"Phlegmatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is all this to me?" was the strange and rather phlegmatic response of the outlaw, who did not seem to take in the full meaning of his officer's speech, and whose mind, indeed, was at that moment wandering to far other considerations. Dillon seemed not ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... consumed, and part of the building had fallen into the canal and choked it up, while fifteen schuyts, waiting to be discharged of their cargoes, had been obliged to retreat from the fury of the flames, the phlegmatic skippers looking on with their pipes in their mouths, and their hands in ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... and a phlegmatic indifference of disposition, although diametrically in opposition to each other, will produce the same results: in the former, it is mental, in the latter, animal courage. Paradoxical as it may appear, the most certain and most ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the phlegmatic brain of her people, was stupefied for a little time, then, recovering some vivacity, she inquired hesitatingly as though she was never at her ease ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... another of the boxes that were the seats in this tent-jail, which was also the courtroom of the Vigilance Committee, and mechanically counted the slow tears that trickled down between the third and fourth fingers of each hand. A half-hour spent so would have rasped the nerves of the most phlegmatic man in the town, and Jack was not phlegmatic; fifteen minutes of watching that silent weeping sufficed to bring a ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... recorded in eternal brass. Why should politics be confined to the negotiations of ambassadors, and the cabinets of princes? I have often revolved the question, and by all that is sacred I can see no reason for it. Is it natural that the unanimating and phlegmatic transactions of a court should engage a more unwearied attention, awaken a brighter invention, or incite a more arduous pursuit than those of love? When beauty solicits the appetite, when the most ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... habits, and barbarous withal. His whole life is spent in the bare process of procuring a living. He consumes a large amount of oleaginous food, and breathes a damp heavy atmosphere, and is, consequently, of a dull phlegmatic temperament. Notwithstanding his uncertain supplies of food, he is recklessly improvident, and indifferent to all the lessons of experience. Intellectual pursuits are all precluded. There is no motive, no opportunity, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... talked of bygone days, Jeanne with tears in her throat, and Rosalie in the quiet tone of a phlegmatic peasant. The servant kept referring to the subject of unpaid interests; and at last requested Jeanne to give her up all the business papers that Jeanne, in her ignorance of money matters, was hiding from her, out of consideration for ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... George than to any one else in the world. George had been as fair of face and hair as Andrew was dark, as cheerful and amusing as Andrew was gloomy and dispiriting, as agile and dexterous of mind and body as his brother was slow and angular, as emotional and warm-hearted as the other was phlegmatic and sour—or so it seemed to the father and to nearly ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... contrast between the two men who faced each other in the Prince's room, and who represented those two schools of thought which have ever been in conflict in religion—reason and authority, and those two types of character which have ever collided in life—the phlegmatic and ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... purified and sanctified rather than polluted by the divinity." As an additional argument against the cause being divine, he adduces the fact that this disease is hereditary, like other diseases, and that it attacks persons of a peculiar temperament, namely, the phlegmatic, but not the bilious; and "yet if it were really more divine than the others," he justly adds, "it ought ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... is churning, Now the horrid sirens blow; Now are India's guests returning Home from India's Greatest Show; Now the gleeful Asiatic Speeds them on their wild career, And, though normally phlegmatic, Gives a ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... by an Indian, who, to Sir Christopher's inquiry if all was well, answered, sententiously, "All well." On arriving at the house, they found the soldier, Philip, who manifested his joy at seeing them again in a manner contrasting somewhat with that of the phlegmatic native. ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... an author in a paroxysm of mortified vanity, nor the energy which he discovers when stung by the poisoned darts of sarcasm; but, on the other hand, the man that is roused to fighting-fury by a personal attack usually subsides very promptly. The more phlegmatic race, who take these things quietly, lay their account with the oblivion which speedily overtakes the spiteful article. These are the truly courageous men of letters; and if the weaklings seem at first to be the strong men, they cannot hold out for ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... be, when we have burnt these people out or shot them, and in various ways annexed a good deal of the land they now live on, how are we to replace them? What strikes one is that time and the country, acting on the naturally phlegmatic Dutch character, has produced a type exactly suited to this life and these surroundings. And it does seem in many ways a pity to destroy this type unless you have something to take its place. Except in one or two very ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after, another, a little before the fire; the old women, and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call the old women too, remarked, especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over, that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... next Thursday night—But between now and Friday I'll do nothing but fret away my strength. Oh, I'm not saying I don't need the rehearsals! But I don't need them strung out through a week. That system's well enough for phlegmatic singers; it only drains me. Every single feature of operatic routine is detrimental to me. I usually go on like a horse that's been fixed to lose a race. I have to work hard to do my worst, let alone my best. I wish you could hear me sing well, once," ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... his hand at him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... very eyes of the Court, and doing her best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the warming-pan lie—our imaginative innocence being most accessible in the region of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... King's Theatre. He must have admired the beauty, grace, and promise of the youthful Rosina, had he been ten times a Dutchman; and if he heard of her intended emigration to America, as he possibly might have done, it most likely excited no particular emotion in his phlegmatic bosom. He could not have imagined that the exportation of a little singing-girl to New York should interfere with a potential venture of his own in fair linen. The gods kindly hid the future from his eyes, so that he might enjoy the comic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... which they took no immediate interest or even knew what it was about. During the course of the Revolution there were thirty thousand Hessians in the British armies in America, and, as their owners, the German princelings, received L5 apiece for them it was a profitable arrangement for those phlegmatic, corpulent, and braggart personages. The Americans complained that the Hessians were brutal and tricky fighters; but in reality they merely carried out the ideals of their German Fatherland which remained behind the rest of Europe in its ideals of what was fitting in war. Being uncivilized, they ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... because he seemed to be too fond of the counsels of Spain and the Empire. Please to observe that these two Courts, which had made incredible solicitations to him while he wavered, began, as soon as his purpose was fixed, to draw back,—a fatality due to the phlegmatic temper of the Spaniard, dignified by the name of prudence, joined to the astute politics of the house of Austria. You may observe at the same time that the Count, who had continued firm and unshaken three months together, changed his mind ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... well, to discredit the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the disabling regime that now governs, an epoch, which would witness the shaking off, by the heavy, phlegmatic red man of the present, of his dull lethargy, with the casting behind him of former inaction and unproductiveness; and his being moved to assert a healthy, genuine, wholesome activity, to be directed ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... just such a training as made him popular. For he passed part of every year in Texas with Dick Millard, and all that could be known about horses and hunting and woodcraft, Harry Hallam knew. He had also taken on very easily the Texan manner, frank, yet rather proud and phlegmatic: "Evidently a young man who knows what he wants, and will be apt ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... of the people who supply it with soldiers. The German Army is what it is not through the application of any academic theory of military perfection, but through the application of organization to German character. Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to initiative, the Germans before the era of modern Germany had far less of the martial instinct than the French. German army makers, including the master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... eyes of those who thus bivouacked for the first time in the wilderness. To them the great waggons; the gigantic Cape-oxen—which appeared to have been created expressly to match the waggons as well as to carry their own ponderous horns; the wild-looking Hottentots and Bushmen; the big phlegmatic Dutchmen; the bristling thorns of the mimosas, cropping out of comparative darkness; the varied groups of emigrants; the weird forms of the clumps of cactus, aloes, euphorbias, and other strange plants, lit ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... signboard with the name of Van Klopen, dressmaker, and in the thousands of handbills distributed with the utmost profusion, he called himself the "Regenerator of Fashion." This was an idea that would have never originated in the brain of the phlegmatic Dutchman, and whence came the funds to carry on the business? On this point he was discreetly silent. The enterprise was at first far from a success, for during nearly a month Paris almost split its sides laughing at the absurd pretensions of the self-dubbed "Regenerator of Fashion." ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... to-day soft, balmy, with healing on their wings, to-night the wind fiend, the destroying simoom, rushing through the land, withering and scorching every flower and blade of herbage on its way. On the other hand, the calm, phlegmatic temperament of the North accords well with her silent mountains, her serener skies, and her less vehement, but chilling winds. The South, too, is the native home of the most violent acute diseases, such as yellow fever and cholera. But, aside from this general climatic influence, there is the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... essentials, and there was not much that young de Crespigny did not know about getting what he wanted done in quick time. Within half an hour seven pretty good camels were sauntering southward out of Hebron, with a couple of phlegmatic Arab policemen perched on the two leaders, and the noses of the others tied to the empty saddles of the beasts ahead. They were neither as big nor in as good condition as old Ali Baba's wonderful string, but very likely better than any that the wool-merchant ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... unbound by day, and to shut them down at night, or while sailing. As long as these men were unarmed and themselves armed, they had not the slightest fear of any trouble arising. For the Acadians, though stout, muscular fellows, were all so good-natured and phlegmatic in their faces that no danger of anything so desperate as an attack on their part was to be anticipated. It was decided, however, while they were on deck, to keep them confined to the forward part ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... Knowing this, William H. Vanderbilt made a studious policy of standing in with his father, truckling to his every caprice and demand, and proving that he could make an independent living. He is described as a phlegmatic man of dull and slow mental processes, domestic tastes and of kindly disposition to his children. His father (so the chronicles tell) did not think that he "would ever amount to anything," but by infinite plodding, exacting the severest labor from ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... it is morn—I rise To smell the roses sweet; Emphatic are my hips and thighs, Phlegmatic are my feet. Ten thousand roses have I got Within a garden small, Give me but strength to smell the lot, Oh, ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... called the most perfect straight-forward hands; that is, men who on the turf would hold the most difficult three-year-old to the steady stroke of the two-mile course, and place him as a winner to half-a-length—who in the hunting-field would ride the hottest, or the most phlegmatic made hunter, with equal skill, through all difficulties of ground, and over every species of fence, with admirable precision and equality of hand—or who on the exercise ground would place his broken charger on his haunches, and make him walk four miles an hour, canter six and a half, trot ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... appointments, talking with his publishers, his lawyers, his family, his friends. It would have goaded almost any man into excitement and irritability, but it was all in a day's work with Lawson. Yet he is not phlegmatic; indeed, he is extraordinarily animated. But it is animation with composure. In a business way there is not a busier man in the country, but he finds leisure for other interests—books, pictures, bronzes, horses. He has a beautiful ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... energy of his keen intelligence from following the line marked out for it. That he was to dispatch without quarter the flower of the youth of Florence troubled him, as I take it, no whit. He was too imperturbable, too phlegmatic for that. Had he been of our race he might, perhaps, have sighed over their fate, for we that are of the race of Rome have some droppings of the old Roman pity as ingredients in our composition. Messer Griffo was no such fantastico, but a plain, straightforward, journeyman sword-bearer ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... months, almost every entry in the Captain's green volume dealt with Tristram's appetite. Nor did this fluctuate enough to make the record exciting. He was a slow, phlegmatic infant, with red cheeks and an exuberant crop of yellow curls. He slept all night and a good third of the day, and, beyond cutting ten teeth in as many months, exhibited no precocity. Nothing troubled him, if we except an insatiable hunger. He was weaned ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nothing. The shy sprite in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor's eyes the dreadful truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have indubitably betrayed—a fear that he would not do well. The phlegmatic and stony Englishman neither felt nor cared whether Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and, although pleased that he did speak well, invested no particular sympathy in the matter, either for or against, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... without its difficulties and objections, that to determine is no easy task. Circumstances in part must guide me. I must have patience. At present I can only prepare and keep in readiness such cumbrous engines as this phlegmatic foggy land of beef and pudding can afford. I must supply the fire, if I find it necessary to put the ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Lady Fermanagh's advice, and he was wooing Myra with all the fervour and passion of which his somewhat phlegmatic nature was capable, wooing her as if their betrothal was yet to be, instead of an accomplished fact. Hardly a day passed but he brought or sent some expensive trifle, together with flowers, chocolates, or cigarettes, with assurances of ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... "O, never fear—you will speak well!" he would have said nothing. The shy sprite in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor's eyes the dreadful truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have indubitably betrayed—a fear that he would not do well. The phlegmatic and stony Englishman neither felt nor cared whether Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and, although pleased that he did speak well, invested no particular sympathy in the matter, either for or against, and so spared Hawthorne's shyness the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the diabolical possibility. A double knock at the door sent the blood to my heart. I rose, and passing into the front room opened the door. Mr. Carville stood in the porch in an attitude of profound meditation. The sight of him, phlegmatic and isolated from all emotion, restored the balance of my mind somewhat. We shook hands and he still stood there, trying ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... principally to the imagination and fears of the people. He ascertained, however, enough from Bartley Sullivan to justify a belief that there was something certainly uncommon about the woman; and being of a cold, phlegmatic disposition, with some humor, he desired them to go home, if they were wise—he shook his head mysteriously as he spoke—"and do the woman no injury, if they didn't wish—" and with this abrupt hint he ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... his manner excited beyond aught one could have believed possible in so phlegmatic-seeming a person, "it ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... Reuben asked of his companion, in a bantering voice. "I should have pictured you grandly jovial, wreathed perhaps with ruddy vine-leaves, the light of inspiration in your eye, and in your hand a mantling goblet! Drink, man, drink! you need a stimulant, an exhilarant, an anti-phlegmatic, a counter-irritant against English spleen. You are still on the other side of the Alps, of the Channel; the fogs yet cling about you. Clear your brow, O painter of Ossianic wildernesses! Taste the foam of life! We are in the land of Horace, and nunc ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... fate should we fall into the power of the hitherto submissive, but now savage and vindictive natives. It was no slight cause probably which had induced them to revolt. The cruelty and tyranny, the exactions and treachery of the white man had at length raised their phlegmatic natures, and they were about to exact a bitter revenge for long years of oppression and wrong. As in many similar instances, the innocent were doomed to suffer with the guilty; and as far as we had been able to judge, our friend Senhor Pimento had treated those around him with ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... stability of Europe. It is known how Germany has ever since been a scene of continual wars, dynastic changes, and territorial confusion. What evils have not the wars of the present century brought upon her! Yet, owing to the phlegmatic disposition, one might call it the stolidity of the majority of Germans, the disturbances have been so far external, and the lower masses of society have scarcely been agitated, except by the first rude explosion of Protestantism, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Chinese are saturated with a hereditary instinct for their own language and literature, which instinct, besides assiduous cultivation for thousands of years, is fostered from infancy by their surroundings, and is so exactly suited to their patient, phlegmatic temperament that it comes to them as naturally as the air they breathe, and even if unable to read but a few characters in a phrase, they will arrive at the meaning as surely as a well-bred ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... he and Van Sickle, after being instructed to be mutually helpful and to keep Cowperwood's name out of all matters relating to this work, departed together. They were an odd pair—the dusty old General phlegmatic, disillusioned, useful, but not inclined to feel so; and the smart, chipper Sippens, determined to wreak a kind of poetic vengeance on his old-time enemy, the South Side Gas Company, via this seemingly remote Northside conspiracy. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... are such a phlegmatic man, when I said that,' answered Schreiermeyer with the frankness of a conjurer who admits that his ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... phlegmatic coolness and their terrible rolling fire, the Russians, with that inertia that is called their tenacity, have given way before attack. The German has given way, he who on account of his subordination and stability has been called ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of the finest passages in the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... closed the book and replaced it in his pocket. His face bore no sign of exultation. His somewhat phlegmatic calm successfully concealed the fact that he had at last obtained information which he had long sought. A cart rattled past over the cobble-stones, making speech inaudible for the moment. The man moved uneasily on the bed. Von Holzen went towards ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... Individuals who are phlegmatic, matter-of-fact, and not very intense in their feelings might be inclined to ridicule this anxiety and suffering on the part of the parents, for so slight a cause; they would fail to understand it. But any mother with children of her own would understand ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... tent on the side of her plate with the debris of fish. 'There's Bartlett Browning, telling me the other evening a melancholy story of some melodious fishes, off the coast of—Weiss nicht wo; oysters, I suppose; conceive of it! the most phlegmatic of creatures. I suppose some poor fisherman heard a merlady singing in her green halls, and fancied it the death song of some of his shells. But that's nothing to some of Bartlett Browning's musical tales. The man's a perfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... read at thirty, and spoke with difficulty, partly from shortness of breath, partly from inability to follow his own thought. His temperament exhibited all the varieties known to science: in the morning, before drinking, he was melancholy; in the middle of the day, choleric; and in the evening, phlegmatic, that is to say, he did nothing at that time but snore and grunt till he was put to bed. Ivan Afanasiitch appeared before him during the choleric period. He found him sitting on a sofa, in an open dressing-gown, with a pipe between his teeth. A fat, crop-eared ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... to make me feel as if I had met a tiger escaped from the Jardin des Plantes," said Couture. "He was lean and red-haired, his eyes were the color of Spanish snuff, and his complexion was harsh. He looked cold and phlegmatic. He was hard upon the widow, pitiless to the orphan, and a terror to his clerks; they were not allowed to waste a minute. Learned, crafty, double-faced, honey-tongued, never flying into a passion, ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... but, amidst her virginal calmness, there was so much contempt for everything foreign to her love, that her father felt her to be capable of acting with the greatest folly in all ingenuousness. Only indifference was manifested by the Prince's wife, a phlegmatic and still beautiful Englishwoman, who considered that she had done quite enough for the household by bringing her husband a dowry of five millions, and bearing him five children. The Prince, anxious and weak despite his violence, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Good! That's good". The next morning, he said, it might not seem good at all. This calls to mind the old advice to writers about its being "better to compose with fury and correct with phlegm than to compose with phlegm and correct with fury". The phlegmatic critical attitude interferes considerably with the enthusiastic inventive activity. Give invention free rein for the time being, and come ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... and still our wond'ring eyes With deeds magnanimous like these surprize, And lest some wretch, phlegmatic, dull, and cold, Without applause such actions should behold, Aloud to list'ning crowds your worth proclaim, Yourself the herald of your deathless fame. To spacious Berks your dignity avow, From Buscot's meads, to ...
— An Heroic Epistle to the Right Honourable the Lord Craven (3rd Ed.) • William Combe
... it will be understood that people possessing a calm and phlegmatic temperament, will not attain to high degrees of fever, except in cases of very serious complications, while nervous people may quickly reach very considerable degrees of temperature. Children and younger people are more inclined to high fever, since their organs are still immature. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... excellent tailor, all that is needed is for him to see the work. They make very good carpenters; and this trade is not taught them, but they only have to see it. For in what pertains to agibilibus [101] they are better than we, for they are more phlegmatic. The Indian women have more capacity, and learn easily to use the needle, when they see it, thus they are more skilful than the Spanish women reared here; therefore the articles of handiwork that have been exported from these islands are numberless. And all ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... of my recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common—he didn't remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made no difference)—had happened to a Mrs. What's-her-name, as once lodged there—but he didn't call it to mind, particular. Nettled by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, HAD I? Ah! And did I find it had got on tolerably well without ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... sat down solemnly to talk of the weather with the two men, who found him a little dismal. One—he of the Zambesi lion episode—was grizzled, phlegmatic, and patient, and in no way critical of his company. So soon he was embarked on extracts from his own experience to which Mr. Andrews, who had shares in some company in the neighbourhood, listened with flattering attention. Mrs. Alderson ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... a spot like that to rouse excitement in the breast of the usually phlegmatic Andrew Thorne? Why had he been in such haste to drag Lynch thither, and what had passed between the two before the older man came to his sudden and tragic end? Was it possible that somewhere within that four square miles of desolate wilderness ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... lived in a slightly hysterical state as concerns the possibilities of war and bloodshed, we soon learned to be phlegmatic enough about disease and pestilence. Nearly five hundred starving people had gathered in Capiz, and their emaciated bodies and cavernous eyes mocked all talk of the brotherhood of man. This condition did not represent the normal one of the whole province,—but ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... an audience weep so much as the audience wept that night at the Suomalainen Teaatteri (Finnish Theatre): they positively sobbed. Was it that they seldom saw a play, or was it that the generally phlegmatic Finn once ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... been reported absent from his cabin, the day that Murphy came up from the valley, and he had not returned. So there was mystery in plenty to keep the talk going. One man shot dead from ambush and three persons missing, were enough to stir the most phlegmatic soul—and Mrs. Singleton Corey, however self-possessed ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... common sense, which was the only guide and authority in the administration of it. In corroboration of this, the little black eye of Judge Mondelet brightly twinkled, and he nodded his head in dignified approbation. Judge Van Feloon, who seemed more phlegmatic, quietly settled the matter by saying, that he supposed if a man did work for another, and the other had agreed to pay him, he was entitled to the money, and that therefore the court would have to see that a bargain had been made, and the work duly ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... others approach. "There will be no difficulty in talking, to judge by the gentleman," he dropped; and while he remains so conspicuous our eyes may briefly rest on him. He was middling high and was visibly a representative of the nervous rather than of the phlegmatic branch of his race. He had an oval face, fine firm features, and a complexion that tended to the brown. Brown were his eyes, and women thought them soft; dark brown his hair, in which the same critics sometimes regretted the absence of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... feverishly eager to establish a record. Griffith, badly shaken by the failure and disappearance of Blake, had been peremptorily ordered South by his physician. Seizing the opportunity, Ashton, instead of interfering with the work, as McGraw expected, had astonished the phlegmatic general foreman by pushing operations ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... to make a great lady of her, and had married her without consulting her wishes. Prince Charles-Louis-Frederic was then twenty years of age, and though exceedingly good, brave, and generous, and possessing many admirable traits, was heavy and phlegmatic, ever maintaining an icy gravity, and entirely destitute of the qualities which would attract a young princess accustomed to the brilliant elegance ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... than their Anglo-Saxon brethren have; that they apprehend more surely when, where, and how the truest impress of physical nature occurs on the percipient faculties of the soul, than men of a more phlegmatic constitution do; and that they can draw from such intuitions of their own a sort of inspiration, or second-sight of nature, comparable to prophecy, which gives their highest poetic utterance a rapt enthusiasm—and the accuracy of this estimate need not be disputed, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... place at least where the popularity of the little belle of Crowheart showed no signs of diminution and this was in the menagerie of domestic animals which occupied quarters in the rear of the large backyard of the hotel. The phlegmatic black omnibus and dray horses neighed for sugar at her coming, the calf she had weaned from the wild range cow bawled at sight of her, while various useless dogs leaped about her in ecstasy, and a mere glimpse of her skirt through the kitchen doorway ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... are slow, but for that reason surer when once aroused. The Emperor's enormous fame had preceded him; and the appearance among them of this genius, all fire and flame, who had come, as he said, to adopt them, warmed their phlegmatic nature. They were at once filled with admiration; his presence, his trust in them, his consoling and encouraging words, the good works at once begun by his active and able administration, filled them ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals for exportation? There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... A timid, phlegmatic fellow, he was frightened by everything and found all things difficult. His strong impressions were manifested neither in his motions nor his words, but in a sudden flush, which coloured his cheeks and his forehead, and which would soon disappear and ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... me; so, to adopt the language of Miss Fay's fellow-citizen, I "bit in my breath and swallered it down." I adopted the course Mr. Maskelyne told me he did with the Davenports, sat with my eyes open and my mouth shut. It is marvellous to see how excited we phlegmatic islanders grow when either spirits are brought to the front, or we think we have found out a conjuring trick. I am not going to follow the example of my gushing brethren, but I can safely say that if anybody ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... of their earthy temperament are most vehemently aroused. Even so, on the other hand, a man fails to stand to that which is counselled, because he holds to it in weakly fashion by reason of the softness of his temperament, as we have stated with regard to woman (ad 1). This is also the case with phlegmatic temperaments, for the same reason as in women. And these results are due to the fact that the bodily temperament is an occasional but not a sufficient cause of incontinence, as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... turn porter? I was strong; but there was something besides strength required to ply the trade of a porter—a mind of a particularly phlegmatic temperament, which I did not possess. What should I do? enlist as a soldier? I was tall enough; but something besides height is required to make a man play with credit the part of soldier, I mean a private one—a spirit, if spirit it can be called, which will not only enable a man to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... kissed his wife, as he had also done before during the recital of the story. It was done in a way that was so real and genuine that it completely broke them down. They declared that morning that they would not quickly judge anyone again. They had thought him phlegmatic and unlovable, and now here had come out from the heart of this Indian, of such a rugged exterior, a story and an exhibition of love and devotion more genuine and beautiful than any that had ever been revealed to them ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... statement), his own experience was limited to some words or looks such as I have myself endured. His abandonment of Miss Penclosa is in itself a sign that he was never really in her toils. Oh, if he only knew his escape! He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag's clutch is deep in my nerves. Shall I ever get it out? Shall I ever be the same man that I was ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... well enough known who the stranger was. Indeed there was but little chance of Peter's being mistaken for a Dutchman. The way in which he flew about, and the terrible energy with which he did everything, set him quite apart from the easy-going, phlegmatic Hollanders. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... in an intermittent fashion during the years 1875-1879, when the Eastern question produced so much excitement in all ranks of Russian society. At first the cesarevich was more Slavophil than the government, but his phlegmatic nature preserved him from many of the exaggerations indulged in by others, and any of the prevalent popular illusions he may have imbibed were soon dispelled by personal observation in Bulgaria, where ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... It had to be wise rather than heroic, conservative rather than creative; to give no great architects to the edifice of modern thought, but many able workmen, a legion of patient and useful laborers. By virtue of these qualities of prudence, phlegmatic activity, and conservatism the Dutch are ever advancing, although step by step. They acquire slowly, but lose none of their acquisitions;—they are loth to quit ancient usages, and, although three ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... French and Irish troops who had been assembled for the purpose of subjugating England, pulled manfully and with loud huzzas towards the six huge wooden castles which lay close to Fort Lisset. The French, though an eminently brave people, have always been more liable to sudden panics than their phlegmatic neighbours the English and Germans. On this day there was a panic both in the fleet and in the army. Tourville ordered his sailors to man their boats, and would have led them to encounter the enemy in the bay. But his example and his exhortations ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shewed us that grey hairs could add nothing but hypocrisy to him; for he avowed public prostitution, laughed at all honour, public spirit, and patriotism; and gave convincing proofs that the most phlegmatic old miser upon earth could not be sooner tempted with gold to perpetrate the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... is altogether different from that outside it. The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydized; the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm. In the same way there are two Hollands in every Dutchman: there is the man of the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of others, and there is the man of the dune, of the harbor, the shore, the sea, who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, daring. Where the two agree is in calculating prudence, and in ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... series of attempts seems to have been made—by some person or persons to the deponent most emphatically unknown—to get my cool, phlegmatic nervous system and brain excited. The two principal means made use of to complete the obsession were, that just mentioned, and the announcement of a succession of 'big things,' as about to occur—the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... man's made of 'impenetrable stuff;' and, being too wise for whimsicality, is too phlegmatic for genius, and too crabbed for mellowness." Mark, what a set of merry open-faced rogues surround Punch, who peeps down at them as cunningly as "a magpie peeping into a marrow bone; "—how luxuriantly they laugh, or stand with their eyes and mouths equally distended, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... that the heart of the British Army was sound. Sykes used to study furtively a small book called French, and how to speak it, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a deaf-and-dumb language of his own. But he was naturally a man of few words, and phlegmatic. He described the first battle of Ypres, in which he had been "wownded," in exactly twenty-four words, and I could never get any more out of him, though he became comparatively voluble on the subject of his wife at Norwich and the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... in his most phlegmatic tones. "Aye, just so! And where d'ye intend to cut in, now, like? Is it a sort of Gordian knot affair that you're thinking of? Going to solve this difficulty ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... payerai tout ce qu'il faut. I will pay de ten guineas. I will satisfy every body. I cannot never forgive myself if I bring him into any disgrace." "Disgrace!" exclaimed Forester, starting up, and repeating the word in a tone which made every person in the room, not excepting the phlegmatic magistrate, start and look up to him, with a sudden feeling of inferiority. His ardent eye spoke the language of his soul. No words could express his emotion. The master-tailor dropped his day-book. "Constable—call a constable!" cried the justice. ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... to one who has seen a city coal-man cursing another for not moving on, smothered his shrieking spouse in a pillow brought over for that purpose from the Blaisdells', where most of the actors were boarding. We were not inclined to endure this quietly. The more phlegmatic among us moved uneasily in our seats, and one or two men, excitable beyond the ordinary, sprang up, with an oath. Mrs. Wilson dragged her husband ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... of Jupiter on the ecliptic, and it would seem probable that the names of Saturn, /Kaawanu/ and /Sag-us/ (the former, which is Semitic Babylonian, meaning "steadfast," or something similar, and the latter, in Sumerian, "head-firm" or "steadfast"—"phlegmatic"), to all appearance indicate in like manner the deliberation of his movements compared with those of the planet dedicated to the king ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... rather too much even for Ebenezer's phlegmatic spirit. He seized his broad-brimmed hat and ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... which the success of this enterprise hung were named Lindsay and Budge. Lindsay was a phlegmatic youth with watery eyes. Nothing disturbed him, which was fortunate, for the commotion which surrounded him was considerable. A stout sergeant lay beside him on a waterproof sheet, whispering excited counsels of perfection, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... told me that I should not care at all whether she liked me or whether she didn't, whether I pleased or displeased her. But I did care, I couldn't help it, I cared altogether too much. A middle-aged quahaug should be phlegmatic and philosophical; I once had a reputation for both qualities, but I seemed ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... been pushed just as long as the bondholders of Holland would put up the money. To keep things going, interest had been paid to the worthy Dutch out of the money they had supplied. Gradually, the phlegmatic ones grew wise, and the purse-strings of the Netherlanders were drawn tight. For hundreds of years Holland had sought a quick Northwest passage to India. Little did she know she was now warm on the trail. Little, also, did ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... and imperial with an air-pump thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and unconcerned on the chaos of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... awe-stricken by the extraordinary display of deep feeling and quaint rugged eloquence which had just been wrung from their hitherto phlegmatic and taciturn skipper, stretched to their oars in dead silence, mechanically keeping the boat stern on to the sea, and so regulating her speed as to avoid the mischance of being pooped or ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... being a phlegmatic animal, heard him quietly to the end, and opened his jaws to answer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... the high and courageous songs, loving songs, and songs of faith. Lady Dorinda, having shut her curtain for the night, declined to take any part in this household festivity, though she contributed some unheard sighs and groans of annoyance during its progress. A phlegmatic woman, fond of her ease, could hardly keep her tranquillity, besieged by cannon in the daytime, and by chattering and laughter, the cracking of nuts and the thump of soldiers' feet half ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the very angles of them remain as acute as if they had been cut last year. Indeed, some large stones have dropped out of the arches; but the whole is admirably preserved, and presents the eye with a piece of architecture, so unaffectedly elegant, so simple, and majestic, that I will defy the most phlegmatic and stupid spectator to behold it without admiration. It was raised in the Augustan age, by the Roman colony of Nismes, to convey a stream of water between two mountains, for the use of that city. It stands over the river ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... He remained unmoved, phlegmatic. "So? Nice talk about you and Sim Gage! Was you two married? I know you ain't. You come out to ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... not worth anything," she replied nonchalantly. "As a nation, you might sometimes give us the impression of being phlegmatic and slow-witted. Both ideas may have some basis of fact, yet not be absolutely true. We are not all abnormally quick in America. Look at ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... moreover, a coarse, thick pronunciation, and when you hear them speak, you almost imagine that it is some German or English peasant attempting to express himself in the language of the Peninsula. They are constitutionally phlegmatic, and it is very difficult to arouse their anger; but they are dangerous and desperate when once incensed, and a person who knew them well told me that he would rather face ten Valencians, people infamous for their ferocity and blood-thirstiness, than confront one ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... place this was the Latin name for 'liquid.' According to medieval physiology there were four chief liquids in the human body, namely blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, and an excess of any of them produced an undue predominance of the corresponding quality; thus, an excess of phlegm made a person phlegmatic, or dull; or an excess of black bile, melancholy. In the Elizabethan idiom, therefore, 'humor' came to mean a mood, and then any exaggerated quality or ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to some people of the world it would seem to live your life! how utterly impossible to live it with a serene spirit and an unsoured disposition! It seems wonderful to me, because you are not, like Mrs. ——, phlegmatic and impenetrable, but received from nature feelings of the very finest edge. Such feelings, when they are locked up, sometimes damage the mind and temper. They don't with you. It must be partly principle, partly self-discipline, which ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... unfrequently by an impatient stamp, or other movement of her foot that exposed fairy toe and instep. Contemplation of the one rested and refreshed the observer; of the other, amused and excited him. Mr. Dorrance's phlegmatic nature found supreme content in dwelling upon the incarnation of patrician tranquillity at his right hand, and he regarded the actions of his frisky would-be tormentor very much as a placid, well-gorged salmon would survey, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... earliest manhood, and he attributes to overtoil in boyhood this tendency which was probably a part of his natural temperament. To a disposition like his, raptures, exaltations, agonies came as naturally as a uniform neutral-tinted existence to more phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure that every cause of self-reproach which his past life had stored up in his memory tended to keep him more and more familiar with the lower pole in ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the most phlegmatic mind, but to the mystically constituted brain of Nelson, under all the varied thoughts that came into his brain during the days and nights of watching and searching for those people he termed "the pests of the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... was more than half blocked, and cabs and omnibuses, in charge of overheated and eloquent drivers, were being filtered through the narrow space left at their disposal by a phlegmatic policeman. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... natives of Canton or Ava. Climate is not, therefore, able to change the colour of a nation; but it seems to have a greater effect on the temperament. Cold can produce a change of temperament from the melancholic and choleric to the phlegmatic and sanguine, and heat acting on the human frame, is capable of producing a contrary revolution. Hence, rosy cheeks and lips are frequently observed among the mountain Hindus of Nepal, although they are very little fairer ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... may be arranged in a direct and simple scale in quantitative relation to the gross output of action of different human beings. One passes from the incessant employment of such a being as Gladstone at the one extreme, a loquacious torrent of interests and achievements, to the extreme of phlegmatic lethargy on the other. Call the former a high energetic and the latter low. Quite possibly it might be found that we could breed "high energetics." But before we did so we should have to consider very gravely that the "go" and "energy" of a man have no ascertainable relation ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... dull, slow rage was simmering within her. Even her vanity could not misinterpret the meaning of Hector's devotion to Mrs. Brown. He was deeply in love, of course, and she, Morella, was robbed of her hopes of being Lady Bracondale. Her usually phlegmatic nature was roused in all its narrow strength. She was like some silent, vengeful beast ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... fisherman should have what makes Stewart White a great hunter—no emotions. If a lion charged me I would imagine a million things. Once when a Mexican tigre, a jaguar, charged me I—But that is not this story. Boschen has the temperament for a great fisherman. He is phlegmatic. All day—and day after day—he sits there, on trigger, so to speak, waiting for the strike that will come. He is so constituted that it does not matter to him how soon or how late the strike comes. To me the wait, the suspense, grew to be maddening. Yet I stuck it out, and in this I claim ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... seethed like a boiling cauldron; verdant novices were laughed down as they endeavored to make some telling point, while sly old stagers lay in ambush to spring out armed with "points of order." Emasculate conservatives were snubbed by followers of new prophets; belligerent Southrons glared fiercely at phlegmatic Yankees; one or two intoxicated Solons gabbled sillily upon every question, and sober clergymen gaped, as if sleepy and disgusted with political life. Banks, unequaled in his deportment, was as cool as a summer cucumber; Aiken, his principal opponent, was courteous ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... we are thus introduced, was a man of some mark in the history of literature. Johnson always spoke of him with affection and afterwards wrote his life in complimentary terms. Cave, though a clumsy, phlegmatic person of little cultivation, seems to have been one of those men who, whilst destitute of real critical powers, have a certain instinct for recognizing the commercial value of literary wares. He had become by this time well-known as the publisher of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of more importance than another. I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it,—a cipher, an o! I acknowledge life at all only by an occasional convulsional cough and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me, My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... earth or balmy atmosphere inspire us with enthusiasm or pleasure, while the fate of Raymond was in jeopardy. No man had ever excited so strong an interest in the public mind; this was apparent even among the phlegmatic English, from whom he had long been absent. The Athenians had expected their hero to return in triumph; the women had taught their children to lisp his name joined to thanksgiving; his manly beauty, his courage, his devotion to their cause, made him appear in ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... is well enough for a young woman who is frightened," answered the more phlegmatic parent; "but it might not be so excusable in one in command of an expedition. Jasper may think the chance of drowning in getting ashore fully repaid by the chance of escaping as soon as he reaches ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me, sometimes with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or a calf throw up its heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer excess of vitality and spirits? Well, there ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... bowel-ache is also expressive,—the cry is not so piercing as from ear-ache, and is an interrupted, straining cry, accompanied with a drawing-up of the legs to the belly; the cry of bronchitis is a gruff and phlegmatic cry; the cry of inflammation of the lungs is more a moan than a cry; the cry of croup is hoarse, and rough, and ringing, and is so characteristic that it may truly be called "the croupy cry;" the cry of inflammation of the membranes ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... art are more beautiful than the leading one on each panel, the St. Paul on the one and the St. John on the other. If we interpret these as regards temperament, John is the type of the melancholy, Peter of the phlegmatic, Paul of the choleric and Mark of ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... feeling, and singularly destitute of all passions. He was perfectly exemplary in his conduct, perhaps not so much from inherent strength of principle as from possessing that peculiarity of temperament, cold and phlegmatic, which feels not the power of temptation. He submitted passively to the arrangements for his marriage, never manifesting the slightest emotion of pleasure or repugnance in view of his approaching alliance with one of the most beautiful ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... "Drink!" replied the phlegmatic Houmain, who himself set the example most assiduously, and began to half shut his eyes with a languishing air. "'Tis the second transaction I've had with this Laubardemont—or demon, or whatever the name is; but 'tis a good devil of a demon, at all ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... whale family, though apparently phlegmatic, are somewhat given to Blowing up, and, when about to die, instead of taking the matter coolly and philosophically, they are always terribly Flurried. In fact, the whale, when in articulo mortis, makes a more tremendous rumpus about its ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... Phlegmatic rather than emotional, and wholly secretive, he had accustomed himself to regard romantic ideality, and susceptibility to sentimentality as a species of intellectual anaemia; holding himself always thoroughly in hand, when ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... grave, the phlegmatic Erasmus, melts into love and playful thoughts, when he thinks of kisses—"Did you but know, my Faustus," he writes to one of his friends, "the pleasures which England affords, you would fly here on winged feet, and if your gout would not allow you, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... breath and his heart gave a great throb, as would be the case with the most phlegmatic being who contemplated the near possession of such vast wealth. Visions of the wild round of dissipation and excesses in which they would indulge came up before the two evil men, and it was no wonder that they were ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... three years before, that the child, then but ten years old, had nearly managed to make a quarrel between Harry Esmond and his comrade, good-natured, phlegmatic Thomas Tusher, who never of his own seeking quarrelled with anybody: by quoting to the latter some silly joke which Harry had made regarding him—(it was the merest, idlest jest, though it near drove two old friends to blows, and I think such a battle would have pleased her)—and from ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... This is the doctrine of a book published not thirty years ago. Another work, issued also in London, says, "Cynthia, 'the queen of heaven,' as the ancients termed her, or the MOON, the companion of the earth, and chief source of our evening light, is a cold, moist, watery, phlegmatic planet, variable to an extreme, in astrological science; and partaking of good or evil, as she is aspected by good or evil stars. When angular and unafflicted in a nativity, she is the promissory pledge ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... scarcely approve of these mechanical ways of gaining control of the tongue except in cases where the singer is phlegmatic of temperament and cannot be made to feel the various sensations of stiff tongue or tongue drawn far back in other ways. Ordinarily I think they make the singer conscious, nervous and more likely to stiffen the tongue in a wild desire to relax it ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... could not love. He ruled her—she was his property. She found it easier to accept his rule than to rebel. Had his treatment of her descended to brutality, she would have flown to her lover or else died. One critic says: "Laura must have been of a phlegmatic type, not of a fine or sensitive nature, and all of her wants were satisfied, her life protected and complete. The adoration of Petrarch was not a necessity to her—it came in as a pleasing diversion, a beautiful compliment, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... merry still, laughing, pleasant, meditating on plays, women, music, &c. Phlegmatic, slothful, dull, heavy, &c. Choleric, furious, impatient, subject to hear and see strange apparitions, &c. Black, solitary, sad; they think ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... This grave, phlegmatic, and silent individual was called Hans Bjelke; and he came recommended by M. Fridrikssen. He was our future guide. His manners were a singular contrast ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... proceed at his word. As the principal part of the work was performed at midsummer under the rays of a scorching sun, the cattle were, of course, irritable and restive to a degree that in colder weather would have seemed inconsistent with the phlegmatic characteristics of their race. ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... odd a lot of tales as I ever heard—drawled (oh so admirably drawled, without the flutter of an eyelid, or the quiver of a muscle) by a Lowland Scotchman, and queerly characteristic of the Lowland Scotch race!!!! Picture this slow phlegmatic rendering ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... to become cold; in which state it may be eaten, but it is far more efficacious in its beneficial results when taken warm. The use of Iceland moss jelly is strongly recommended in cases of consumption, and in the treatment of severe colds, catarrhs, and all phlegmatic diseases ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... contemplative disposition and an energetic temperament, sir, is hell. Hell, I tell you. A contemplative disposition and a phlegmatic temperament, all very well. But ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... the methods, the instruments, the form?" Lenyard's voice was tense with excitement. The phlegmatic Scheff noticed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... he muttered, defiance strong in his tone. But one glance took in those stoic mounted Britishers, five miles deep in the enemy lines, yet unexcited, unmoved. Thus would they fall back thirty leagues if need be, phlegmatic and unconcerned—knowing not when defeated and ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... moment he should be acting. This man takes little part in politics and follows his mercantile pursuits. His hobby-horse is ship-building, in which art he is such a proficient as to be quite the Seppings of Hydra. As to the rest, he is a very worthy, warm-hearted man, but excessively phlegmatic. ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... eyes, with the white visible, I have often observed both in the timid and phlegmatic, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... ground of modesty and reserve; and such a one I do, without vanity, profess myself.[149] Now these are the very persons who are likely to attach themselves to the character of Emilius, and of whom it is sure to be the bane. This dull, phlegmatic, retiring humour is not in a fair way to be corrected, but confirmed and rendered desperate, by being in that work held up as an object of imitation, as an example of simplicity and magnanimity—by coming upon us with all the recommendations ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... in music, that it is suited to please all the varieties of the human mind. The illiterate and the learned, the thoughtless and the giddy, the phlegmatic and the sanguine, all confess themselves to be its votaries. It is a source of the purest mental enjoyment, and may be obtained by all. It is suited to all classes, and ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... across the floor to their seats on the stage. Miss Egerton had stopped in the midst of her sentence to find out whose coming had turned the galleries into pandemonium and brought every usher but the phlegmatic Jean to ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... rages with undiminished force. If judiciously[56] treated, it is, of all the symptoms, the least liable to mischief. To possess a series of well executed portraits of illustrious men, at different periods of their lives, from blooming boyhood to phlegmatic old age, is sufficiently amusing[57]; but to possess every portrait, bad, indifferent, and unlike, betrays such a dangerous and alarming symptom as to ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... proceeding from a hill in Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The tones are those of the convent Nakous, says the wild Arab;—there must be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them, says an English one in an Oxford gown;—they resemble rather the striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder: ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... probable. Infessura, though he expressed horror for the crimes of Sixtus, was yet a dry chronicler of daily events, many of which passed beneath his own eyes, Burchurd was a frigid diarist of Court ceremonies, who reported the rapes, murders, and profligacies of Alexander with phlegmatic gravity. The evidence of these men, neither of whom indulges in satire strictly so called, is more valuable than that of Tacitus or Suetonius to the vices of the Roman emperors. The dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors, again, are trustworthy, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... needs above all else, time, contemplativeness, freedom. Nowhere can one so unrestrainedly cultivate one's own style of life as there. And withal, artistic freedom of life accommodates itself remarkably well with the political narrowness of the country under Clerical rule. The Bavarian phlegmatic temperament craves constant stimulation; the political strife, in which there is no embittered fanaticism, but which in all good nature sways backward and forward, is an indispensable condition of the national ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... commonplace. Tintoretto said: "Colors can be bought at the paint-shop, but good designs are only obtained by sleepless nights and much reflection." It is doubtful if Cranch ever laid awake over his work, either in poetry or painting. He had a dreamy, phlegmatic disposition, which seemed to carry him through life without much effort of the will. He once confessed that when he was a boy he would never fire a gun for fear it might kick him over, and when he was at Hampton beach in 1875 he was in the habit of going out to sketch at a certain hour with ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... are considered rather as articles of food than of medicine: they are supposed to afford little or no nourishment, and when eaten liberally they produce flatulencies, occasion thirst, headachs, and turbulent dreams: in cold phlegmatic habits, where viscid mucus abounds, they doubtless have their use; as by their stimulating quality they tend to excite appetite, attenuate thick juices, and promote their expulsion: by some they are strongly recommended in suppressions ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... Ferguson, with whom he was more intimate than any others of the party. He would not have been drawn to the Scotchman, but for his being Tom's room-mate. Through him he came to appreciate and respect the Scot's sterling virtues, and to overlook his dry, phlegmatic manner. ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... rushed again with a redoubled zest into the seductive regions of my imaginary world. Oh, how greatly do they err who think that such studies may be safely engaged in by the young and excitable mind. Some indeed there are so phlegmatic as to be proof against all the charms of poesy, insensible to the highest illusions of romance; but their number is small, and the individuals hard to identify, because a very cold exterior is often like the snow- capped heights of Etna, overspreading a hoard of volcanic elements of ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... whole air had that indefinable grace which is the sign of high- breeding; to this there was added exceeding loveliness, with great animation of face and elegance of manner. She was a perfect lady, yet not of the English stamp; for her looks and manner had not that cold and phlegmatic air which England fosters. She looked rather like some Italian beauty—like those which enchant us as they smile from the walls of the picture-galleries ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... well enough have grown to universal flame of War. But this always needs two parties; and pacific George would not be second party in it. George, guided by pacific Walpole, backed by pacific Fleury, answers the ardent firing by phlegmatic patience and protocolling; not by counter-firing, except quite at his convenience, from privateers, from war-ships here and there, and in sulky defence from Gibraltar itself. Probably the Termagant, with ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... till he reached the Paviljoensgracht—where he now sits securely in stone, pencilling a thought as enduring—that he encountered fresh difficulty. There, at his own street door, under the trees lining the canal-bank, his landlord, Van der Spijck, the painter—usually a phlegmatic figure haloed in pipe-clouds—congratulated him excitedly on his safe return, but refused him entry to the house. "Here ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Eleanor did her best to hear what was said between these two apparently phlegmatic companions. But Tom meant his words for Polly's ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... daily trained to the labors of the chase, might appear well acquainted with the sagacity of a horse—but there were certain circumstances which intruded themselves per force upon the most skeptical and phlegmatic; and it is said there were times when the animal caused the gaping crowd who stood around to recoil in horror from the deep and impressive meaning of his terrible stamp—times when the young Metzengerstein turned pale and shrunk away from the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... have a good walk, and nothing exhibits the person to so much disadvantage as a slovenly bad gait. It is true, that the walk of a person will indicate much of his character. Nervous people walk hurriedly, sometimes quick, sometimes slow, with a tripping and sometimes a running step; phlegmatic people have a heavy, solid, and loitering step; the sanguine man walks rapidly, treads somewhat briskly and firmly; while the melancholic wanders, and seems almost unconscious of touching the ground which he seems to slide over. But the qualities ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... traits and of temperament is still in its infancy. Many recent attempts at classification of temperaments rest upon as impressionistic a basis as the popular fourfold division into sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Two of the efforts to define temperamental differences rest, however, upon first-hand study of cases. Dr. June E. Downey has devised a series of tests based upon handwriting material for measuring will traits. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... doing his best to copy his father's manners. He was but twenty-one and he affected impassibility. He adopted his most phlegmatic English air, and ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina |
