"Penultimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves in that light to the person most nearly concerned—by name Mr. Peter Fishwick; and moving him to grasp at the forlorn hope presented by a vacant stewardship at one of the colleges, brought him by coach to Oxford. There he spent three days and his penultimate guineas in canvassing, begging, bowing, and smirking; and on the fourth, which happened to be the very day of Sir George's arrival in the city, was duly and handsomely defeated without the honour ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... Perry Green landed him a little short of his gate,—not bad! Pirrip, the postman, whom he had passed in the bicycle's penultimate struggles, overtook him in its death throes and watched with interest the miracles of balancing with which, despite his preoccupation of mind, habit made him prolong ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... have known me then," returned Lady Sellingworth, with the slightest possible stress on the penultimate word. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does. The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the penultimate, 'it's a very unusual piece of good ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... to say more of Mr. Morris's "Odysseus." Close to the letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the surge and thunder of Homer? Apparently we must accent the penultimate in "Amphinomus" if the line is to scan. I select a passage of peaceful beauty from ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... for his immortal robes. It was Miss Pinnegar who saw the travellers and ordered the unions and calicoes and grey flannel. James hovered round and said the last word, of course. But what was his last word but an echo of Miss Pinnegar's penultimate! He was not interested in ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... that offspring should resemble its penultimate rather than its latest phase, and should thus be more like a grand-parent than a parent; for we observe that we very often repeat a performance in a manner resembling that of some earlier, but still recent, repetition; rather than on the ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... Our penultimate performance was over, and I was in the midst of my vagaries again, when I saw Berry. Unanxious to tempt Providence, I retired precipitately to the shelter of the booth. My companion was sitting disconsolately upon the box on which she ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... James Carstairs, explorer, gentleman and rolling stone, limped into the picture, and the story of The Lost Valley entered upon its penultimate phase. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... that the pang she had felt would have been left unexplained. No, it was more fundamental than that. All the dress had accomplished was to set an acute accent over a development which, though already at its penultimate stage, had so far escaped the notice of Cleopatra and her mother. The picture had been present the day before, but it had not been quite perfectly focussed. The new frock had focussed ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... one exception which has sadly to be made — one class of men, of whom I would fain, if possible, have avoided mention, who are strangers to any such scruples. These be Executors — a word to be strongly accented on the penultimate; for, indeed, they are the common headsmen of collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for harmless books. Hoary, famous old collections, budding young collections, fair virgin collections of a single author — all go down before the executor's ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... work. And, in any case, the title is open to all Asiatic expeditions whatsoever; to the Trojan that just crossed the water, to the Macedonian that went beyond the Indus. The word Anabasis must have its accent on the syllable ab, not on the penultimate syllable as. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... also a secondary accent upon the ending of present participles (-ende), and upon the penultimate of weak verbs of the second class (130), ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... deliver them. If only one feels like writing, he should pour forth his heart to his friend, although that friend remain as silent as the grave. It would be as absurd to say that either party "owes the letter," as to charge him who had the penultimate word in a dialogue with the duty of making the first remark the next time he encounters her who had the last word. When the topic of immediate interest has been disposed of, a correspondence is over. It matters as little who contributed the larger proportion to it, as who contributes the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... dine with Sheridan [1] and Rogers this evening. I have a little spite against R., and will shed his "Clary wines pottle-deep." [2] This is nearly my ultimate or penultimate letter; for I am quite equipped, and only wait a passage. Perhaps I may wait a few weeks for Sligo, but not if ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... have been established, the key for subscription of the ECB's capital shall be established. Each national central bank shall be assigned a weighting in this key which shall be equal to the sum of: - 50% of the share of its respective Member State in the population of the Community in the penultimate year preceding the establishment of the ESCB; - 50% of the share of its respective Member State in the gross domestic product at market prices of the Community as recorded in the last five years preceding the penultimate ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... in his Supplement a l'Hist. de l'Imprimerie, by Marchand, p. 111., accuses Baron Heinecken of having stated that this fictitious typographer set forth the Fables Allemandes in 1461. Heinecken, however, had merely quoted six German lines, the penultimate of ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... term for Mawliyah or Mawliyah, a short poem on subjects either classical or vulgar. It generally consists of five lines all rhyming except the penultimate. The metre is a species of the Basit which, however, admits of considerable poetical license; this being according ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... the situations; but all this would have gone for comparatively little had it not been for the excellence of Mr. HARE's rendering of the first-rate part of Goldfinch, which did not consist of occasional flashes, only to collapse and disappear in the penultimate Act, but continued right through to the end, dominating everything and everybody. This is not so with Lady Bountiful. The appearance of Roderick Heron, who is no creation of the Author's, as he admits, but merely Mr. Skimpole under another name, raises hopes at the commencement, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... beast, and exhausting the soil of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, from the centre continuously outwards; whilst immediately within the enlarging ring there is constantly a band of coarse rank grass fed by the manure of the penultimate dead spawn. The innermost starved ground remains poor and barren. In this duplicate way the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... case; but its features, although unusually prominent, are like those of the general run of the considerations by which evolution is supposed to exclude design. Those of the penultimate citation and its context are all of the same stamp. The differences which begin as variations are said to be spontaneous—a metaphorical word of wide meanings—are inferred to be casual (whereas we only know them to be occult), or to be originated ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... shadow is nearer to its penultimate extremities the deeper it will appear, g z beyond the intersection faces only the part of the shadow [marked] y z; this by intersection takes the shadow from m n but by direct line it takes the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... tend to separate, and those which are similar, to cluster together ("segregation"); and this subdivision and dissipation of forces, so long as there are any forces unbalanced by opposite forces, must end at last in rest; the penultimate stage of this process "in which the extremest multiformity and most complex moving equilibrium are established," being the highest conceivable state. The various derivative laws of phenomenal changes are thus deducible from the persistence of force. It remains to apply them to inorganic, organic, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... walk are intact, and the building is a good example of a mediaeval dwelling-house (erected 1335). The parish church has a 14th-cent. chancel with a Dec. E. window; the nave (Perp.) dates from the 15th cent., and has on the parapet of the S. aisle the monogram of Abbot Selwood, the penultimate Abbot of Glastonbury. There is a ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Parliament were the King's penultimate stroke against Presbytery. They armed the bishops with such power, that the King felt he might at length summon an Assembly which would make submission to Episcopacy. An Assembly was accordingly held in Glasgow in June 1610; and there the King's resolutions were carried with only ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... sun-brightened mists, and the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks, whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion, an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the poet's penultimate volume, beginning— ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... exceptions then we already regard the foreigner as a member of our own moral system. The moral sphere has already extended or is at least in course of extension to its ultimate limits: and war is a survival from the penultimate stage of morality. War, to put it mildly, is a moral anachronism. War between European nations is civil war. Logically all war should be recognised at once, at any rate by enlightened opinion, as the crime, the disaster, the ultimate disgrace that it obviously is. Why then do we cling to the ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... from old Brahminism, the Dhyani Buddhas (that is the Buddhas evolved out of the mind in mystic trance) were given their elect Buddhas; and so three sets of five were co-ordinated.[26] That is, first, five pre-penultimate Buddhas; then their Bodhisattvas or penultimate Buddhas; and then the ultimate or human Buddhas, of which Gautama was one. Or, first abstraction; then pre-human ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... their spring song of Hosannah with three melodies, which sound in the three orders of joy wherewith it is threefold. In this hierarchy are the three Divinities, first Dominations, and then the Virtues; the third order is of Powers. Then, in the two penultimate dances, the Principalities and Archangels circle; the last is wholly of Angelic sports. These orders are all upward gazing, and downward prevail, so that toward God they all are drawn, and they all draw. And Dionysius[2] with ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... through the prehensile antennae; and it thus continues to do throughout life in most or all of the species of Lepas, Conchoderma, Dichelaspis and Ibla. In the first two of these genera, the cement escapes from the borders of the lower side of the disc or penultimate segment of the antennae, and can be there seen radiating out like spokes, which at their ends divide into finer and finer branches, till a uniform sheet of cement is formed, fastening the antennae and the adjoining part of the peduncle down to the surface ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... death and leaps four centuries: it is young and perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a vision when I think ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... Pioneer Delirant on the tramp goes littoralwise. His Flag at furl, portmanteaued; drains to the dregs The penultimate brandy-bottle, coal-on-the-head-piece gift Of who avenged the Old Sea-Rover's smirch. Marchant he treads the all-along of inarable drift On dubiously connivent legs, The facile prey of predatory flies; Panting for further; ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... means intended to stand on that foundation alone, however adequate. And it was with a view to further steps—not all of them taken at this time—that clauses as to the civil magistrate were introduced in the penultimate chapter, assigning to him 'principally' the conservation and purgation of the religion—by which, it is carefully explained, is meant not only the 'maintenance' of the true religion, but the 'suppressing' of the false. One more remark may be made. Theoretically, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... whether the Hebrew knows anything at all of the twin-bearing ewes; the penultimate line ought rather to be rendered (as in the margin of the Revised Version) "thy teeth ... which are all of them in pairs." But, however rendered, the Hebrew means this. Theocritus speaks of the richness of the goat's ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... of malice in her words, or rather in the pause between the penultimate word and the last. Ernest detected its presence, and knew that her love for Reginald was dead. Stiff and cold it lay in her heart's chamber—beside how many others?—all emboxed in the ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... two monuments in the nave. Thomas Kemp, who died bishop, reposed under the penultimate arch in the north side, in a chapel enclosed by a screen and railings. The second was that of Sir John Beauchamp, who died in 1358, and whose monument was under the eastern arch on the south side. Somehow the populace entertained the idea that this latter ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... involved the personal charge of the Palace and its inmates; and departed to his own country, from which he had lately received some unsatisfactory intelligence. The Emperor endeavoured to engage his influence to bring about a marriage which he desired to contract with a daughter of the penultimate Emperor, Muhammad Shah: but the Abdali, on his attention being drawn to the young lady, resolved upon espousing her himself. He at the same time married his son Timur Shah to the daughter of the heir apparent, and, having left that son in charge ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... palpable, panacea, panegyric, panorama, paradoxical, paramount, parasite, parochial, paroxysm, parsimonious, parturition, patois, patriarchal, patrician, patrimony, peccadillo, pecuniary, pedantic, pellucid, pendulous, penultimate, penurious, peregrination, perfunctory, peripatetic, periphery, persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... The penultimate syllable of the name Porsena has been shortened in spite of the authority of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assigning any ground for his opinion, that Martial was guilty of a decided blunder ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be it known that he, Dr. Paley, in what he says of utility, contemplates only the final result, the very outermost circle; inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that the first, second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all happen to clash with utility; but then, says he, the outermost circle of all will never fail to coincide with the absolute maximum of utility. Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply this test of utility ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... his "Chronicon," in the Monumenta Historica Britannica, pp. 502 and 505. Nouns, and names ending thus in "r," preceded by a vowel, were often written without the penultimate vowel, particularly in the Scandinavian branches of the Teutonic language; as Baldr for Balder and Baldur; Folkvangr for Folkvangar; Surtr for Surtur and Surtar, etc. (See the Glossary to the prose Edda in Bohn's edition of Mallet's Northern Antiquities, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... It was largely guesswork, following those intricate alien connections, but Rynason had seen this part of such machines before. He found the penultimate point at which the impulses from the brain were translated into sound and broadcast through the speaker. He disconnected this, his torn fingers working ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... to the penultimate point of importance, which may be held to affect the inclusion or exclusion of Irish Members at Westminster—I mean the question of future constitutional amendment. Here the colonial analogies are a little complicated. Since the Australian Colonies Act of 1850, in the new grant of ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... syllabising, not only in displacement of accent (as in the first example above) but also by modification of the accented vowel according to its position in the word, the general tendency being to make long vowels in monosyllables and in penultimate accents, but short vowels in antepenultimate accents. Thus come such differences of sound between opus and opera, omen and ominous, virus and virulent, miser and miserable, nation and national, patron and ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... said, in her high, repellent voice. 'Don't ask me!—I know nothing about ULTIMATE marriage, I assure you: or even penultimate.' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... refuse to let my simple faith be shaken. She records the bones that she has broken, but John Addington Symonds told her that she retained "l'oreille juste." Her husband said she wrote well, and he must know. Besides, am I to be convinced in my penultimate chapter that anything can be wrong with the model I have followed? Certainly not. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... that?—but of his confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners who had reached the penultimate stage—the stage which in theory is a rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was close and the air of the banquet such as to restrict ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Notopods (or those crabs which have their posterior legs placed almost on their backs, for the purpose of adhering to the under side of rocks), is very remarkable from the structure of its hind pair of legs. The penultimate joint, instead of terminating in a simple claw, ends in three bristle-like appendages of dissimilar lengths — the longest equalling that of the entire leg. These claws are very thin, and are serrated with the finest teeth, directed backwards: their curved extremities are ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Locke was despatched to Merton School, and ranked, according to his merits, as lag of the penultimate form. When he came home for the Christmas holidays he was more saturnine than ever; in fact, his countenance bore the impression of some absorbing grief. He said, however, that he liked school very well, and eluded ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through the long-drawn sound of 'Tendebantque,' through the time occupied by the five syllables and therefore by the idea of 'ulterioris,' and through the identity of the long sound 'or' in the penultimate syllables of 'ulterioris amore'—all this, and much more, apprehended not in this analytical fashion, nor as added to the beauty of mere sound and to the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the poetic meaning ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... of the penultimate act that an attendant brought round Miss Cunyngham and her mother—the latter a handsome and distinguished-looking elderly lady, with white hair done up a la Marie Antoinette—behind the scenes; and Nina, hanging some way back, could see them ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... still serves both in his way, painfully selling red-herrings; rates on him and his red-herrings to boil right soup for the Devil's declared Elect! Never in my travels, in any age or clime, had I fallen in with such Visiting Magistrates before. Reserved they, I should suppose, for these ultimate or penultimate ages of the world, rich in all prodigies, political, spiritual,—ages surely with such a length of ears ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... assimilate the spoken to the written language. Thus, Americans incline to give to every syllable of a written word a distinct enunciation; and the popular habit is to say dic-tion-ar-y, mil-it-ar-y, with a secondary accent on the penultimate, instead of sinking the third syllable, as is so common in England. There is, no doubt, something disagreeably stiff in an anxious and affected conformity to the very letter of orthography; and to those accustomed to a more ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... time."—Lowth's Gram., p. 39. "The following sentence cannot be possibly understood."—Ib., p. 104. "The words must be generally separated from the context."—Comly's Gram., p. 155. "Words ending in ator have the accent generally on the penultimate."—Murray's Gram., i, 239. "The learned languages, with respect to voices, moods, and tenses, are, in general, differently constructed from the English tongue."—Ib., i, 101. "Adverbs seem originally ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of Connemara has passed away from the ancient dynasty. If the penultimate monarch could rise from his peaceful grave, his place would know him no more. If he traveled through all his thirty miles of seaboard, the Scotch laborers would doff their hats more respectfully to the steward of the "Law Life" than ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... internode had grown from 1.75 to 6 inches in length, and carried an internode 1.875 inch long, which was just perceptibly moving; and this carried a very minute ultimate internode. After the twenty-first revolution, the penultimate internode was 2.5 inches long, and probably revolved in a period of about three hours. At the twenty-seventh revolution the lower and still moving internode was 8.375, the penultimate 3.5, and the ultimate 2.5 inches in length; and the inclination of the whole ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... some degree the avicularia of Polyzoa, both serving as pincers, it may be worth while to show that with the former a long series of serviceable gradations still exists. In the first and simplest stage, the terminal segment of a limb shuts down either on the square summit of the broad penultimate segment, or against one whole side, and is thus enabled to catch hold of an object, but the limb still serves as an organ of locomotion. We next find one corner of the broad penultimate segment slightly prominent, sometimes furnished with irregular teeth, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... the penultimate sentence: "It would not surprise me, indeed, to hear of any number ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ending in pure iota with a penultimate of alpha the same is done, as [Greek omitted], "horn," [Greek omitted], "old age," [Greek omitted], "ray." And this, too, is Attic, where it is said [Greek omitted], "let them be," and [Greek omitted], ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... last cat jumped over the one in front and over the one in front of that and so on until, having cleared the first cat, it leaped on to its stand where it began to lick itself placidly. Meanwhile, the penultimate cat had begun the same evolution, and then the ante-penultimate cat, until all the cats had cleared the front one and had taken their positions on their stands. The last cat, left alone, looked round, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... least four hundred years old when it was given up. The horses were always called Barberi, with the accent on the first syllable, and there has been much discussion about the origin of the name. Some say that it meant horses from Barbary, but then it should be pronounced Barberi, accented on the penultimate. Others think it stood for Barbari—barbarian, that is, unridden. The Romans never misplace an accent, and rarely mistake the proper quantity of a syllable long or short. For my own part, though no scholar has as yet suggested it, I believe that the common people, always fond of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Par{i}s, trist{i}s, Save all such words as mensIs, istIs. Plurals oblique that end in is, Adding thereto for quibus quIs. The is in SamnIs long by right is Because its genitive's SamnItis, Where you observe a lengthened state Of syllable penultimate. The same to all such words applies, And Is contracted, meaning eis, Long too,— and pray remember this Are monosyllables in is. Save {i}s the nominative pronoun, And qu{i}s, and b{i}s, which last is no noun. When verbs by is concluded are, In second person ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... "Al-malikhulya," proving that the Greeks then pronounced the penultimate vowel according to the acute accenta; not as we slur it over. In old Hebrew we have the transliteration of four Greek words; in the languages of Hindostan many scores including names of places; and in Latin and Arabic as many hundreds. By a scholar-like ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... last remark is Xenophon-Hellenic, but less edifying; fortunately it is only the penultimate, for there is the final {khairete} [good-bye] and message to his wife. Why was she not present? I suppose she was ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... story! A most charming story!!" gurgled the Baron, as, with sobs in his inner voice, talking to himself, he finished the penultimate chapter of Dolly. "Now, Mrs. BURNETT, if you dare to kill your heroine, I swear I'll never forgive you, and never read another of your fatally-fascinating books." The Baron trembled as he commenced the last chapter of the simplest, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... says the man with the nose, "is indisposed toward foreign idioms ye might, to please yourself, smuggle the letter into the penultimate syllable." ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... goat's hide, talked like a shepherd on a May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I could make out—for the mistral whirled many of his words away over unheeding Provence—he had entered the Cafe de l'Univers one evening, a human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... even as high as No. 4 in your summary. It was very natural that you should give only a line to sexual selection in the summary to the Westminster Review, but the result at first to my mind was that you attributed hardly anything to its power. In your penultimate note you say: "In the great mass of cases in which there is great differentiation of colour between the sexes, I believe it is due almost wholly to the need of protection to the female." Now, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... therefore take this opportunity of informing him that sailors have long made use of a compound which actually goes by the name of geograffy, which is only a trifling corruption of the name of the science, arising from their laying the accent on the penultimate. I will now give his lordship the receipt, which is ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... anybody belonging to him heard of the boy's escapade at the meeting, for upon that subject Job Legg felt it wisest to be silent. And when the penultimate meeting passed, the spirit of it was such that those best able to judge again felt very sanguine for Ironsyde. He had created a good impression and won a wide measure of support. He had worked ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... possess any feature, and are not as devoid of all eccentricity as half pounds of butter bought of metropolitan grocers, are recommended not to leave a roomful of their acquaintances until the last but one. Yes, they should always be penultimate. Perhaps Mrs. Woffington knew this; but epilogues are stubborn things, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... lively as the penultimate entree was reached, had turned naturally on the affair of the theatre and the constitutionally sworn rector. In the first fervor of royalty, during the year 1816, those who later were called Jesuits were all for the expulsion of the ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... which you will object to, and I do not doubt many errors. I am very far from expecting to convert you to many of my heresies; but if, on the whole, you and two or three others think I am on the right road, I shall not care what the mob of naturalists think. The penultimate chapter (Chapter XIII. is on Classification, Morphology, Embryology, and Rudimentary Organs.), though I believe it includes the truth, will, I much fear, make you savage. Do not act and say, like Macleay versus Fleming, "I write with aqua fortis ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Hodshon in the bosom of his family. He was dandling a new baby in the air and trying not to step on the penultimate child, who was treating one of his legs as a tree. When the telephone rang he tossed the latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the table, trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well to hear a child gurgling ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... had been falsely suspected. If she had spent the night in the hero's bedroom, she had done so with the best intentions, under the strictest chaperonage ... usually that of her dear, devoted old nurse, God bless her!... whose presence in the bedroom had been hidden, until the middle of the penultimate chapter, from the heroine's friends and relatives. The hero, of course, poor, manly, broken giant, had been ill, suffering from a fever, and in his delirium had called for her, discontent until she had put her cool firm ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... mistress more visible. The Wilhammers kept royally to themselves in their palatial suite, though the husband sometimes deigned to parade his fangs in the smoking-room, where with the luck of the rich he won heavily in the pools. It was not till the penultimate night of the voyage that Rozenoffski caught his second glimpse of his red-haired muse. He had started his nocturnal pacing much earlier than usual, for the inevitable concert on behalf of marine charities had sucked the loungers from their steamer-chairs. He had himself, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi belong, as has already been noted, to 1537. Francesco Maria, here represented in the penultimate year of his stormy life, assumes deliberately the truculent warrior, and has beyond reasonable doubt made his own pose in a portrait destined to show the leader of armies, and not the amorous spouse or the patron of art and artists. Praise enthusiastic, but not ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... by Roth from the penultimate position where it stands in the original. Dawn here pays Night for the latter's malutinal withdrawing by withdrawing herself. Strictly speaking, the Dawn is, of course, the sunset light conceived of as identical with that preceding the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... years. Dying in 1793, Timour left a heap of shahzades, amongst whom our good friend Soojah was almost the youngest. As they call people Tertius, Septimus, or Vicesimus, from their station in the line of birth, let us call him—Penultimate Soojah Penultimate, if he was, he could fight as respectably as the rest: and many was the kick he bestowed on antepenultimate Mahmood. From that year 1793, the zenith of the French Revolution, in Affghanistan was nothing but fighting for some ten or fifteen years. Truly a battle royal it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... partly because this picture and this sense are conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the long-drawn sound of "tendebantque," through the time occupied by the five syllables and therefore by the idea of "ulterioris," and through the identity of the long sound "or" in the penultimate syllables of "ulterioris amore"—all this, and much more, apprehended not in this analytical fashion, nor as added to the beauty of mere sound and to the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... fault affects this name as that of Alexandria. In each name the Latin i represents a Greek ei, and in that situation (viz., as a penultimate syllable) should receive the emphasis in pronunciation as well as the sound of a long i (that sound which is heard in Longinus). So again Academia, not Academia. The Greek accentuation may be doubted, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... nearly smooth, 9-17 mu in diameter." This would seem too great a variation even in this protean species. The only specimens in our herbarium are from the Congo valley. The spores are pale and nearly smooth, as in Tilmadoche alba, and 9 mu. Spores 17 mu suggest immaturity; penultimate cell-division. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... 1515, a Portuguese admiral hoisted his sovereign's flag, and formed a durable settlement at Columbo, which was, and is, considered the maritime capital of the island. Very nearly halfway on the interval of time between this event and Waterloo, viz. in 1656 (ante-penultimate year of Cromwell,) the Portuguese nation made over, by treaty, this settlement to the Dutch; which, of itself, seems to mark that the sun of the former people was now declining to the west. In 1796, now forty-seven years ago, it arose out of the French revolutionary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Arabic Guttural, these Tetrastichs are more musically called) are independent Stanzas, consisting each of four Lines of equal, though varied, Prosody; sometimes all rhyming, but oftener (as here imitated) the third line a blank. Somewhat as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last. As usual with such kind of Oriental Verse, the Rubaiyat follow one another according to Alphabetic Rhyme—a strange succession of Grave and Gay. Those here selected are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... "nobler," pronounced as "nobiler" - u -, was the poet's word, and that the accent is to be placed on the penultimate of ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... The penultimate week in August went on—wearily, tamely, and monotonously. It was, perhaps, the presence of the Speaker—it was, perhaps, the painful recollection of the scene of violence on a previous occasion—it was, perhaps, the universal exhaustion ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Will not some American millionaire come forward with noble philanthropy and six thousand pounds to rescue and to save the most beautiful, the most unfortunate country in the world from further disappointment? Only six thousand pounds now required for the great ultimate, or penultimate, or antepenultimate effort. Another twopence and up goes ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the longer—he had, you see, wasted less breath. When he saw Hugh gasping in the penultimate throes of death, he mustered sufficient strength to clutch the bottle, and even to crawl over to his friend's side. Hugh saw him coming and shut his teeth. Arthur was too feeble to prize them open with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... crusted copybook moral sentiments, to suit bourgeois palate: throw in the safe situation of some one concealed, behind door or window, listening to private conversation. Add one well-tried effective dramatic situation to bring down curtain on penultimate Act, and there's a stage-dish to set before the appreciative B. P., if only it can be presented to them effectively garnished by a clever and popular Manager ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... is requisite to know that rhyme may be considered in a double sense, that is to say, in a wide and in a narrow sense. In the narrow sense, it is understood as that concordance which in the last and in the penultimate syllable it is usual to make. In the wide sense, it is understood for all that language which, with numbers and regulated time, falls into rhymed consonance; and thus it is desired that it should be taken and ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... and these documents greatly helped me to understand what was going on. No language can be more beautiful to listen to than either the Kafir or Zulu tongue: it is soft and liquid as Italian, with just the same gentle accentuation on the penultimate and antepenultimate syllables. The clicks which are made with the tongue every now and then, and are part of the language, give it a very quaint sound, and the proper names ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... thing! To be puffectly candid, I've thought the same once or twice when I've caught sight of myself in a mirror at a big moment, when I was all worked up!—Big moments are vury suiting, but on ordinary days" (Cornelia put a strong accent on the penultimate), "my nose," she closed one eye to regard with the other the sharp little tip of the member in question, "there's no getting away from it, that my nose is a set-back! It's a mean little thing, without a mite of dignity. And I'm kinder washed-out and pasty by your English roses! ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the poems we catch a glimpse in the fragments of letters and diaries which form the penultimate section of the volume. But here, again, we find cause for discontent. If private reasons forbade fullness, was it wise to print scraps? Why tantalize us? In the letters we should, perhaps, have recaptured the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... train myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I die, they will but bury my spine. Ah! where, where, where, my lord, is the everlasting Tekana? Tell me, Mohi, where the Ephina? I may have come to the Penultimate, but where, sweet Yoomy, is the Ultimate? Ah, companions! I faint, I am wordless:- -something, nothing, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of the fact. The existence of the perception of matter is admitted on all hands. It refers to the nature, or origin, or constitution of the fact. Is the perception of matter simple and indivisible, or is it composite and divisible? Is it the ultimate, or is it only the penultimate, datum of cognition? Is it a relation constituted by the concurrence of a mental or subjective, and a material or objective element,—or do we impose upon ourselves in regarding it as such? Is it a state, or modification of the human mind? Is it an effect that can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... gay and expensive quality. There was a fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... like a penultimate branching-out of the old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences, those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of decomposition much more than a proof of life—there has appeared a strange school of dramatic poetry. This ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... at the penultimate pause in order to promote variety, since the voice generally falls at ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... such a quantitative method be applied as has already been described, the results show a continuous decrease in the amount of underestimation of this interval from the first position to the fourth, or penultimate, which presents the following relative values: 92, 66, 50, 40. A phase of rapid increase in the amount of underestimation appears in the fifth or final position, represented on the above scale of relative values by 120. This falling off at the end of ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... up his journal, and beginning at the ante-penultimate page, read aloud:—"To-day—Sold to that old miser of a bookseller, my rare copy of Chaucer, the costly edition of Caxton. My friend, the dear, noble Andreas Vandelmeer, made me a present of it on my birthday, when we were at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... sailors have long made use of a compound which actually goes by the name of geo-graffy, which is only a trifling corruption of the name of the science, arising from their habit of laying the accent upon the penultimate. I will now give his lordship the receipt, which is ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... verb, and 'seizing on' is not properly to be called a pleonasm, merely because it is—nothing at all. The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation through excess of consonants. I should have preferred, indeed, the ante-penultimate tristich as ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... as if the pl. of "Farrj"chicken were "Farrij" instead of "Farrj." In modern Egyptian these nouns of relation from irregular plurals to designate tradespeople not only drop the vowel of the penultimate but furthermore, shorten that of the preceding syllable, so that "Farrij" becomes "Fararj." Thus "Sandik," a maker of boxes, becomes "Sanadk," and "Dakhkhin, a seller of tobacco brands," "Dakhakhn." See Spitta Bey's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... The penultimate line, originally "Some sinful wanderer won," was altered by the author himself. The hymn is found in most Baptist hymnals, and was inserted by Mr. Sankey in Gospel Hymns No. 1. It has since won its way into several ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... principally and also suffixes to the root, but no infixes (that is to say, no mutable syllable incorporated into the middle of the root-word).[7] (2) The root excepting its terminal vowel is practically unchanging, though its first or penultimate vowel or consonant may be modified in pronunciation by the preceding prefix, or the last vowel in the same ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... these Utopias give you an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim at is liberation of the inner interests. Give man possession of a soul, and he will work out his own happiness under any set of conditions. Accordingly, when, in the penultimate year of his life, he proposed his night-school to a meeting of young East-Side workingmen in New York, he told them that he had no sympathy whatever with the griefs of "labor," that outward circumstances meant nothing in his eyes; ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... one of the concubines of the penultimate feudal ruler of Ch'in was living as a hostage in the neighbouring state of Chao, in what is now northern Shansi. There he made the acquaintance of an unusual man, the merchant Lue Pu-wei, a man of education and of great political influence. Lue Pu-wei persuaded the feudal ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the end, and was thankful to see that the reply was from Rachel herself. But the penultimate clause introduced a complication. It must have some meaning. It would scarcely be a wholly irrelevant expression of dislike. Langholm, at all events, read a warning in the words—a warning to himself not to call on Mr. Crofts as a friend of the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Penultimate molar, lower jaw, right side, one-third of natural size, Pleistocene and Newer Pliocene. Co-existed ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... day, is mercifully deferred for a considerable period. To begin with, Mr. Bamborough is under contract to give five farewell tours in the United States at intervals of four years before entering upon the penultimate stage of his severance from the British concert platform. This, which will begin in the autumn of 1934, is likely to continue until the year 1948, when he is booked for an extended tour in Polynesia, Japan, New Guinea and Java. On his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... The rules for its position are briefly as follows. No words but monosyllables or contracted forms have the accent on the last; dissyllables are therefore always accented on the first, and polysyllables on the first or second, according as the penultimate is short or long, Lucius, cecidi. At the same time, old Latin was burdened with a vast number of suffixes with a long final vowel. The result of the non-accentuation of the last syllable was a continual tendency to slur over and so shorten these suffixes. And ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... as the laws of syntax are involved. It is necessary only to speak of objects as possessing and wanting vitality, to communicate to them the property named, whether it in reality possesses it in nature or not. For this purpose words which lack it in their penultimate syllables, take the consonant n to make their plurals for inanimates, and g for animates. By this simple method, the whole inanimate creation—woods, trees, rocks, clouds, waters, &c.—is clothed at will with life, or the opposite class of objects ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... one policeman, ducked, and caught the axe on his poker. The pistol snapped its penultimate shot and ripped a valuable Sidney Cooper. The second policeman brought his poker down on the little weapon, as one might knock down a wasp, and sent it rattling ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... word person seems to be borrowed from a different source, namely from the masks which in comedies and tragedies used to signify the different subjects of representation. Now persona "mask" is derived from personare, with a circumflex on the penultimate. But if the accent is put on the antepenultimate[61] the word will clearly be seen to come from sonus "sound," and for this reason, that the hollow mask necessarily produces a larger sound. The Greeks, too, call these masks [Greek: prosopa] from the fact that they are placed ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... sternutators beside him, he could not be the only nasal nightingale in the three kingdoms. While I thus argued the matter, silently, yet suspiciously, a wandering gleam of day, streaming in at the coach windows, faintly lit up a nose the penultimate peculiarities of which gave a very ominous turn to my reflections. In due time this light became more vivid; and beneath its encouraging influence, first, a pair of eyes—then two sallow, juiceless cheeks, then an upper lip, then a projecting chin; and lastly, the entire figure of the Mysterious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... was worse, it seems, than the penultimate, as the present is worst than the last. We, however, of the present, bad as we may be, shall be kept in countenance by the coming generation, which will prove much worse than ourselves. On the same precedent, all the sermons through the last three centuries, if traced back through decennial ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in integers of the indeterminate equation ax by c may be effected by means of continued fractions. If we suppose a/b to be converted into a continued fraction and p/q to be the penultimate convergent, we have aq - bp 1 or -1, according as the number of convergents is even or odd, which we can take them to be as we please. If we take aq-bp 1 we have a general solution in integers of ax by c, viz. x cq - bt, y ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... huddled up. Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy. He was at the apex of his power. His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent in the eye of the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... to the days of Terence and probably somewhat later the old rule still held good of quadrisyllables with the scansion of m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[)i]s or m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[e]s, but in other words had given way to the later Quintilian rule, that all words with a long unit as penultimate had the stress on the vowel in that unit, while words of more than two syllables with a short penultimate had the stress on the antepenultimate. I say 'unit' because here, as in scansion, what counts ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... the Hebrew might make the congregation stare, but would appear very pedantic to a learned ear. The safest mode is to examine the Greek of the Septuagint, or of the New Testament (if the reader does not understand Hebrew), and observe the place of the acute accent. On that place, if it be on the penultimate or antepenultimate, the accent should be laid in English. But if the accent be on the last syllable, though it is strictly right to place it there also in English, it is not worth while to do so, for fear of making hearers talk ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... "How small, of all," etc. Johnson wrote these concluding ten lines with the exception of the penultimate couplet. They and line 420 were all—he told Boswell—of which he could be sure (Birkbeck Hill's 'Boswell, ut supra'). Like Goldsmith, he sometimes worked his prose ideas into his verse. The first couplet is apparently a reminiscence of a passage in his own 'Rasselas', 1759, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... hidden it rather successfully. I have certainly done my best to hide it. For although the personalities of the villain and his legal spouse crop up periodically, with ominous insistence, from the first chapter onwards, they are always swallowed up again. The reason is given in the penultimate chapter, where the critic might have found a resume of my intentions and the key to this plot—to wit, that a murder under those particular circumstances is not only justifiable and commendable but—insignificant. Quite insignificant! ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m., Janie tasted the penultimate triumph of womanhood. She was courted. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... were the ultimate sect, in the English world, in respect of the necessary qualification of pain and suffering accumulated in their own experience, while the Hobinsonian Independents might rank as only the penultimate sect in this respect. But there is a deeper reason. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, there was a logical connexion between the extreme Separatism of the Baptists, the tightness and exclusiveness ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... followed, and the penultimate hundred yards were covered with fixed bayonets. In this manner we were prepared for any surprise. The enemy replied fitfully to our fire, and we could now see several khaki-clad figures with white hat-bands—the ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... Pocket Vocabularies Pathos The Point of Honour Composure Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes James Russell Lowell Domus Angusta Rejection The Lesson of Landscape Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes Innocence and Experience Penultimate Caricature ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell |
