard, and admit rarely the Anglicised form, less often the Greek, and least often the Native. As to the minutiae of spelling I need scarcely say that I have been tremendously aided by Boissevain's exhaustive studies, briefly summarized in his notes. This painstaking care, for which he feels almost obliged to apologize, will lend a permanent lustre to ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... brings to his work the most inexhaustible and painstaking patience, the most thorough devotion to the labor he has undertaken, and the deepest mental sympathy with his subjects. His present work embraces ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... this motion ever chances to intermit, he cries out miracle! and would offer a prize to the genius that can satisfactorily explain so marvellous a phenomenon. He is the best fellow under the sun; but all my painstaking to break him of this perverseness is utterly vain and thrown away; and if I would not earn sorry thanks for my good intentions, I must even let ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... estates in favour of his two sons and their heirs for ever. This did not represent his complete or final testament, for he added codicils at various times, the latest being executed the day before his death. The document is worth studying; it reveals something of the laborious, painstaking mind reaching out down the rivers and streams of the future that were to flow from the fountain of his own greatness; it reveals also his triple conception of the obligations of human life in this world—the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... allies, and the boy was ever ready to amuse her, often giving up his own plans to take her for a walk to pick flowers in the hedgerow, or to sail a tiny boat for her in the pools left as the sea retired. Mrs. Walsham found, to her surprise, that the child gave little trouble. She was quiet and painstaking during the half hours in the morning and afternoon when she was in the school room, while at mealtimes her prattle and talk amused both mother and son, and altogether she made the house brighter and ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... British points of view as well as from several different kinds of evidence. Kingsford's History of Canada, volumes iv to vii, treats the period in considerable detail. Justin Smith's two volumes, Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony, is the work of a most painstaking American scholar who had already produced an excellent account of Arnold's March from Cambridge to Quebec, in which, for the first time, Arnold's Journal was printed word for word. Arnold's Expedition to Quebec, by J. Codman, is another careful ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Kennedy, who had been ruminating over the incident in his usual painstaking way, ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... has taken painstaking research and a great deal of psychological statistical analysis, but we have found that one company—and one company only—benefits by these legal changes. Did you ever ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary command over the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly command of your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it, can be acquired without painstaking, or in a very short time. The kind of drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... him that, for all her angelic profile, she was a very stupidly obstinate girl. She didn't like the tropics. He had brought her out there, where she had no friends, and now, she said, he was becoming inconsiderate. She had a presentiment of some misfortune, and notwithstanding Davidson's painstaking explanations, she could not see why her presentiments were to be disregarded. On the very last evening before Davidson went away she asked him in a ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... manner, a defect which might deprive his valuable book of much of its unquestionable reliability and importance. The attentive student, however, finds, after going seriously through the mass of material still on hand, that Mr. Davis has been so painstaking and honest, that he is very much inclined to forgive the ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... a protest; because no one can entertain a doubt as to his ability to edit in a most satisfactory manner the work he has undertaken; and because also we can bear testimony to the labour and conscientious painstaking which he is employing to clear up the various obscure points in that very curious document. The following communication from a valued correspondent, in answering W.'s Query as to Henno Rusticus, confirms the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... rewrite your ideas until they are expressed in clear, concise terms. Pope sometimes spent a whole day in perfecting one couplet. Gibbon consumed twenty years gathering material for and rewriting the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Although you cannot devote such painstaking preparation to a speech, you should take time to eliminate useless words, crowd whole paragraphs into a sentence and choose proper illustrations. Good speeches, like plays, are not written; they are rewritten. The National ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... admiration of the world? (24) And once more, habits of indolence, along with the fleeting pleasures of the moment, are incapable, as gymnastic trainers say, of setting up (25) a good habit of body, or of implanting in the soul any knowledge worthy of account; whereas by painstaking endeavour in the pursuit of high and noble deeds, as good men tell us, through endurance we shall in the end attain the goal. So ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... suggestions and reproofs so amiably that the Principal, often irate at her lack of capacity, had not the heart to scold her too severely. Of her own choice, I am afraid, Winnie would never have opened a book, but she managed to get up her subjects for her classes, and was a conscientious, painstaking mistress, if ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... "I don't understan' it! Booker T. Washington he ain't never ben here befo', yit he knows mo' 'bout dese parts an' mo' 'bout us den what eny of us knows ourselves." This old man did not know that one of Mr. Washington's most painstaking and efficient assistants, Mr. Monroe N. Work, the editor of the Negro Year Book, devoted much of his time to keeping his chief provided with this startlingly accurate information about his people in every section of the ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... of a man who might solve a puzzle by hard, painstaking experiment and inquiry, but rather hoped that some brilliant flash of inspiration or luck might give him the key that would fit it together at once. They rarely ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Indian Mutiny (6 vols., 1890); also histories of the East India Company and of Christianity in India, and Lives of Sir John Malcolm and other Indian soldiers and statesmen. All his writings are characterised by painstaking research, love of truth, and a style suited to the importance of his subjects. He was made ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... ought to be so deeply effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means consistently adhered ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... tone-language has grown, precisely as the word-language grew out of men's early attempts to communicate facts to one another. Its story records a slow, painstaking building up of principles to control its raw materials; for music, as we understand it, cannot exist without some kind of design. Vague sounds produce vague, fleeting impressions. Definiteness in tonal relations and rhythmic plan is requisite to produce a defined, enduring ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... idea is most strikingly illustrated in the cultivation, or breeding, of the horse from a primitive creature into the splendid animals which represent the various types of equine present-day perfection. It has taken generations of the most [10] painstaking intelligence to understand the traits which had to be evolved in scientific mating to reach the present standard. If the same rules, or lack of rules, applied to the mating of horses as applied to ourselves, there would be few, if any, "thoroughbreds" among them. The ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... blushing slightly. "He is just as you left him; very painstaking and efficient in the parish, and all that, but, oh, so stupid in some ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... significant than the base camps of the efficiency and painstaking thoroughness of the British war-machine are the training camps scattered behind the lines. Typical of these is the great camp at Etaples, on the French coast, where 150,000 men can be trained at a time. These are not schools for raw recruits, mind ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... that he was now lieutenant; if anything should happen to Tontz, he would be commander. He was secretary of the expedition, drew careful maps, and made voluminous daily entries in a journal, which was afterward found to be a marvel of painstaking both in the facts and fictions which it contained. Scanty mention was there of La Salle and Tontz Main de Fer, and much of Pere Francois Xavier, but it was clear, explicit, depicting the advantages of an acquisition of this territory to the crown of France ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... cleansing the wounds of purulent material. Even those with the smaller burns are very weak and all suffered from diarrhea. In the farm houses in the vicinity, almost everywhere, there are also wounded. Father Rektor made daily rounds and acted in the capacity of a painstaking physician and was a great Samaritan. Our work was, in the eyes of the people, a greater boost for Christianity than all our work ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... acting wisely, and on the spur of the moment, in new and untried circumstances, is an incommunicable faculty, which genius, and genius only, can possess. And genius is as rare now as it ever was. Any man of talent can be converted, by dint of study and painstaking, into a good military critic; but a Wellington or a Napoleon had as certainly to be born what they were, as a Dante ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Myrover's painstaking instruction, could read this sign very distinctly. In fact, she had often read it before. For Sophy was a child who loved beauty, in a blind, groping sort of way, and had sometimes stood by the fence of the cemetery and looked through at the green mounds and shaded walks and blooming ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... into another when hurrying to the apothecary. In this latter monologue, too, when all his thoughts must have been of Juliet and their star-crossed fates, and love-devouring Death, he is able to picture for us the apothecary and his shop with a wealth of detail that says more for Shakespeare's painstaking and memory than for his insight into character. The fault, however, is not so grave as it would be if Romeo were a different kind of man; but like Hamlet he is always ready to unpack his heart with words, and if ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... able to amply reiterate those praises. The plot again is well developed and logically carried out, while the language used by the authoress is always happy and well chosen, and never commonplace.... The story is a very powerful one indeed, and may be highly commended as a piece of painstaking fiction ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... not suppose he is having in the foregoing descriptions examples of the style of ceremonials most in fashion at the Greek court. Had formality been intended, the affair would have been the subject of painstaking consideration at a meeting of officials in the imperial residence, and every point within foresight arranged; after which the revolution of the earth might have quickened, and darkness been unnaturally precipitated, without inducing the slightest ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... their letters, were scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly this chronic disposition has been quickened into an acute form by the falling-in of some few thousands to their domestic treasury,—left as the sole residuum of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into her head to make a will in Bob's favor, leaving, among other good things, a nice little bit of land in a rural district half an hour's railroad-ride ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... underneath, their plumage resembling the foliage of the trees they hunt, nest, and live among. Sexes alike. More deliberate in habit than the restless, flitting warblers that are chiefly seen darting about the ends of twigs. Vireos are more painstaking gleaners; they carefully explore the bark, turn their heads upward to investigate the under side of leaves, and usually keep well hidden among the foliage. Bill hooked at tip for holding worms and insects. Gifted songsters, superior to the warblers. This family is peculiar ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... record indicating that the object glasses of these enormously attenuated instruments ever exceeded in diameter two and one-half inches. Yet, with unwieldy and ungainly telescopes, nearly always defining badly, wonders were accomplished by the painstaking and indomitable observers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... seemed to be designed for magical purposes. The library of this singular character was of the same miscellaneous description with its other effects. Curious manuscripts of classical antiquity lay mingled with the voluminous labours of Christian divines, and of those painstaking sages who professed the chemical science, and proffered to guide their students into the most secret recesses of nature, by means of the Hermetical Philosophy [a system of philosophy ascribed to the Egyptian Hermes (Thoth) who was reputed to have written certain ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... de mer when I was on the steamer," the child said, in her pretty, painstaking English—she spoke French habitually. "I do not like to have it on the land. The gentleman in there," she pointed to the room beyond where Gaspard was again distressfully sleeping the sleep of the spent after a period of the most profound ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... Tom Reade, on the other hand, was almost provokingly slow and cool as he carefully adjusted the sensitive assaying balance and finally weighed the buttons. Then he did some slow, painstaking calculating. At ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... else—a precis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party invariably gives up its chance of finishing the war at the precise time ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... began to dance. There was a particularly painstaking little boy in a white silk shirt and black velvet knickerbockers, very tight in places, who danced assiduously, looking neither to the right nor to the left. "Right leg, To-mus, left leg, To-mus!" came in stentorian tones from a Fraulein in the corner, ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss |
