"Lax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such a character that the true conifers show rings of growth, not larger, nor much less distinct, than those of many of their modern congeners. The Sigillariae and Calamites were not, as often supposed, composed wholly, or even principally, of lax and soft tissues, or necessarily short-lived. The former had, it is true, a very thick inner bark; but their dense woody axis, their thick and nearly imperishable outer bark, and their scanty and rigid foliage, would indicate no very rapid growth or decay. In the case of the Sigillariae, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... He grew lax in his tasks; he dragged his feet and there were even times when he was not hungry. When his mother noticed the latter circumstance she knew surely that the boy was ill, but her ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... administered the Chancery. Suitors did there what people did everywhere else; they acknowledged by a present the trouble they gave, or the benefit they gained. It may be that Bacon's known difficulties about money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, his easiness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, encouraged this profuseness of giving. And Bacon let it be. He asked no questions; he knew that he worked hard and well; he knew that it could go on without affecting his ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... commander-in-chief lacks insight, force and determination, the discipline of the army will be lax and its efficiency greatly impaired. If he is a craven, without faith in himself and in the cause he represents, his lack of courage, his doubt and indecision will communicate themselves to the whole army, resulting in ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... or common, was an undivided waste of above 6000 acres. The saying is applied to persons of lax principles, who can accommodate their ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... The conclusion is just, and Diderot might have verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing years of the old regime was undoubtedly the lax and shifting interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse before a habit of loosely superseding principles in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... present at the formation of new churches, I have mourned to see that, instead of declaring infant baptism to be the duty of believers, as was formerly done in our older churches, a compromise with modern lax views is made, by merely permitting infant baptism, saying, in the confession of faith, that, "Baptism is the privilege only ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... by their unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children when grown but a ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... of forces involved. Hayti was lost to France as a result of the negro uprising under Toussaint l'Ouverture. Practically all the French Antilles changed hands twice in 1794, the failure of the British to hold them arising from a combination of yellow fever, inadequate forces of occupation, and lax blockade methods on the French coast, which permitted heavy reenforcements to leave France. General Abercromby, with 17,000 men, finally took all but Guadaloupe in the next year. As Holland, Spain, and other nations came under French control, England seized their colonies likewise—the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... I think not, John. Well, you couldn't come to a more charming place than this, Miss Worsley, though the house is excessively damp, quite unpardonably damp, and dear Lady Hunstanton is sometimes a little lax about the people she asks down here. [To SIR JOHN.] Jane mixes too much. Lord Illingworth, of course, is a man of high distinction. It is a privilege to meet him. And that member of Parliament, ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... great men, and the old time Buccaneers who had made history about its walls. He gazed upon it and wondered. Were they such bad old days? Were the men who lived in those times great men? Were they scoundrelly Buccaneers? Were their scruples and morals any more lax than those of to-day? Were they any different from those who walked under the shadow of the old walls? They were the questions doubtless asked a thousand times in as many minutes by those who paused to think as they ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Episcopalians of Virginia, where a larger Norman-English stock was settled, with infusions of French-Huguenot blood, and where slavery bred more men of wealth and broader social distinctions, were sternly religious in their laws, although far more lax and pleasure-loving in their customs. Everywhere, this new life of Englishmen in a new land developed their self-reliance, their power of work, their skill in arms, their habit of common association for common purposes, and their keen, intelligent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... Fordun's "Scotichronicon," makes it a reproach to lax prelates that they suffer the common people to vary after their own pleasure the days kept as fast days in honour of Mary. In doing so he recalls that on Saturday, the first Easter Eve, she abode unshakenly in the faith, when the apostles doubted. Good reason, therefore, why ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... say—which must have cost him dearly—withdrew from the bed where his grandson's body lay shrunken, lax, and grimy. To be sure that it was Firm, I gave one glance—for Firm had always been straight, tall, and large—and then, in a miserable mood, I stole to the Sawyer's side to stand with him. "Am I to blame? Is this my fault? For even this am I to blame?" I whispered; ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... practiced so far as possible wherever obstetrical patients are attended, but only in the hospital can the underlying principles be applied with complete thoroughness and persistence. The hospital is constantly alert, whereas in private houses carelessness or ignorance, or both, often lead to lax technique. As a result, statistical evidence indicates that two to three infections occur among those delivered at home ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... with more certainty tend to increase the crime of perjury than the multiplying custom-house oaths, and what are termed oaths of office. ... In Ireland the habits of the common people are already too lax with regard to truth. The difference of religion, and the facilities of absolution, present difficulties so formidable to their moral improvement as to require all the counteracting powers of education, ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... Puritan, prosperous, powerful, progressive—presents probably the most remarkable evidence earth affords of the blessings of Protestantism, while the results of Roman Catholicism left to itself are writ large in letters of gloom across the priest-ridden, lax and superstitious South. Her cities, among the gayest and grossest in the world, her ecclesiastics enormously wealthy and strenuously opposed to progress and liberty, South America groans under the tyranny of a priesthood which, in its highest forms, is unillumined ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... rest was lost in an incoherent babble, and with a deep sigh she fell lax into Cleggett's arms. The reaction from despair had been too much for her; it had come too suddenly; at the first word of reassurance, at the first ray of dawning hope, she had fainted. High-strung natures, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... furtive glance, but, upon being observed, he resumed his crouching attitude, which concealed his face beneath the rim of his weather-worn hat. It was evident that he was afraid of being recognized. He had the slinking air of the convict, and his form, so despairing in its lax lines, appealed to Lee with even greater poignancy than his face. "I'm sorry," she said to him, "but it was my duty to help ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... need not depend on one lover surely?—" and he would get for answer, "No, she need not—but it so happens that she does,"—which to everybody seemed extraordinary, more particularly in Italy, where morals are so lax, that a woman has only to be seen walking alone in the public gardens or streets with one of the opposite sex, and her reputation is gone for ever. It is no use to explain that the man in question is her father, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... with a sudden laugh. 'And the joy of not having any more visits to make! I wonder if you've ever thought of that? Just at first, I mean; for society's getting so deplorably lax that, little by little, it will edge up to us—you'll see! I don't want to idealize the situation, dearest, and I won't conceal from you that in time we shall be called on. But, oh, the fun we shall have had in the interval! And ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co-operation. ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... The public square was crowded with vehicles, live stock, and countrymen whose chief pleasure was to mix in motley crowds, and to whose fancy an uproar of some kind was ever welcome. On such occasions, in the somewhat lax administering of justice of those early times, the killing of a fellow creature seemed indeed a trifle light ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... see who was coming. Then he hastened back to Menelaos and told him that two strangers of princely bearing were at the palace gate, and asked if he should unharness their horses or send them on their way. Menelaos was vexed that any of his servants should be so lax in hospitality, and told him he had acted like a foolish child, and reminded him of the gifts that had been showered on them when they wandered so long in foreign lands. And he bade him hasten to unharness ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... had been easier than he had hoped. In the excitement as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measures had been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, no one looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship had never been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out the guards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition, every man who served ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city—a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... an awful pleasure bland Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing, gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feather'd neck, Nestling nearer to Jove's feet; While o'er his sovran eye The curtains ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... forgive you," returned Grace. "I'm a very lax correspondent, too. I'm so glad you've been well, and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... senator's son. "It seems that several years ago they were a little lax, and, as a consequence, some fellows slipped through that had no right to pass. Now they have jacked the examiners up, so that the test is likely ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... shown to have neither ear nor nose for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study—was much read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... have great merit," said the Irish cotters, whose names were Lee and Twohy, "when they succeed in causing a lax Catholic to trample on every precept of his religion and to perjure himself; but as God is just, and as those who counsel to evil partake of its guilt, and will have to suffer its punishment, so will all the sins that your minister's cruel advice led us to commit ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... docile because of her deep love for her husband, under the latter's attempts to interest her in the faith which he holds dear. Trescott, who compels admiration by his fine, straightforward course, takes his wife to a small Missouri town, where Southern prejudice is still rife and laws are lax, and where feeling is bitter against the uncle of Constance, the absentee landowner, who has sent Trescott to represent him in enforcing evictions from a tract of land to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... desponding; manhood only callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time; others, that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from such lax, chance-medley maxims, that would, in their consequences, reduce man to the level of the brutes. Notwithstanding a prejudice which had haunted him from his childhood, he had, when the occasion offered, applied to Mr. Rigby for instruction, as one distinguished ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... cried: "Stop her!" The two oars were lifted simultaneously, and then by his father's orders Jean pulled alone for a few minutes. But from that moment he had it all his own way; he grew eager and warmed to his work, while Pierre, out of breath and exhausted by his first vigorous spurt, was lax and panting. Four times running father Roland made them stop while the elder took breath, so as to get the boat into her right course again. Then the doctor humiliated and fuming, his forehead dropping with sweat, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... through them as if her life depended on the task. Rapidly as she went to work at this singular task, it occupied an hour, and when it was all over the prim, starched old lady actually sat down upon her own door-step with lax hands, and crushed her best new bonnet against the door-post in a very abandonment of ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... the world there remained not one living soul who through ties of kinship was authorised to properly control these children. Nor could they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a pleasant legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded stories told them by Kathleen Severn and by ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... avert one's eyes from the spectacle presented by the luckless Ellen Berstoun, were it not that her unhappy condition makes the contrast between lax and proper principles the more poignant. No mate with two thousand pounds a year for her! Instead, merely a hopeless passion for an impecunious subaltern sweltering in far-off India. That was poor company throughout the long series of monotonous months that were ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... the Sorbonne, though divided on nearly every other issue, made common cause against the Society. They were assisted in their campaign by Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress, for whom the Jesuit theology was not sufficiently lax, and by the Duc de Choiseul, the king's prime minister. The well-known Jesuit leanings of Louis XV. and of the royal family generally, imposed a certain measure of restraint upon the enemies of the Society, until the famous La Valette law ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... time. Among the ladies especially a sort of frivolity was conspicuous, and it could not be said to be a gradual growth. Certain very free-and-easy notions seemed to be in the air. There was a sort of dissipated gaiety and levity, and I can't say it was always quite pleasant. A lax way of thinking was the fashion. Afterwards when it was all over, people blamed Yulia Mihailovna, her circle, her attitude. But it can hardly have been altogether due to Yulia Mihailovna. On the contrary; at first ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... extreme—giving seldom, but with choice and purpose—Joshua, without inspiring sympathy, commanded generally that cold respect, which is always paid to the rigid moralist; for instead of yielding to the influence of lax and dissolute colonial manners, he appeared to live with great regularity, and his exterior had something of austerity about it, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... When their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters, they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him and his estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty. The firm was highly reputable, long established strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view. It did not understand, or seek to understand, America. It had excellent ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to the purity of morals, for the proper and inestimable worth of an absolutely good will consists just in this, that the principle of action is free from all influence of contingent grounds, which alone experience can furnish. We cannot too much or too often repeat our warning against this lax and even mean habit of thought which seeks for its principle amongst empirical motives and laws; for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow, and in a dream of sweet illusions (in which, instead of Juno, it embraces a cloud) it substitutes for morality a bastard patched up ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... affecting the base running, having been at no time as clear and definite as they should be; nor have the existing rules bearing upon base running been strictly observed by the majority of the umpires each year; especially was this the case in 1892, when the observance of the balk rule was very lax indeed. The difficulty in framing a proper rule for the purpose is, to properly define the difference between a palpable fielding error, which enables a base to be run on the error, and an error ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... there into space, Mrs. Kaufman sat with her arm still entwining the slender but lax form. "Ruby, is—is it something you ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... conduct. Very few, however, venture to take this ground. The ordinary method is to contend for some measure of Church order—for the right and duty of excluding some of the worst—and then to lean on this parable for an argument in favour of a lax and against a stringent administration. We submit that to take your stand on this parable, and thence contend for the exclusion to some extent of the evil from the pale of the Church, is to trample all ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of the undergraduates. His learning and pre-eminence in his department were universally admitted. He had a caustic wit and his sayings were the current talk of the campus. He maintained discipline, which was quite lax in those days, by the exercise of this ability. Some of the boys once drove a calf into the recitation-room. Professor Hadley quietly remarked: "You will take out that animal. We will get along to-day with our usual number." It ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... cases the more healthy and picturesque of the existing small towns will develop a new life. Already, in the case of the London area, such once practically autonomous places as Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, and Godalming have become economically the centres of lax suburbs, and the same fate may very probably overtake, for example, Shrewsbury, Stratford, and Exeter, and remoter and yet remoter townships. Indeed, for all that this particular centripetal force can do, the confluent "residential ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... title of the Marquise de Pompadour. This story, unadorned, may sound paltry, even commercial, but we should not fall into the error of judging it by twentieth century standards. The morals of the French Court, never austere, were especially lax in the reign of Louis XV., and galanteries were the fashion, rather than the exception; while for the post of King's favorite there was a continual ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... battleship alone was there a watch. I could see him plainly in the upper works of the ship, and as I watched I saw him spread his sleeping silks upon the tiny platform in which he was stationed. Soon he threw himself at full length upon his couch. The discipline on Omean was lax indeed. But it is not to be wondered at since no enemy guessed the existence upon Barsoom of such a fleet, or even of the First Born, or the Sea of Omean. Why indeed ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... strange that the political field should so often be the field of a lax and depressed morality, when we consider that here is the great theatre where human ambition struggles for its aims; here are enlisted the strongest passions of the soul; here throng some of its ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... which did not meet the rigid requirements of their own belief; and they planned at once a Spanish crusade which was intended to improve the general deplorable condition of public morals and at the same time to modify, in a most radical way, the liturgy of the Spanish Church, which was far too lax in points of discipline. Their conduct at the time of the surrender of Toledo, in 1074, is a most excellent example of the eager, yet thoughtless, way in which they went about their new work. When King Alfonso, after an interval of more than three hundred years, regained possession of the ancient ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... a single writer of any distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W.W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the weary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Mr. Stubmore the story he had imparted to Mr. Clump. Somehow or other, men who live much with horses are always more lax in their notions than the rest of mankind. Mr. Stubmore did not seem to grow more ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sweet-peas grown near Darjeeling in Upper India, but originally derived from England, can be successfully cultivated on the plains of India; for they flower and seed profusely, and their stems are lax and scandent. In some of the foregoing cases, as Dr. Hooker has remarked to me, the greater success may perhaps be attributed to the seeds having been more fully ripened under a more favourable climate; but this view can hardly be extended to so many cases, including plants, which, from being cultivated ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... date in Rome's political history. That this borrowing assisted greatly in Latin cultural advancement, none may deny; but it is also true that the new Hellenised literature exerted a malign influence on the nation's ancient austerity, introducing lax Grecian notions which contributed to moral and material decadence. The counter-currents, however, were strong; and the virile Roman spirit shone nobly through the Athenian dress in almost every instance, imparting to the literature a distinctively national ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... I saw others and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... stationed there. Its object was to challenge all passers-by during the dark hours, and it formed part of the scheme already elaborated by the authorities for a complete search of every foot of ground. But Brazilian soldiers are apt to be lax in such matters. These men were all lying down, and smoking. For a marvel, they happened to be silent when Marcel led his cohort into the open road. They were listening, in fact, to the crackling of the undergrowth, though utterly unsuspicious of its cause, and the first ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... so scattered through the forests, and the discipline of some of the divisions was so lax that it was some days before McClellan had them ranged in order on the Chickahominy. Another week elapsed before he was in a position to undertake fresh operations; but General Johnston had now four divisions on the spot, and he was too enterprising ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church and chapel) and help him to conduct ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... near a very picturesque spot, which artists were in the habit of frequenting with their sketch-books. Allowed a degree of liberty which mamma never accorded me at home, I availed myself of the lax regimen of my grandmother, and roamed at will about the beautiful country adjacent. In one of these ill-fated excursions I encountered a young artist, who was spending a few days in the neighbourhood. I was a simple-hearted schoolgirl, untutored in worldly wisdom, and had always spent ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... never a letter from Bob. It sometimes crossed John's mind that his brother might still be alive and well, and that in his wish to abide by his expressed intention of giving up Anne and home life he was deliberately lax in writing. If so, Bob was carrying out the idea too thoughtlessly by half, as could be seen by watching the effects of suspense upon the fair face of the victim, and the anxiety of the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... church with such arms as they had to resist the Ku Klux. It had not been thought that the danger would be imminent until about the expiration of the time named in the notice; so that the watch which had been determined upon had not been strictly kept, and on this night had been especially lax on one of the roads ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... as, undeterred by what has occurred since then, I affirm now, that secession was a right, that separation is a fact, and that reconstruction is an impossibility." Mr. Gregory denounced Mr. Seward as "lax, unscrupulous, and lawless of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... with rats, and its discipline was lax, in all save speed and quality of work, and some of his companions were of a dissipated stamp. To add to his discomforts, the line he worked was old and defective; but he improved the signals by adjusting three sets of instruments, and ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... "you have promised to obey me; till this minute you have kept your word; are you getting lax ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... executed more men without process of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and relative one, and one extremely difficult of ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... supposed to at once close the gate, blow a horn, and exhibit a flag. Upon hearing the horn or observing the flag, the warder on the roof raised the alarm, and assistance was sent. Such was the system, but as no attack had taken place for some years the discipline had grown lax. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the sons left home to work elsewhere, he was expected to bring or send home all his earnings, except what he required for food, lodgings, and other necessary expenses; and if he understood the word "necessary" in too lax a sense, he had to listen to very plain-spoken reproaches when he returned. During his absence, which might last for a whole year or several years, his wife and children remained in the house as before, and the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... LICINIUS, Roman Emperor from 260 to 268, and for seven years (253-260) associated in the government with his father, the Emperor Valerian; under his lax rule the empire was subjected to hostile inroads on all sides, while in the provinces a succession of usurpers, known as the Thirty Tyrants, sprang up, disowning allegiance, and aspiring to the title of Caesar; in his later years he roused himself to vigorous resistance, but in 268 was murdered ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... prepared to name Ensamples still of things exclusively To one another adapt. Thou seest, first, How lime alone cementeth stones: how wood Only by glue-of-bull with wood is joined— So firmly too that oftener the boards Crack open along the weakness of the grain Ere ever those taurine bonds will lax their hold. The vine-born juices with the water-springs Are bold to mix, though not the heavy pitch With the light oil-of-olive. And purple dye Of shell-fish so uniteth with the wool's Body alone that it cannot be ta'en Away forever—nay, though thou gavest ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... this manner of living evidently seemed ungodly, and perhaps the citizens of New Amsterdam were a trifle lax not only in their appetite for the things of this world, but also in their indifference toward the Sabbath. As Madam Knight observes in her Journal: "There are also Dutch and divers conventicles, as they call them, viz., Baptist, Quaker, etc. They are not strict in keeping ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... just and catholic spirit. We translate the conclusion of the last article, in which Mr. Schmidt gives the result of his careful analysis of all the works of the author: "The novel, on account of its lax and variable form, and the caprice which it tolerates, is in my opinion not to be reckoned among those kinds of art, which, as classic, will endure to posterity. The authors who have been most read in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... with his baggage disguised as a horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so terrible and admirable, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a white thing, that is fulle swete and righte delicyous, and more swete than hony or sugre; and it comethe of the dew of hevene that fallethe upon the herbes, in that contree; and it congelethe and becomethe alle white and swete: and men putten it in medicynes for rich men, to make the wombe lax, and to purge evylle blood: for it clensethe the blode, and puttethe out malencoyle. This lond of Job marchethe to the kyngdom of Caldee. This lond of Caldee is fulle gret: and the langage of that contree is more gret in sownynge, that it is in other parties bezonde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... in very much the same relationship to China as Corea; and, although the enforcement of the suzerain tie was lax, there was no doubt that at Pekin the opinion was held very strongly that the action of France was an encroachment on the rights of China. But if such was the secret opinion of the Chinese authorities, they took no immediate steps to arrest the development of French policy in Tonquin ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his own mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through a training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. In his early life he had been the very prototype of the hero of Cervantes. The single study of the young Hidalgo ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in their practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life is notedly lax. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... can be produced from the annals of revered Antiquity? Placidia's care for her purple-clad son has often been celebrated; but by Placidia's lax administration of the Empire its boundaries were unbecomingly retrenched. She gained for him a wife and for herself a daughter-in-law[716] by the loss of Illyricum; and thus the union of Sovereigns was bought by a lamentable ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen idolatry of his age." He labored to expose the vices that had taken shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,—a reformer of ecclesiastical abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found. His labors were great, and his attainments remarkable for his age. He is accused of being ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... apartment floored formally with squares of black and white marble, furnished in the formal style of the eighteenth century, and hung around with formal family portraits and curious old prints in which rather lax classical subjects were treated with a formal severity. The library being our usual habitat, I inferred that our change of quarters was in honour of the day. It was much to my liking; for in that antiquely ordered room—and the presence of the Vidame helped the illusion—I felt always as though ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... while MacMaine was in the prisoner's cell, and he was relying on the lax discipline of the soldiers to get him and Tallis out of the cell block. With luck, the guards would have failed to listen too closely to what they had been told by the men they replaced; with even greater luck, the previous guardsmen would have failed to be too explicit about ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... little band that went toward the Alamo, and there were three women and three children in it, but since they knew definitely that Santa Anna and his great army had come there was not a Texan who shrank from his duty. They had been lax in their watch and careless of the future, faults frequent in irregular troops, but in the presence of overwhelming danger they showed not the least fear ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... it was not the public services, terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal—perhaps one might say more advanced—than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"—this, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... harsh and terrible cry from Hutchinson! He made one last convulsive effort and it doomed him. Slowly he lost his balance. Cordts's dark, evil, haunting face swung round. Both men became lax and plunged, and separated. The dust rose from the rough steps. Then the dark forms shot down—Cordts falling sheer and straight, Hutchinson headlong, with waving arms—down and down, vanishing in the depths. No sound came up. A little column of yellow ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about. Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... myself. She liked the best of everything, and these our circumstances allowed us to give her. For the rest, though in kitten days suspected of having caught a mouse, she had never been known in after life to do anything which the most lax of economists could describe as useful. She would lie all day in the best arm-chair enjoying real or pretended slumbers, which never affected her appetite at supper-time; although in that eventide ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... appeared in the street; the ladies dropped me half-curtseys, and walked over to the other side. That precious clergyman went from one tea-table to another preaching on the horrors of seduction, and the lax principles which young men learned in popish countries and brought back thence. The poor Fawn's appearance at home a few weeks after my return home, was declared to be a scheme between her and me; and the best informed agreed that she had waited on the other side of the river until I gave her the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Besides bringing on us the whole mass of savage nations, whom fear and not affection had kept in quiet, there is danger that in giving time to an enemy who can send reinforcements of regulars faster than we can raise them, they may strengthen Canada and Halifax beyond the assailment of our lax and divided powers. Perhaps, however, the patriotic efforts from Kentucky and Ohio, by recalling the British force to its upper posts, may yet give time to Dearborn to strike a blow below. Effectual possession of the river from Montreal to the Chaudiere, which is practicable, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... As a matter of fact, in my own experience, I have found that the major portion of nodal formations appear on the left cord, indicating that it is the weaker. The fact that one cord is slightly lax while the other vibrates at full tension along its face causes trouble. Another source of difficulty is subglottic, owing to inflammation of the mucous membrane in the trachea, which extends upward and ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... felicity in his subject, that he could thus select a pattern of private purity and public honour in the person of the actual Sovereign, without incurring the least suspicion either of base adulation or lax morality.... ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... was organized at once, but Westby was not admitted to it. There was not room for the substitutes; they were expected to do their own training. Westby was notoriously lax in that matter and had to be nagged constantly by Collingwood, whom he found some pleasure ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... approve and co-operate in he stands aloof from, and satisfies his unhappy disposition with carping criticisms and ungenerous censures. A neighbour who does not reach his standard of moral excellence in character and action he pronounces lax in principles and delinquent in life. One who does not agree with him in his peculiar views of some disputed doctrine of Christian faith or principle of Church discipline he judges to be little better than a heretic or ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... I've got an appointment." Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. "Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang upon ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... office. He has served twenty years, with exception of one term when he and Menocal had a disagreement. Menocal controls the votes in this county, you know; that's general knowledge. But things became so lax under the Mexican sheriff who displaced him that he was put back in office. Menocal ordered it; he has much property and believes in law and order; and there's little or no stealing with Winship in the sheriff's saddle. I've heard that he first required the banker ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... things. Crime is persecuted, wickedness is condoned, and goodness treated with indifference in both countries. Men care more for what they eat than anything else, and combine a closely defined idea of meum with a lax perception as to tuum. Barring a little difference of complexion and feature the Englishman would make a good Japanese, or the Japanese a first-class Englishman. But when an American comes to us ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... and most of our numerous race-grounds and race-towns, are scenes of destructive and universal gambling among the lower orders, which our absurdly lax police never attempt to suppress; and yet, without the slightest approach to an improperly harsh interference with the pleasures of the people, the Roulette and E.O. tables, which plunder the peasantry at these places for the benefit of travelling sharpers (certainly equally respectable with some ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... prized. These tobacco notes provided the only currency in Virginia until she resorted to the printing press during the French and Indian War. By the end of the eighteenth century the reputation of the inspectors and the value of the tobacco notes began to decline, due primarily to lax inspecting. Exporters and manufacturers frequently demanded that their tobacco ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon
... His habit of ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, and ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... recognize a right and reasonable discipline as such, even though it causes him personal inconvenience, because he has acquired a sense of military values. But if it is either unduly harsh or unnecessarily lax, he likewise knows it and wears it as a hairshirt, to the undoing of his morale. Though the man, like the group, can be hurt by being pushed beyond sensible limits, his spirit will suffer even more sorely if no real test is put upon his abilities ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... started and got under way, the fathers of the Province assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole course of its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... a world that also contained aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in some better terms than "go as ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... your hands!' you must be partic'lar an' see he does it. Which if you grows lax on this p'int he's mighty likely to put your ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... veracity, would in its tendency be destructive to the safeguards of personal virtue and of social purity; and his arguments for the lie of exigency are similar to those which are put forward in excuse for common sins against chastity, by the free-and-easy defenders of a lax standard in such matters. "Some moralists," says the average young man of the world, "in their extreme regard for personal purity, will not admit that any act of unchastity is necessary, even to protect one's health, or as an act of love. But the men of virility and strong feeling will let ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... examples about to be given, it will be observed that That is never used, whether it correspond to the quod or the ut of the Latin. Nee eme vitzn, nap hibe, I see that you are lax; Nee aguteran, Domincotze amo misa ea vitzaca, I know that you have not heard mass Sunday; where vitzaca or vitzcauh is passive perfect, and the literal rendering is, I know, on Sunday your mass was not heard. I desire that you may live here, Nee eme iuide ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... Christianity was not among the religiones licitae of the Empire. Over and over again it had been pronounced by Imperial Rescript unlawful. This being so, Diocletian saw in its toleration merely one of those corruptions of lax government which it was his special mission to sweep away, and proceeded to deal with it as with any other abuse,—to be put down with whole-hearted vigour ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... non-assimilation proves E. Scand. source. Cp. Sw. dial. slakk adj. bending, e.g., "bakken jaer no na slakk," the hill slopes a great deal, again a W. Scand. form in Sw. dial. The word is probably related to Eng. slack, loose, lax, Dan. slak, ...
— Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch • George Tobias Flom
... abolished altogether. Every one of these articles contained material for a future explosion. It was impossible to comply with them fully, because on the one side a conviction of their justice or expediency was wanting, and on the other they were considered as far too lax in their requirements—because individual cases usually occurred in such a shape that their conditions were not applicable in every particular, and finally, because the embers of passion still glowed in the bosoms ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Revival'—Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes—are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the multitude to speak loosely. Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word 'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of this or that poet and straightly assign this or that quality of his verse ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... face burned and his eyes smoldered with a fever only half sane. At times cold sweat stood on his temples and he trembled, with every muscle lax and inert. As dawn began to lighten the eastern sky-line no man could say—and least of all himself—which counsel ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... was still further increased by the wasteful and lax use of public funds. The money which was wrung from the poor people by these unequal taxes, was seldom wisely or economically expended. Much was squandered upon foolish projects, costly in the extreme, and impossible of accomplishment. ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... as either of you, would simply be lost; where he would be tied down by such stringent rules that he could never amount to anything on the gridiron. I don't mean to say that at Robinson the faculty is lax regarding standing or attendance at lectures, but I do say that it holds common-sense views on the subject of college athletics, and does not hound a man to death simply because he happens to belong to the football ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... various privileges which lay open to him: others in his place would have frequented the passages, hung about the yards and grown familiar with the tap, where spirits were openly bought and sold. Money could do much in those days of lax discipline, and the man who could pay and could give need have very few wants unsatisfied. But Adam's only desire was to be left undisturbed and alone; and as this entailed no undue amount of trouble after their first ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... period. He began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson |
