|
|
|
More "Disproportion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man, poor dust and ashes, that he should crowd it up, and go jostlingly into the presence of the great God—especially since it is apparent the disproportion that is betwixt God and him? Esther, when she went to supplicate the king her husband for her people, made use neither of her beauty nor relation, nor the privileges of which she might have had temptation to make use of, especially at such a time, and in such exigencies, as then ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... of equipping an army—were lacking. The expenditure of L80,000,000 sterling during the conflict with Turkey rendered the strictest economy imperative, and so intent was the Cabinet on observing it that the first candidate for the post of War Minister declined the honour, because of the disproportion between the sum offered to him for reorganization and the pressing ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... epidemy consist not in alterations of the four primary qualities, but in a corruption of the air, powerful, though quite immaterial, and not cognoscible by the senses—(corruptio aeris non substantialis, sed qualitativa) in a disproportion of the imponderables in the atmosphere, as it would be expressed by the moderns. The causes of the pestilence and epidemy are, first of all, astral influences, especially on occasions of planetary conjunctions; then extensive putrefaction ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... reason given for this dealing is, "Son, thou art always with Me, and all that I have is thine." By which Christ seems to tell us that the disproportion between man and man is much less than we suppose. The profligate had had one hour of ecstasy—the other had had a whole life of peace. A consistent Christian may not have rapture; but he has that which is much better than rapture: calmness—God's serene and perpetual presence. And after all brethren, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... their dealings and purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;—never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... jumped; and foaming waterfalls are like streams from penny squirts. Everyone knows the avalanches on the Jungfrau, and the curiously disproportionate appearance of the little puffs of white smoke, which are said to be the cause of the thunder; but the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure distance, and to know that these smoke-puffs, represent a cataract of crashing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... ignorare, ignorat scire.' This 'learned ignorance' is the rational conviction by the human mind of its inability to transcend certain limits; it is the knowledge of ourselves,—the science of man. This is accomplished by a demonstration of the disproportion between what is to be known, and our faculties of knowing,—the disproportion, to wit, between the infinite and the finite. In fact, the recognition of human ignorance, is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... fellow-servant owed to him, there is no assignable proportion: so vast is the difference that we cannot form a definite conception of the relation. This is precisely what we should expect in order to show the disproportion, or want of all proportion, between sins against God and sins against a neighbour. In this parable, on the other hand, the debt in both cases is due to the master, and not in either due by one servant to another. We accordingly do not expect, and do not find a disproportion so ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations. The villages are so small, the churches so vast. It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills. From any one spire in Holland one must be able to see ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... chains was adopted on the Caernarvonshire side. A thick bank of earth had there to be cut through, and a solid mass of masonry built in its place, the rock being situated at a greater distance from the main pier; involving a greater length of suspending chain, and a disproportion in the catenary or chord line on that side of the bridge. The excavation and masonry thereby rendered necessary proved a work of vast labour, and its execution occupied a considerable time; but by the beginning of the year 1825 the suspension pyramids, the land piers and ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish; and Sir William Butler; and Kitchener, I think; and a disproportion of the other prominent Generals are of Irish and Scotch breed-keeping up the traditions of Wellington, and Sir Colin Campbell of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A. as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped beauty in so far as he could worship anything. The homage was cerebral, intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart. As he looked out upon the world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the disproportion which was engendered by "having heart," as it was called. He did ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this strange disproportion in your years, And, let me add, disparity of tempers, Might make the world doubt whether such an union Could make you ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... hearing it with proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was associated, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... temptation I forgot my remorse and good resolutions. I am weak and mean-spirited, and you are not firm enough to govern my vacillating nature. While my intentions are good, my actions are villainous. The disproportion between my extravagant desires, and the means of gratifying them, is too great for me to endure any longer. Who knows to what fearful lengths my unfortunate disposition may lead me? However, I will take my fate in my own hands!" he finally said with ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... of the English monarch was much more extensive within his kingdom, and the disproportion much greater between him and the most powerful of his vassals. His demesnes and revenue were large, compared to the greatness of his state: he was accustomed to levy arbitrary exactions on his subjects; his courts of judicature extended their jurisdiction into every part of the kingdom: ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... taken up into the social sciences from natural science, and adopted. But originally it descended from social science to natural. Darwin's law is, as he himself said, only Malthus' law generalised and extended to the animal world: a growing disproportion between the supply of food and the number of the living is the fatal order whence arises the necessity of universal struggle, a struggle which, to the great advantage of the species, allows only the best equipped individuals to survive. Nature is regarded by Huxley as an immense arena where ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small bodies of strangers who landed on their continent. *j They several times attempted to do it, and were on the point of succeeding; but the disproportion of their resources, at the present day, when compared with those of the whites, is too great to allow such an enterprise to be thought of. Nevertheless, there do arise from time to time among the Indians men of penetration, who foresee the final destiny which awaits the native population, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... saw how want propagates itself like the plague, and gradually conquers all—a callous accomplice in the fate of the poor man. In a week to a fortnight unemployment would take all comfort from a home that represented the scraping and saving of many years—so crying was the disproportion. Here was enough to stamp a lasting comprehension upon the minds of all, and enough to challenge agitation. All but persons of feeble mind could see now ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... that iron gateway? The feeling was due perhaps to the melancholy landscape, the vast, desolate plain that stretches from Nanterre to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... be made. Fitzjames was still doomed to be an illustration of the curious disproportion which may exist between a man's intrinsic power and his fitness for professional success. Still, as at college, he was distanced in the race by men greatly his inferiors in general force of mind, but better provided with the talent for bringing their gifts to market. Such a position was trying, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the King of France of six millions of livres, to be drawn for by General Washington at distant periods, and an offer to provide clothing and other supplies for the army, the expense to be deducted from the donation above mentioned. The disproportion between this and the necessities of the United States upon which their demand was founded, as well as the exceptionable manner of touching the money, determined me without delay to renew the negotiation, in which I ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... semi-barbarian who does Desdemona to death, has been goaded to madness by the machinations of Iago; and even this last can plead his by no means gratuitous hatred. The disasters that weighed so heavily on the lovers of Verona were due to the inexperience of the victims, to the manifest disproportion between their strength and that of their enemies; and although we may pity the man who succumbs to superior human force, his downfall does not surprise us. We are not impelled to seek explanation elsewhere, to ask questions of fate; and unless he appear to fall victim to superhuman ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... system were fully revealed, as well as the wretched character of the "health officers,'' "inspectors,'' and the whole army of underlings, and I exhibited statistics carefully ascertained and tabulated, showing the absurd disproportion of various classes of officials to each other, their appointment being made, not to preserve the public health, but to carry the ward caucuses and elections. During this exposure Boole, the head of the whole system, stood not far from me on the floor, his eyes fastened upon ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... river was crossed in that vicinity, and that the traveller then descended the valley to opposite P'u-chau fu, or possibly embarked and descended the river itself to that point. This last hypothesis would mitigate the apparent disproportion in the times assigned to the different parts of the journey, and would, I think, clear the text of error. But it is only a hypothesis. There is near Kichau one of the easiest crossing places of the River, insomuch that since ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... conclusion follows from the premises, our sole warrant for that judgment being that we can not conceive it not to follow. Consequently if the postulate is fallible, the conclusions of reasoning are more vitiated by that uncertainty than direct intuitions; and the disproportion is greater, the more numerous the steps ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Ceylon, that is, had the elephants there been provided with tusks, they would long since have been annihilated for the sake of their ivory.[1] But it is a curious fact that, whilst in Africa and India both sexes have tusks[2], with some slight disproportion in the size of those of the females: not one elephant in a hundred is found with tusks in Ceylon, and the few that possess them are exclusively males. Nearly all, however, have those stunted processes called tushes, about ten or twelve inches ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... in this way: He appeared to be just of that age which we should think least advantageous to him; too young to enforce approbation by robust manly exertion of talents; too far advanced to win over the judgment by tenderness; or by a manifest disproportion between his age and his efforts, to excite that astonishment which, however shortlived, is, while it lasts, despotic over the understanding. Labouring, therefore, under most of the disadvantages without any of the advantages of puerility, candor ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... thinking it worth while to claim them. It must be a long time after the first establishment of such colonies, before it can become profitable to feed cattle upon the produce of cultivated land. The same causes, therefore, the want of manure, and the disproportion between the stock employed in cultivation and the land which it is destined to cultivate, are likely to introduce there a system of husbandry, not unlike that which still continues to take place in so many ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... ten Whigs, members of former Cabinets, are omitted in this, while only two Peelites are omitted, and one entirely new is admitted—Argyll. Let me propose further that the minor posts be recast with less disproportion. Cardwell ought not to have office while Labouchere, Vernon Smith, and ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the reliability or want of reliability in certain materials or processes used in decoration, or the rules of treatment which will modify a low and dark room and make it seem light and airy, or "bring down" too high a ceiling and widen narrow walls so as to apparently correct disproportion? These things are the results of laws which she has never studied—laws of compensation and relation, which belong exclusively to the world of colour, and unfortunately they are not so well formulated that they can be committed to memory like rules of grammar; yet all good colour-practice ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... fact was of a different kind. The disproportion between the cause assigned by my stepfather and its result in the terror from which he was suffering was too great. The dominion which Edmond Termonde exercised over his brother was not to be justified by the threat ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... north of Europe the helpless decline of Protestantism is betrayed by the numerical disproportion of preachers to the people. Norway, with a population of 1,500,000, thinly scattered over a very large territory, has 485 parishes, with an average of 3600 souls apiece. But the clergy are pluralists, and as many as five parishes are often united ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... public, and enumerate the services, which he has performed to mankind and society. What praise, even of an inanimate form, if the regularity and elegance of its parts destroy not its fitness for any useful purpose! And how satisfactory an apology for any disproportion or seeming deformity, if we can show the necessity of that particular construction for the use intended! A ship appears more beautiful to an artist, or one moderately skilled in navigation, where its prow is wide and swelling beyond its poop, than if it were framed with a precise geometrical ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places.' They all correspond to their circumstances, but we have an infinitude ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... would have been formerly to an American. And five years product is not worth the perpetual inheritance of land, where all is possessed, and none remains waste, to be taken up by him that is disseized: which will be easily granted, if one do but take away the imaginary value of money, the disproportion being more than between five and five hundred; though, at the same time, half a year's product is more worth than the inheritance, where there being more land than the inhabitants possess and make use of, any one has liberty to make use of the ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... reaped their principal honours. But in modern Europe, republics of a similar extent are like shrubs, under the shade of a taller wood, choaked by the neighbourhood of more powerful states. In their case, a certain disproportion of force frustrates, in a great measure, the advantage of separation. They are like the trader in Poland, who is the more despicable, and the less secure, that he is neither master ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... and Marcia coming down from the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means. He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the Chronicle-Abstract, ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... ill-used, one must examine the body for signs of neglect—e.g., dirtiness of skin and hair, presence of vermin, bruises or skin eruptions. Compare its weight with a normal child of the same age and sex. If the disproportion be great and signs of neglect present, then the probability is great (provided there be no actual disease present) that the child has ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... in the van of his army, he did not wait for the rear, making his way onward by nearly impassable roads and coming before the outposts of the supplementary Russian army with only eight thousand men. With apparently utter indifference to the vast disproportion in numbers, the Swedish firebrand rushed forward, the Russians, not dreaming of such mad temerity, being sure that he had his ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... pointing finer and read two descriptions of the filigree ball. The disproportion in the rewards offered was apparent. That promised by Uncle David was calculated to rouse any man's cupidity and should have resulted in the bauble's ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Sprang heavenly Science; and from Science Freedom. 225 O'er waken'd realms Philosophers and Bards Spread in concentric circles: they whose souls, Conscious of their high dignities from God, Brook not Wealth's rivalry! and they, who long Enamoured with the charms of order, hate 230 The unseemly disproportion: and whoe'er Turn with mild sorrow from the Victor's car And the low puppetry of thrones, to muse On that blest triumph, when the Patriot Sage[118:1] Called the red lightnings from the o'er-rushing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... seaman's arguments, urged with all the fervency of almost paternal affection for both Mr. Morton and his seamen. Unable to oppose or refute the arguments of Captain Williams, proving the innocence of the prisoners, or, at least, the veniality of their offence, if guilty, and the unreasonable disproportion between the crime and the punishment; wearied by the perseverance of the petitioner, and convinced, though unwilling to own it, by his arguments;—convinced, too, that he was making a very ridiculous figure in the eyes of his officers and several merchants who were present, he did, as all ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... without cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... laws, seeking statements that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and insufficiency—like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By them it ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Hellenic stamp is veracity:—Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;—Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into restricted ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... blame us if you are left happy at the last? We are daily banishing from our law-books the statutes that disproportion punishment to crime. Daily we preach the doctrine that we demoralize wherever we strain justice into cruelty. It is time that we should apply to the Social Code the Wisdom we recognize in Legislation! ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expose its false professors. The dialogue that perhaps comes next, The Parasite, is still Platonic in form, but only as a parody; its main interest (for a modern reader is outraged, as in a few other pieces of Lucian's, by the disproportion between subject and treatment) is in the combination for the first ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... of the bowl. There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you might own one a year without thinking how it was done; but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same elements. Twice a year, in the time of white butterflies ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... flourished. When men were hanged for petty theft, when they were whipped at the cart's tail for seditious language, when they were disembowelled for treasonable practices; theft, sedition, and treason flourished as they have never flourished since. The very disproportion and hideousness of the penalty inflamed men's minds to the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate the death penalty ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... eleven thousand effective men, and these imperfectly provided with arms and ammunition. Nevertheless, Washington gave battle to the English; but the result was disastrous to the Americans, owing to the disproportion of the forces engaged. General Howe took possession of Long Island, the Americans evacuated New York, and, shortly after, the city fell into the hands of the English. Washington, with his diminished army, posted himself ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... fortune of Hannibal was then consolidated; more than 60,000 Boians, Insubrians, and Ligures flocked in a few days to his standards, and raised his forces to 100,000 men. With such a disproportion between the nucleus of the Carthaginian army and its auxiliaries, Hannibal was in reality but a Gaulish chief; and if, in the moments of danger, he had no cause to repent his new situation, more than once, nevertheless, he cursed with bitterness its inconveniences. Nothing could equal the courage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... accessions made the collection the finest academic library in England, not excepting the excellent library of 380 volumes then at Peterhouse. It had a character of its own. The usual overwhelming mass of Bibles, of church books, of the Fathers and the Schoolmen does not depress us with its disproportion. The collection was strong in astronomy and medicine: Ptolemy, Albumazar, Rhazes, Serapion, Avicenna, Haly Abenragel, Zaael, and others were all represented. Besides these, there was a fine selection of the classics—Plato, Aristotle, including the Politica and Ethica, Aeschines' orations, Terence, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... month of June, that the school-room door opened a foot and a half wider than usual, and a huge, colossal figure stalked in, with a kind of bashful laugh upon his countenance, as if conscious of the disproportion betwixt his immense size and that of the other schoolboys. His figure, without a syllable of exaggeration, was precisely such as I am about to describe. His height six feet, his shoulders of an enormous breadth, ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... the great forces of evil that are always arrayed against Christ. There is the thoroughgoing and formidable rejection of all that is dearest to us, which is creeping like poison through cultivated society at home; there is the manifest disproportion between our resources and the task that we have set ourselves to. 'They need not depart; give ye them to eat,' said the Master. What! five thousand people need not depart, and only this scanty provision of loaves and fishes! Yes; the Master's hand can multiply it. There is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... The same disproportion of number and value may be noticed on many occasions between the sin-offering and the peace offering. A striking example of this was the sacrifice of peace-offerings made by Solomon on the dedication of the temple to the number of ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... jolly and mirthful as any of his frontier companions. Judge Bradford was no advocate, but by the action of a phenomenal memory his large head was stored so full of law as to emphasize, to those who knew him, the curious disproportion between its size and that of his legs and feet. These latter were of such peculiarly modest dimensions as to call to mind Goldsmith's well-known lines, though in this case we must, of necessity, picture ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... gathered under Lord Howard of Effingham slipped out of the bay and hung with the wind upon their rear. In numbers the two forces were strangely unequal, for the English fleet counted only eighty vessels against the hundred and forty-nine which composed the Armada. In size of ships the disproportion was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including the squadron of the Lord Admiral and the craft of the volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present day. Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed its main body, there were but four which equalled in tonnage the smallest ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... thought that "the great number of negroes which of late have been imported into this Collony may endanger the safety thereof." The immigration of white servants was therefore encouraged by a special law.[10] Increase of immigration reduced this disproportion, but Negroes continued to be imported in such numbers as to afford considerable revenue from a moderate duty on them. About the time when the Assiento was signed, the slave-trade so increased that, scarcely a year after the consummation ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... dark locks were rolled back in pompadour fashion over a high cushion, the plait turned up in a queue, fastened at the nape of the neck by an enormous outstanding bow; the cheeks were fuller in outline, and the disproportion between nose and mouth less marked. She was by no means pretty, yet there was a charm about the quaint little face which made the onlooker smile involuntarily and feel a ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... however, one important modification. Fewer subjects were, in the issue, specifically discussed, but these more in detail; while some questions—such, for instance, as that of the Church in the Colonies—were scarcely touched upon. Hence a certain disproportion of treatment, which a general introductory chapter ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... real feeling mingled with a touch of sentimentality. Madeleine Blanchet is rather old for Champi, whom she had brought up like her own child. In the country, though, where difference of age is soon less apparent, the disproportion does not seem as objectionable as it would in city life. The novel is not a study of maternal affection in love, as it is not Madeleine's feelings that are analyzed, but those of Francois. For a long time he had been in love without knowing it, and he is only ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish, & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish & Scotch that are placed in the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of French Authors condemn'd in this polite World for trifling, came a huge Volume containing, Les Oevres de scavans, which has 19 small Bells painted upon the Book of several disproportion'd sizes. ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... other single figure. Like Pauline and Paracelsus, with which it has points of affinity, the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul "whose ambition," as it has been rightly said, "is in extravagant disproportion to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than in willing and doing itself." Sordello's youth is fed ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. The Greeks—predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle—were speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be asked, or what ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... which made him insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on in "Peter Bell" ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... strengthening fortresses and collecting troops, which he placed under the command of his veteran general, Prince Eugene. He was quite sanguine that here he would be abundantly able to repel the assaults of his foes. But here again he was doomed to bitter disappointment. The emperor found a vast disproportion between promise and performance. The diet had voted him one hundred and twenty thousand troops; they furnished twelve thousand. They voted abundant supplies; they furnished ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... enterprises and vainglorious pursuits of a monarchy are not a proper standard by which to judge of those which might be necessary in a republic, it ought, on the other hand, to be remarked that there should be as great a disproportion between the profusion and extravagance of a wealthy kingdom in its domestic administration, and the frugality and economy which in that particular become the modest simplicity of republican government. If we balance a proper deduction from one side ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... length of the transept to which it is attached; and thus, also, the choir and transepts, taken collectively, form nearly a square, except that, to the end of the middle compartment, is attached a circular apsis, of an unusually small size; and, seen from the inside of the church, this disproportion becomes even more conspicuous: the great thickness of the wall necessarily subtracting much from the space. It even strikes the eye as being less than it really is, from being subdivided into a number of small ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... figure, a certain symmetry or disproportion of parts (either of which depends immediately upon the locomotive system)—or a certain softness or hardness of form (which belongs exclusively to the vital system)—these reciprocally denote a locomotive symmetry or disproportion—or a vital softness or hardness—or ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... Man's disproportion.—[This is where our innate knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase himself in ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... invariably presented, the elucidation of which can only be effected by a higher development of the faculties. There is never an approach to equilibrium between the artist and his public. As it advances in knowledge of his art, he maintains the want of balance, the disproportion that always exists between the genius and the ordinary man, by ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... previous one which had lasted but a short time and had been promptly suppressed. But when it was perceived that the native dynasties had taken a hold upon the country, and had carried on a successful contest with Persia, in spite of the immense disproportion in their respective resources; when not only the bravest soldiers of Asia, but the best generals of Greece, had miserably failed in their attacks on the frontier of the Delta, Phoenicia and Syria began ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... schism, battle, controversy, disproportion, incongruity, separation, conflict, difference, dissension, inconsistency, variance, contention, disagreement, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... equivalent amount of protein, while the calory content of the one pound of nuts is more than ten per cent greater than that of the milk furnishing the same amount of protein. In the case of many nuts the disproportion is greater. For example, one pound of filberts has a food value double that of an amount of milk containing the same amount ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... cannot compass by the vast disproportion of their forces to those of the superior beings, they may by their fraud and cunning carry farther in a seeming league, confederacy, or subserviency to the designs of some good angel, as far as consists with his purity to suffer such an aid, the end of which may possibly be disguised ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... certainty how far gold would have cheapened, or, to speak in the current language, how high the ratio of silver would have become, had France during the decade abandoned her bimetallic system; but it is certain that the disproportion would have been enormous, undoubtedly very much greater than the present disproportion in the market between silver and gold, resulting from the demonetization of silver. M. Chevalier gave it as his opinion ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... perfect skill appear. When first the Atoms to the Congress came, And by their Concourse form'd the mighty Frame, What did the Liquid to th' Assembly call To give their Aid to form the ponderous Ball? First, tell us, why did any come? next, why In such a disproportion to the Dry! Why were the Moist in Number so outdone, That to a Thousand Dry, they are ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... is uncommonly serviceable, for, at the same time that it totally prevents putrefaction, it renders the skin moist and flexible for many days. While the bird is drying, take it out and replace it in its position once every day. Then, if you see that any part begins to shrink into disproportion, you can easily ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... one of those striking parts in the West Indian husbandry, in which we see a constant source of loss to those who adopt it; and may we not speak, and yet with truth, as unfavourably of some of the other striking parts in the same system? What shall we say, first, to that injurious disproportion of the articles of croppage with the wants of the estates, which makes little or no provision of food for the labourers (the very first to be cared for), but leaves these to be fed by articles to be bought three thousand miles off in another country, let the markets there be ever so high, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... itself may leave free. During the little more than mechanical action of their hands and eyes, the circumstances of their condition press hard into their minds. The lot of many of those classes is placed in a melancholy disproportion between what must be given to the cares and toils for a bare subsistence, and what can, at most, be given to the interests of the nobler part of their nature, either during their work or in its intervals. It is a sad spectacle ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... violence. This defect may be due to violent heat from certain quarters of the sky, pouring into the open pores in too great proportion to admit of a mixture suited to the natural temperament of the body in question. Again, if too much moisture enters the channels of a body, and thus introduces disproportion, the other elements, adulterated by the liquid, are impaired, and the virtues of the mixture dissolved. This defect, in turn, may arise from the cooling properties of moist winds and breezes blowing upon the body. In the same way, ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this region considerably outnumber the females; yet, while that disproportion exists throughout the provinces, polyandry is confined to the Tibetans. Their wretched lands, verging on the line of perpetual snow, devoid of fuel, and in many places unable to ripen grain, keep them poor; and they assign as a justification for the practice the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... effectiveness of the Krupp gun. Counting all the French dead we came across killed by artillery, they figured up about three hundred —a ridiculously small number; in fact, not much more than one dead man for each Krupp gun on that part of the line. Although the number of dead was in utter disproportion to the terrific six-hour cannonade, yet small as it was the torn and mangled bodies made such a horrible sight that we turned back toward Bazeilles without having ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... necessarily be general, and there may be a use with a view to comprehensiveness in dropping individuals and their lives and actions. In all things, if we leave out details, a certain degree of order begins to appear; at any rate we can make an order which, with a little exaggeration or disproportion in some of the parts, will cover the whole field of philosophy. But are we therefore justified in saying that ideas are the causes of the great movement of the world rather than the personalities which conceived them? The great man is the expression of his time, and there may be peculiar difficulties ...
— Sophist • Plato
... have said, the entire population of the ten districts of Fezzan is, according to the last Turkish census, only about twenty-six thousand souls, of whom about eleven thousand are males, including the children. The disproportion of the sexes arises in part from the number of female slaves, in part from the emigration of the men to the commercial countries of the interior, either for temporary gain, or permanently to escape from the grinding ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... most reliable sources the enemy at this period numbered 40,000 men, all trained soldiers of the former regular army, besides undisciplined armed hordes of fanatics and rabble of the city and surrounding country—a formidable disproportion to our scanty force when it is recollected that they were protected by strong fortifications mounting upwards of fifty guns, with an unlimited supply of artillery and munitions of war, and that with their vast numbers they had ample opportunities of ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... do so in the heyday of life, but I shall not be the one to say it. The race must yet revert in its decrepitude, as I have in mine, to the climates of the South. Since I have been in Italy I have realised what used to occur to me dimly at home—the cruel disproportion between the end gained and the means expended in reclaiming the savage North. Half the human endeavour, half the human suffering, would have made the whole South Protestant and the whole East Christian, and our civilisation would now be there. No, ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms:—waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity—her disproportion—her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious—in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... six thousand. According to Cheshire's calculations, she has provided each of their antennae with thirty-seven thousand eight hundred olfactory cavities, while the worker has only five thousand in both. There we have an instance of the almost universal disproportion that exists between the gifts she rains upon love and her niggardly doles to labour; between the favours she accords to what shall, in an ecstasy, create new life, and the indifference wherewith she regards what will patiently have to maintain itself by toil. Whoever would seek ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... partial, if not entire concurrence, in the general criticism on the central front, and of the two wings. The first impression is far from that produced by unity, grandeur, or elegance; there is a fantastical assemblage of turrets, attics, and chimneys, and a poverty or disproportion, especially in "the temple-like forms" which complete the ends towards the park. The dome, too, has been sarcastically compared with a "Brobdignagian egg." It strictly belongs to the back part of the palace, and had it been screened from the front, its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... included both dimensions. Our thoughts met as naturally as our eyes: it was almost as if we loved each other because we liked each other. The quality of a love may be tested by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them, no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... I perceived, in examining the fruits of the labour of so many days and nights, the vast disproportion between the magnitude of the subject and my untrained powers. One passage seemed faulty, another so overstrained and inadequate, that I flung it angrily back among the rest. At the same time I thought that the verses I had addressed to various beauties and the answers which I had received ought ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... numerous in all thickly populated parts of the world where we have trustworthy statistics. In Austria, England, and Wales, there are nearly one hundred and five women for every one hundred men. In Sweden they are as one hundred and nine to one hundred. In all cities the disproportion is greater than in the country. In London there are one hundred and thirteen women to every one hundred men; and in the large towns of Sweden they stand as one hundred and sixteen ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... journeyed otherwise. Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering by disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the human measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while the cloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... tamers of horses, thought to be meant for Castor and Pollux which stand on this hill; this group is surmounted by an Egyptian obelisk. These statues are said to be the work of Phidias; but there is a terrible disproportion between the men and the horses they are leading; they give you the idea of Brobdignagians leading Shetland ponies. The Quirinal palace is every way magnificent and worthy of the Sovereign Pontiff; there are large grounds annexed to it; it stands nearly ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... thoroughly brow-beaten the states, and having soundly lectured Buckhurst—as a requital for his successful efforts to bring about a more wholesome condition of affairs—she gave the envoy a parting stab, with this postscript;—"There is small disproportion," she said "twist a fool who useth not wit because he hath it not, and him that useth it not when it should avail him." Leicester, too, was very violent in his attacks upon Buckhurst. The envoy had succeeded in reconciling Hohenlo with the brothers Norris, and had persuaded Sir John to offer ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... characteristics—his voice and his hair—as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—while ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... constitution, were indiscriminately admitted by Marius. See Sallust. de Bell. Jugurth. c. 91. * Note: On the uncertainty of all these estimates, and the difficulty of fixing the relative value of brass and silver, compare Niebuhr, vol. i. p. 473, &c. Eng. trans. p. 452. According to Niebuhr, the relative disproportion in value, between the two metals, arose, in a great degree from the abundance of brass or copper.—M. Compare also Dureau 'de la Malle Economie Politique des Romains especially ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... when I say that one-third of the colored people in our cities live in just such dwellings as I have described here; while most of the white population live in well-built houses in the healthy portions of the cities. Is there any surprise that there should be so great a disproportion in the mortality of the races? Compare the statistics of all the large cities and you will find that under similar conditions, this same proportion in mortality exists in the Northern and foreign cities, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... New South Wales (including the Port Phillip and Moreton Bay districts) was granted representative government, but the distance between Sydney and Melbourne and the disproportion of representatives made it a farce as far as Port Phillip was concerned. Melbourne proceeded to demonstrate to the British Government the necessity for Separation. Victoria was established as a separate colony ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... concerned with economic arguments for Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... place, he asserted that the number of the slaves in our West India islands might be kept up without the introduction of recruits from Africa; and to prove this, he would enumerate the different sources of their mortality. The first was the disproportion of the sexes, there being, upon an average, about five males imported to three females: but this evil, when the Slave-trade was abolished, would cure itself. The second consisted in the bad condition in which they were brought to the islands, and the methods of preparing them for sale. They arrived ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... information which is believed to be correct, Colonel Hayne, the inspector-general, reports it to be in total 2600. His report I enclose you. My loss was inconsiderable, being only seven killed and six wounded. Such a disproportion in loss, when we consider the number and kind of troops engaged, must, I know, excite astonishment, and may not everywhere be fully credited; yet I am perfectly satisfied that the account is not exaggerated on the one part, nor ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... which attacks of one sort or another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... break the heart, because, by the sight the soul then has of His perfections, it sees its own infinite and unspeakable disproportion." ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... over and above the difference they have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining life. Children, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the interior economy of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... there was less disproportion than usual; for the great army which Hooker had had before Chancellorsville had been greatly reduced, both by casualties and by the expiration of terms of service. On May 13 he reported that his "marching force of infantry" was "about 80,000 men." A little later the cavalry was reported ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... concern it is to see that no one but himself enjoys these opportunities. The means, moreover, that each combatant will bring to the conflict are, in the end, on the side of Germany. Much the same disproportion of resources exists as lay between ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... a case. In the moment of real action, the notions of the actual strength of the enemy are generally so uncertain, the estimate of our own commonly so incorrect, that the party superior in numbers either does not admit the disproportion, or is very far from admitting the full truth, owing to which, he evades almost entirely the moral disadvantages which would spring from it. It is only hereafter in history that the truth, long suppressed through ignorance, vanity, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... the soul of England. Well, the 154th Error, Heresy, and Blasphemy in this catalogue is this:— "That 'tis lawful for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for disproportion and deadness of spirit, or something distasteful and averse in the immutable bent of nature; and man, in regard of the freedom and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him; neither need he hear any judge ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of the Superior he started off on his expedition, and in his heart he nourished good hopes of success. He knew that Ottilie was not ill-disposed toward him; and although it was true there was some disproportion of rank between them, yet distinctions of this kind were fast disappearing in the temper of the time. Moreover, the Baroness had made him perceive clearly that Ottilie must always remain a poor, portionless maiden. To be related to a wealthy family, it was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she talked and found some ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Black Prince, then little more than a boy, had won the chief honor of the day. But it was beyond hope that so great a success could again be attained. It seemed madness to join battle with such a disproportion of numbers. Yet the prince remembered Crecy, and simply said, on being told how mighty was the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.... The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the weight of the entire skeleton have really increased in weight; but the second table shows that according to the same standard the wing-bones have also really decreased in weight; so that the relative disproportion shown in the foregoing tables between the wing and leg bones, in comparison with those of the wild duck, is partly due to the increase in weight and length of the leg-bones, and partly to the decrease in weight and length ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... In consequence of the daily vicissitudes of his fortune, he is well aware that he is affected for better or for worse by agencies which fall outside the more familiar routine operations of society and nature. So great is the disproportion between the calculable and the incalculable elements of his life that he is like a man crouching in the dark, expecting a blow from any quarter. The agencies whose working can be discounted in advance form his secular ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Jefferson detested or feared the aristocracy of money, while Gallatin, with a clearer insight into commercial and financial questions, recognized that in a young country where capital was limited, and specie in still greater disproportion to the increasing demands of trade, a well-ordered, well-managed money institution was an enormous advantage, if not an imperative necessity to the government and ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... considerable addition to real happiness. In the case of rich men this is not the case, and of colossal fortunes only a very small fraction can be truly said to minister to the personal enjoyment of the owner. The disproportion in the world between pleasure and cost is indeed almost ludicrous. The two or three shillings that gave us our first Shakespeare would go but a small way towards providing one of the perhaps untasted dishes on the dessert table. The choicest masterpieces of the human mind—the works of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the first lesson taught here, the divinely appointed disproportion between means and end, and its purpose. Many an Israelite would look across to the long lines of black tents, and think, 'We are too few for our task'; but to God's eye they were too many, and the first necessity was to weed them out. The numbers must be so reduced that the victory shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... like a thunder-clap on Joan and her husband. The Hungarian army consisted of 10,000 horse and more than 7000 infantry, and Aversa had only 500 soldiers under Giacomo Pignatelli. In spite of the immense disproportion of the numbers, the Neapolitan general vigorously repelled the attack; and the King of Hungary, fighting in the front, was wounded in his foot by an arrow. Then Louis, seeing that it would be difficult to take the place by ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... results from the disproportion of the means of our cognition to the knowable; seeing that in order to contemplate Divine things, the eyes must be opened by means of images, analogies and other reasonings which by the Peripatetics are comprehended ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... effect of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual traveller, whose solitary course is through a thriving ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... The disproportion in the sizes of the predatory wasps and their insect prey is indeed astonishing. The great sand-hornet selects for its most frequent victim the buzzing cicada, or harvest-fly, an insect much larger than itself, and which it carries off to its long sand tunnels by short flights from successive ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... enterprise of others is baffled by the extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an extravagant woman can carry on her back in one winter. Some are ambitious of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This disproportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The victim is straitened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost their brilliant colors. Which shall he ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... overawing the Welsh. One of the family seems to have carried out this latter purpose very vigorously; for it is recorded of him that he slew twenty-six men of Kemaes, a district of Wales, and one wolf. The manner in which the two kinds of game are classed together, and the disproportion of numbers, are remarkable; but probably at that time the wolves had been so closely killed down, that lupicide was become a more rare and distinguished exploit than homicide. The last of this family died about 1778, and their property was divided between Leighs and ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... prevents putrefaction, it renders the skin moist and flexible for many days. While the bird is drying, take it out and replace it in its position once every day. Then, if you see that any part begins to shrink into disproportion, you can easily ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... Twenty years have now rolled away since I first began to examine the specimens of zoology in our museums. As the system of preparation is founded in error, nothing but deformity, distortion and disproportion will be the result of the best intentions and utmost exertions of the workman. Canova's education, taste and genius enabled him to present to the world statues so correct and beautiful that they are worthy of universal admiration. ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Carolina had reached such proportions that it was thought that "the great number of negroes which of late have been imported into this Collony may endanger the safety thereof." The immigration of white servants was therefore encouraged by a special law.[10] Increase of immigration reduced this disproportion, but Negroes continued to be imported in such numbers as to afford considerable revenue from a moderate duty on them. About the time when the Assiento was signed, the slave-trade so increased that, scarcely a year after ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... livres, to be drawn for by General Washington at distant periods, and an offer to provide clothing and other supplies for the army, the expense to be deducted from the donation above mentioned. The disproportion between this and the necessities of the United States upon which their demand was founded, as well as the exceptionable manner of touching the money, determined me without delay to renew the negotiation, in which I had the concurrence ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... which make them so valuable for the improvement of other and less perfect races, may become a fault when wanted for the table. The very rapidity with which they increase in size is thought by some to prevent their meat from ripening up sufficiently before being hurried off to the butcher. The disproportion of the fatty to the muscular flesh, found in this to a greater extent than in races coming more slowly to maturity, makes the meat of the thorough-bred short horn, in the estimation of some, less agreeable to the taste, and less profitable to the consumer; since the nitrogenous compounds, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... at once establish that those bye-laws which afford protection to the well-governing of the merchant service in general, are not sufficient to maintain the necessary discipline on board of the East India ships. The greater the disproportion between the unit who commands and the numbers who obey, the greater the chance of mutiny. Sedition is the progeny of assembly. Even where grievances may be real, if there is no contact and no discussion, there will be no ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... in Holland had made them acquainted with the various forms of Christianity; a wide experience had emancipated them from bigotry; and they were never betrayed into the excesses of religious persecution, though they sometimes permitted a disproportion between punishment and crime." (Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. I., ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even when the worshipper's motives are most sordid and his notions most material; for in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never be traced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity and disproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rational living more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man's consciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetative union with the general life; it bemoans division ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Board. In land operations, we are still more seriously hampered by the non-existence of our army. And although, in point of population, our numerical inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this slight disproportion may be regarded by an Irish Parliament as a fact not ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... have the odious power of being a benefactress, and that a man so superior should be condemned to pick up such bribes falling from such a hand, what a frightful iniquity! And what social system is this which has for its base disproportion and injustice? Would it not be best to take it by the four corners, and to throw pell-mell to the ceiling the damask tablecloth, and the festival, and the orgies, and the tippling and drunkenness, and the guests, and those with their elbows on the table, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... from his sofa to salute the priest. He was feeble and small of stature, but the thing about him that struck you at first sight was the disproportion between his shrunken body and his immense head. The forehead, round and prominent, seemed to crush with its weight the dark and irregular features, much pitted by smallpox. He was very ugly, but still the expression of his blue eyes, the brilliancy of his white and ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in England, not excepting the excellent library of 380 volumes then at Peterhouse. It had a character of its own. The usual overwhelming mass of Bibles, of church books, of the Fathers and the Schoolmen does not depress us with its disproportion. The collection was strong in astronomy and medicine: Ptolemy, Albumazar, Rhazes, Serapion, Avicenna, Haly Abenragel, Zaael, and others were all represented. Besides these, there was a fine selection of the classics—Plato, Aristotle, including the Politica and ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... must know, a great heiress, but was ruined by the prodigality of her father and the villainy of a horrid man in whom he confided. And one of the handsomest young gentlemen in the country is attached to her; but, as he is heir to a great estate, she discourages his addresses on account of the disproportion of ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of a population whose institutions were naturally antagonistic to the slave idea. This being the case, she must be alarmed at seeing that population steadily outstripping her own in numbers and wealth.[61] Since she could not possibly even hold this disproportion stationary, her best resource seemed to be to endeavor to keep it practically harmless by maintaining a balance of power in the government. Thus it became unwritten law that slave States and free States must be equal in number, so that the South could not be outvoted ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... traversed by deep gullies, and unadorned even by a solitary tree,—the only vegetation sprouting out of its parched soil being a melancholy crop of weeds interspersed with languid sunflowers. The disproportion between the deaths of adults and those of children, which has been a subject for comment by every writer on Mormonism, is peculiarly noticeable there. Most of the graves are indicated only by rough boards, on which are scrawled rudely, with pencil or paint, the names ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... lines appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it in. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... advantage of seeming what he believed himself to be. Yet, no doubt this intoxicating credulity pushed him into extravagance unworthy of, and strangely contrasted by, his soberer intellect, and made him disproportion his vast ends to his unsteady means, by the proud fallacy, that where man failed, God would interpose. Cola di Rienzi was no faultless hero of romance. In him lay, in conflicting prodigality, the richest and most opposite elements of character; strong sense, visionary ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... such tendency in some other mission fields. Possibly it may yet be manifested here. This, however, does not now seem probable. The native members of Tai-hoey, almost from the first, have outnumbered the foreign. The disproportion now is as three or four to one, and must continue to increase. It would seem, therefore, that there will now be no occasion for jealousy of the missionaries' influence to grow up on the part of the ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... of cases in which attacks of one sort or another—too often successful—had been made upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... According to various statistics, embracing not only the period of childhood, but including as well the period of youth, we learn that girls constitute one-fifth only of the total number of youthful criminals. A number of different explanations have been offered to account for this disproportion. Thus, for instance, attention has been drawn to the fact that a girl's physical weakness renders her incapable of attempting violent assaults upon the person, and this would suffice to explain why it is that girls so rarely commit such crimes. In the case of offenses for which bodily strength is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... certainly going on among the tribes most in contact with the Europeans. In South Australia it is the same; and short as is the time that this province has been occupied as a British Colony, the results upon the Aborigines are but too apparent in their diminished numbers, in the great disproportion that has been produced between the sexes, and in the large preponderance of deaths over births. A miserably diseased condition, and the almost total absence of children, are immediate consequences of this contact ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... and jump on shore; but the commodore objected to it, and would not suffer any man to go before himself."—"Immediately on our landing, they came about us to the number of two hundred or more, looking at us with evident marks of surprise, and smiling, as it should seem, at the great disproportion of our stature."—"They were so delighted with the different trinkets, which they had an opportunity of viewing, as they hung round their necks, and fell down before their bosoms, that the commodore could scarcely restrain them from caressing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... vocabulary, into something rich and strange. His own especially is the March month—his "roaring moon." His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by the gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in the number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions of poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... absolute means of comparison for the consideration of deviations. The great artist is thus able to recognize the beautiful in a detail even in the midst of other discordant details; and the more capable he is of possessing an absolute sense of the beautiful, the more readily will he perceive any disproportion of form. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... one of the many routes between her own residence and that of her aunt, without meeting a single individual whom she knew, or by whom she was known. In viewing this question in its full and proper light, we must hold steadily in mind the great disproportion between the personal acquaintances of even the most noted individual in Paris, and the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand. ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... greater than that of the 9.2 pints of milk containing an equivalent amount of protein, while the calory content of the one pound of nuts is more than ten per cent greater than that of the milk furnishing the same amount of protein. In the case of many nuts the disproportion is greater. For example, one pound of filberts has a food value double that of an amount of milk containing the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... regarded as a nuisance, and must really be such as long as they are under the degradation which public sentiment inflicts on them. They are at the same time rapidly increasing from manumissions and from offspring, and of course lessening the general disproportion between the slaves and the whites. This tendency is favorable to the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... she would delay two days, if she delayed two days she would delay a week, and after a week things would be adjusted to submission forever. "I'll go," she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and estimated means and resources. These and her general preparations had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold watch, a very good gold watch that had been her mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty good, some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few other such inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen shillings unspent of her dress and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... has witnessed on the high seas, as it has been remarkable for the reverse on land. The French have not been wanting in excellent sailors—gallant seamen, too; but the results of their exploits afloat have ever borne a singular disproportion to the means employed—a few occasional exceptions just going to prove that the causes have been of a character as peculiar, as these results have, in nearly all ages, been uniform. I have heard the want of success in maritime exploits, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... to continue: how can one pity a man who bestows his attentions upon such a woman as Madame? If any disproportion exists, it is ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that loved me, that condescended to bear, to communicate, and to share in all the pleasures and pains of the human heart, where the social affections and emotions of the mind only presided, without regard to the infinite disproportion of our rank and condition. This is a wound that cannot, ought not, to heal—if I pretended to fortitude here I should be infamous, a monster of ingratitude; and unworthy of all consolation, if I was ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... made to illustrate are unawakened; the programme of republican government is lucidly announced, its watchwords adopted, its philosophy expounded, while its spirit and realization continue in abeyance: and thus everywhere we find a singular disproportion between formula and fact, profession and practice, specific knowledge and its application. The citizen of the world finds no armory like that which the institutions, the taste, and the genius of the French nation afford him, whether he aspire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... oxygen. The carbon of the food, not meeting with a sufficient supply of oxygen to consume it, passes into other compounds containing a large excess of carbon—or, in other words, fat is produced. Fat is thus an abnormal production, resulting from a disproportion of carbon in the food to that of the oxygen respired by the lungs or absorbed by the skin. Wild animals in a state of nature do not contain fat. The production of fat is always a consequence of a deficient supply of oxygen, for oxygen is absolutely ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... sentenced—pity might disturb The delicate sense and most divine repose Of spirits angelical. Blessed be God, The measure of his judgments is not fix'd By man's erroneous standard. He discerns No such inordinate difference and vast Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom Such disproportion'd fates. Compared with him, No man on earth is holy call'd: they best Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield To him of his own works the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... up to the best advantage, their arms glittering in the sun. My auxiliaries of the Michico-Canadian stock and the gentlemen of my party were in their best trim. We occupied the beautiful eminence at the outlet of the lake. The assemblage of Indians was large, but I was struck by the great disproportion, or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... considerations. "In this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had done otherwise." The Consistory of Geneva, "that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good custom of his religious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and-forty years that separated ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sane?' he muttered to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hundred men, had routed the army of Holkar and the Rajah of Berar—amounting in all to over fifty thousand, of whom ten thousand five hundred were disciplined troops, commanded by Frenchmen. The news excited the utmost enthusiasm among the troops, as the disproportion of numbers was far greater than it had been at ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... the climate and of their stay near the swamps now became fatally manifest. In the Quorra, fourteen men died, and three in the Alburkah. The disproportion of mortality in the two vessels, at this period, is ascribed to the superior coolness of the Alburkah, which was rendered more healthy in consequence of her iron hull diffusing through her interior the coolness of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... And even this number of really cultured people would not be possible if a prodigious multitude, from reasons opposed to their nature and only led on by an alluring delusion, did not devote themselves to education. It were therefore a mistake publicly to reveal the ridiculous disproportion between the number of really cultured people and the enormous magnitude of the educational apparatus. Here lies the whole secret of culture—namely, that an innumerable host of men struggle to achieve it and work hard ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the first-class shelter of the awning at her stern. Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solution; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide among the lower middle classes. They were mostly good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... them. It is true they were said to be stout vessels, mounting forty-four guns apiece, and carrying above 500 hands, and might be expected to return in company; and he himself had but 227 hands on board, of which near thirty were boys. But this disproportion of strength did not deter him, as he knew his ship to be much better fitted for a sea engagement than theirs, and as he had reason to expect that his men would exert themselves in the most extraordinary manner when they ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... sustain, His breath, his food, his physic and his bane. In due proportions where these atoms lie, A certain form their equal aids supply; And while unchanged the efficient causes reign, Age following age the certain form maintain. But where crude atoms disproportion'd rise, And cast their sickening vapors round the skies, Unlike that harmony of human frame, That moulded first and reproduce the same, The tribes ill form'd, attempering to the clime, Still vary downward with the years of time; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... have pronounced the face not only beautiful, but sweet and womanly. Take that bandage suddenly away and the change would have startled you, and startled you the more because you could detect no sufficient defect or disproportion in the lower part of the countenance to explain it. It was as if the mouth was the key to the whole: the key nothing without the text, the text ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this perfect idea of beauty. "He," says Proclus, "who takes for his model such forms as nature produces, and confines himself to an exact imitation of them, will never attain to what is perfectly beautiful. For the works of nature are full of disproportion, and fall very short of the true standard of beauty. So that Phidias, when he formed his Jupiter, did not copy any object ever presents to his sight; but contemplated only that image which he had conceived in his mind from Homer's ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... opinions of Harrington and others, who adopted the visionary idea of establishing a pure democratical republic in so extensive a country as Britain. This was a rash theory, where there is such an infinite difference betwixt ranks, habits, education, and morals—where there is such an immense disproportion betwixt the wealth of individuals—and where a large portion of the inhabitants consist of the inferior classes of the large towns and manufacturing districts—men unfitted to bear that share in the direction of a state, which must be exercised by the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... is inseparable from the desire to escape from it; every idea of pleasure from the desire to enjoy it. All desire implies a want, and all wants are painful; hence our wretchedness consists in the disproportion between our desires and our powers. A conscious being whose powers were equal to his desires ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... first time I perceived, in examining the fruits of the labour of so many days and nights, the vast disproportion between the magnitude of the subject and my untrained powers. One passage seemed faulty, another so overstrained and inadequate, that I flung it angrily back among the rest. At the same time I thought that the verses I had addressed to various beauties and the answers which I had received ought ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was associated, when he was surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more than ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;—never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... scire.' This 'learned ignorance' is the rational conviction by the human mind of its inability to transcend certain limits; it is the knowledge of ourselves,—the science of man. This is accomplished by a demonstration of the disproportion between what is to be known, and our faculties of knowing,—the disproportion, to wit, between the infinite and the finite. In fact, the recognition of human ignorance, is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of all proportion to the immense number which must have been introduced at various periods of our history. Even the expert, who is often able to detect the foreign name in its apparently English garb, cannot rectify this disproportion for us. The number of names of which the present form can be traced back to a foreign origin is inconsiderable when compared with the much larger number assimilated and absorbed ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Voltaire lets the solemn or serious drapery fall, disclosing man, the poor biped, and in which attitudes![4127] Swift alone dared to present similar pictures. What physiological crudities relating to the origin and end of our most exalted sentiments! What disproportion between such feeble reason and such powerful instincts! What recesses in the wardrobes of politics and religion concealing their foul linen! We laugh at all this so as not to weep, and yet behind this laughter there are tears; he ends sneeringly, subsiding into a tone ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Christian virtue, Pureness." When he was thirty-two, he had written—"The lives and deaths of the 'pure in heart' have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others—partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually great. However, with them one feels—even I feel—that for their purity's sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... can she have learned the reliability or want of reliability in certain materials or processes used in decoration, or the rules of treatment which will modify a low and dark room and make it seem light and airy, or "bring down" too high a ceiling and widen narrow walls so as to apparently correct disproportion? These things are the results of laws which she has never studied—laws of compensation and relation, which belong exclusively to the world of colour, and unfortunately they are not so well formulated that they can be committed to memory like ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... sides, and such as appear neuters with the monarchy a monopoly in either of their hands; weeping over the graves of the Conde, Duque, and Don Luis de Haro, because they were absolute and sole favourites in their generations; attributing to this very cause the seeming disproportion, if not contradiction, between my reception in, and conduction from, Cadiz, hitherto, and now my long demurrage so near the Court, for want of a house in it, and prophesying already that this animosity and emulation will gangrene into the substance, as well ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... the bulk of the German forces are massed against the British lines, and that in some parts of the centre and the east, owing to the nature of the ground, they are but thinly strung along the French front, which accounts partly for the disproportion in the number of kilometres covered by each Ally. But, also, we had to make our Army; the French, God be thanked, had theirs ready, and gloriously have they stood the brunt, as the defenders of civilisation, till we could take our ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... square feet of space walled in by stone and mortar. But Fancy had the power to enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their very number was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and mirth. Here, as in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between the space allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of the manor pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each baronial hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago, what multitudes of voices had stirred the silence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... it worth while to claim them. It must be a long time after the first establishment of such colonies, before it can become profitable to feed cattle upon the produce of cultivated land. The same causes, therefore, the want of manure, and the disproportion between the stock employed in cultivation and the land which it is destined to cultivate, are likely to introduce there a system of husbandry, not unlike that which still continues to take place in so many parts of Scotland. Mr Kalm, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... larger and larger proportion of work out of the fuel; and a perfect engine would be one in which the whole of the coal consumed had its full equivalent in work done. One of our problems, it seems to me, is a similar one. There is an enormous disproportion between the amount of energy expended during the week in preparation and the amount of impression made on the hearers on Sunday. Ministers do not get enough of result in the attention, satisfaction and delight of their hearers for the work they do; and the failure is in ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... letters that there has been some division among the lively friends who had sworn to be comrades for life. There are explanations and justifications. George Sand discovers that there are certain inconveniences connected with intimacies in which there is such disproportion of age and of social position. Finally there are the following desperate letters, written in fits of irritation: "My dear friend, go to Jules and look after him. He is broken-hearted, and you can do nothing for him in that respect. It is no use trying. I do not ask you to come to ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... conduct of the Indians upon the north western frontier. The tribes upon the upper Mississippi, particularly the Sacs and Foxes and Winnebagoes, confident in their position and in their natural courage, and totally ignorant of the vast disproportion between their power, and that of the United States, have always been discontented, keeping the frontier in alarm, and continually committing some outrage upon the persons or property of the inhabitants. All ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... things, a gap to be filled only by a microcosm of playthings which give him his first object-lessons. In proof of which let him see a lady richly dressed, he hardly notices her; let him see a doll in similar attire, he will be ravished with ecstasy. As if to show that it was the disproportion of the sizes which unfitted him to notice the lady, the larger he grows the bigger he wants his toys, till, when his wish reaches to life-sizes, good-by to the trumpery, and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... revealed, as well as the wretched character of the "health officers,'' "inspectors,'' and the whole army of underlings, and I exhibited statistics carefully ascertained and tabulated, showing the absurd disproportion of various classes of officials to each other, their appointment being made, not to preserve the public health, but to carry the ward caucuses and elections. During this exposure Boole, the head of the whole system, stood not far from me on the floor, his ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... judgment being that we can not conceive it not to follow. Consequently if the postulate is fallible, the conclusions of reasoning are more vitiated by that uncertainty than direct intuitions; and the disproportion is greater, the more numerous the steps of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... There was a disproportion between the ages of the master and the pupil; in my eyes she was quite an old person, in her eyes, being her intellectual equal, I was likewise her equal in age. In the natural order of things she felt ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... mist rose from the creek and crept over the garden bank across the lawn. Already the prison doors were shut in that hot country at the junction of the Niles. "He is to pay for his fault ten times over, then," she cried, in revolt against the disproportion. "And the fault was his father's and mine too more than his own. For neither ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... concerning that envy, which arises from a superiority in others, that it is not the great disproportion betwixt ourself and another, which produces it; but on the contrary, our proximity. A common soldier bears no such envy to his general as to his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... determination as to a point in their constitution, will do something to illustrate our own. We are as good as they, I hope, any day: perhaps in a growl, one might modestly insinuate—better. It's not at all likely that there can be any great disproportion of age amongst children of the same household: and therefore, since Kant always countenanced the idea that Jupiter had not quite finished the upholstery of his extensive premises, as a comfortable residence for a man, Jupiter having, in fact, a fine family ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the society of men, in whom the will of God is supreme, is to change the heavy lump of dough into light, nutritious bread. There are three or four points suggested by the parable which I could touch upon; and the first of them is that significant disproportion between the apparent magnitude of the dead mass that is to be leavened, and the tiny piece of active energy which is to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... say that one-third of the colored people in our cities live in just such dwellings as I have described here; while most of the white population live in well-built houses in the healthy portions of the cities. Is there any surprise that there should be so great a disproportion in the mortality of the races? Compare the statistics of all the large cities and you will find that under similar conditions, this same proportion in mortality exists in the Northern and foreign cities, where the food and dwelling of the poor have the same difference. But this ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... wretched corner of a great empire, was the field on which mankind have reaped their principal honours. But in modern Europe, republics of a similar extent are like shrubs, under the shade of a taller wood, choaked by the neighbourhood of more powerful states. In their case, a certain disproportion of force frustrates, in a great measure, the advantage of separation. They are like the trader in Poland, who is the more despicable, and the less secure, that he is neither master ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the machinations of Iago; and even this last can plead his by no means gratuitous hatred. The disasters that weighed so heavily on the lovers of Verona were due to the inexperience of the victims, to the manifest disproportion between their strength and that of their enemies; and although we may pity the man who succumbs to superior human force, his downfall does not surprise us. We are not impelled to seek explanation elsewhere, to ask questions of fate; and unless ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... than those of others, and that they have to do violence to themselves in order to bear with my shortcomings; therefore it is my duty to be patient with them, in imitation of God, who is patient with all, who supports all, and endures all, notwithstanding our many defects, and the disproportion that ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... would, in the case of any other profane works, have prepared the inquirer for casting from him, with disgust, the small remnant, even if not fully convicted of spuriousness; for there is no other case in record of so wide a disproportion between what is genuine and what is spurious" ("Christian Records," p. 67). Their testimony is absolutely worthless until they are themselves substantiated; and from the account given of them above (pp 214-221, and 232-235), the student is in a position to judge of the value of evidence ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... profligate expenditure of powers than that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people. This disproportion increased rather than diminished in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... battle of Sempach, with its signal victory to the Swiss, one of the most striking which history records, if we consider the great disproportion in numbers and in warlike experience and military equipment of the combatants. It secured to Switzerland the liberty for which they had so valiantly struck at Morgarten ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Africa and India prevailed in Ceylon, that is, had the elephants there been provided with tusks, they would long since have been annihilated for the sake of their ivory.[1] But it is a curious fact that, whilst in Africa and India both sexes have tusks[2], with some slight disproportion in the size of those of the females: not one elephant in a hundred is found with tusks in Ceylon, and the few that possess them are exclusively males. Nearly all, however, have those stunted processes called tushes, about ten or twelve ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt—no—no, he skipped—his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... six, and would probably grow two inches more; but he was three stone heavier, Jack being a pound or two only over ten while the pitman reached thirteen. The latter was the acknowledged champion of the Vaughan pits, as Jack was incontestably the leader among the lads. The disproportion in weight and muscle was enormous; but Jack had not a spare ounce of flesh on his bones, while the pitman was ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... course of an hour not only defeated but almost exterminated them, from 7000 to 8000 being killed, and 600 taken prisoners, the latter being executed without mercy by Don John. The loss of the Spaniards was only about ten men. This extraordinary disproportion of numbers, and the fact that 1200 men so easily defeated a force ten times more numerous, completely dashed to the ground the hopes of the Netherlands, and showed how utterly incapable were its soldiers of contending in the field with the veterans ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... Relations Commission that the position of Ireland under the Act of Union would become steadily worse. We have probably not yet reached the bottom of the hill. Ireland is so poor that each new Act for the relief of poverty increases the disproportion between the expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no way out of that vicious circle. If England were to increase Irish taxation she would simply increase the poverty which she has to relieve. During the last fifty years, in fact, the British Government has ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... the progress of the war in Flanders, a disproportion was soon created to the prejudice of England; so the very beginning of the war in Portugal, brought an unequal share of burden upon us; for although the Emperor and the States General were equally parties ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... discord, discordance; dissonance, dissidence, discrepancy; unconformity &c. 83; incongruity, incongruence[obs3]; discongruity[obs3], mesalliance; jarring &c. v.; dissension &c. 713; conflict &c. (opposition) 708; bickering, clashing, misunderstanding, wrangle. disparity, mismatch, disproportion; dissimilitude, inequality; disproportionateness &c. adj[obs3].; variance, divergence, repugnance. unfitness &c. adj.; inaptitude, impropriety; inapplicability &c. adj.; inconsistency, inconcinnity[obs3]; irrelevancy &c. (irrelation) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... it gets rid of the difficulty which I myself have felt and expressed, that it was very improbable that she was sold all standing in sea-going trim, as I imagined Turner intended us to believe she was sold, and answers also the criticism just mentioned as to the disproportion between the weight of the masts and yards and the size of the hull." Part of the Temeraire, Mr. White tells me, is still in existence. Messrs. Castle, the shipbuilders of Millbank, have the two figures of Atlas ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... spring of the present year that, at an evening party of Madame Benzoni's, they were introduced to each other. The love that sprung out of this meeting was instantaneous and mutual,—though with the usual disproportion of sacrifice between the parties; such an event being, to the man, but one of the many scenes of life, while, with woman, it generally constitutes the whole drama. The young Italian found herself suddenly inspired with a passion, of which, till that moment, her mind ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... understand the origin of diseases. They may be occasioned by the disarrangement or disproportion of the elements out of which the body is framed. This is the origin of many of them, but the worst of all owe their severity to the following causes: There is a natural order in the human frame according ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... course, not an original utterance, but derived from one of Napoleon's great Generals; but at all events it shows the estimate placed upon our fighting capacity by an enemy who at one time styled us as 'that contemptible little army.' There is sometimes a weird sense of disproportion revealed, as in the case of a Highlander who was visited by a brother chaplain at a Base hospital some two or three months ago, and who remarked to the patient, 'Well, Jock, what do you think of Jack Johnsons? ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is it all," we say, "but a trouble ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Cairo professed to be amazed at the ludicrous disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could not understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege it is that an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of servants rides safely across the Desert, whilst ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Commission that the position of Ireland under the Act of Union would become steadily worse. We have probably not yet reached the bottom of the hill. Ireland is so poor that each new Act for the relief of poverty increases the disproportion between the expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no way out of that vicious circle. If England were to increase Irish taxation she would simply increase the poverty which she has to relieve. During ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to put into his possession for the purpose of sale, first binding him by a horrid ceremony* and oath not to betray him. Williams, on receiving the watch, which proved a metal one, worth only about ten pounds, and the disproportion of which to the value he had expected, probably had induced him to make the discovery, immediately caused him to be taken into custody, and delivered the property to a magistrate, giving at the same time an account how he came by them. All these circumstances ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... bulk of the German forces are massed against the British lines, and that in some parts of the centre and the east, owing to the nature of the ground, they are but thinly strung along the French front, which accounts partly for the disproportion in the number of kilometres covered by each Ally. But, also, we had to make our Army; the French, God be thanked, had theirs ready, and gloriously have they stood the brunt, as the defenders of civilisation, till we could take ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the case, and turned again to the campo beneath—to the placid dandies about the door of the caffe; to the tide of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords at their sides, and in their ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... eating of a little fruit is. 2. Touching his laws, this I say further, they are both unreasonable, intricate, and intolerable. Unreasonable, as was hinted before; for that the punishment is not proportioned to the offence: there is great difference and disproportion between the life and an apple; yet the one must go for the other by the law of your Shaddai. But it is also intricate, in that he saith, first, you may eat of all; and yet after forbids the eating of one. ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... little more than conjectures; and the figures of a million and a half Germans to half a million French, British, and Belgians, or of fifty corps to twelve and a half, will probably be corrected when the German statistics are known. If it is further true that at the actual points of fighting the disproportion was five to one, we need no further illustration of the ills which inadequate co-ordination imposes on an Alliance, and inadequate staff-work and intelligence on any fighting force. The Allied tactics were probably not ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... abused a still prouder name. Such odds had never been heard of in war. The people whom Frederic ruled were not five millions. The population of the countries which were leagued against him amounted to a hundred millions, The disproportion in wealth was at least equally great. Small communities, actuated by strong sentiments of patriotism or loyalty, have sometimes made head against great monarchies weakened by factions and discontents. But small as was Frederic's kingdom, it probably contained a greater number of disaffected ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ireland of but 36,000,000 pounds, there are in Ireland 75,000 agricultural proletarians more than in the neighbouring island. {272a} How great the competition for land in Ireland must be is evident from this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the labourers in Great Britain are living in the utmost distress. The consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid. The ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... number of negroes which of late have been imported into this Collony may endanger the safety thereof." The immigration of white servants was therefore encouraged by a special law.[10] Increase of immigration reduced this disproportion, but Negroes continued to be imported in such numbers as to afford considerable revenue from a moderate duty on them. About the time when the Assiento was signed, the slave-trade so increased that, scarcely a year after the consummation of that momentous agreement, two heavy ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... wait for the rear, making his way onward by nearly impassable roads and coming before the outposts of the supplementary Russian army with only eight thousand men. With apparently utter indifference to the vast disproportion in numbers, the Swedish firebrand rushed forward, the Russians, not dreaming of such mad temerity, being sure that he had his whole army ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... wonderfully smartened edition of the elf-like child. The dark locks were rolled back in pompadour fashion over a high cushion, the plait turned up in a queue, fastened at the nape of the neck by an enormous outstanding bow; the cheeks were fuller in outline, and the disproportion between nose and mouth less marked. She was by no means pretty, yet there was a charm about the quaint little face which made the onlooker smile involuntarily and feel a sudden outgoing ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... this book. Twenty years have now rolled away since I first began to examine the specimens of zoology in our museums. As the system of preparation is founded in error, nothing but deformity, distortion and disproportion will be the result of the best intentions and utmost exertions of the workman. Canova's education, taste and genius enabled him to present to the world statues so correct and beautiful that they are worthy of universal admiration. Had a common stonecutter tried his hand upon the block ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Holland had made them acquainted with the various forms of Christianity; a wide experience had emancipated them from bigotry; and they were never betrayed into the excesses of religious persecution, though they sometimes permitted a disproportion between punishment and crime." (Bancroft's History of the United ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... applying the very plenteous saliva in my mouth that gamahuching her had stimulated, I added it to the already moistened prick, and applying some to her bum-hole, and introducing a well-wetted finger, I put the knob of my formidable prick to the small and smiling orifice that lay before me. The disproportion struck me as so great that I dreaded success would be much too painful for her, but remembering the dimensions of what had come out of it, I boldly proceeded with the operation. I got in over the knob without making her flinch, but, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... occupies a considerable extent of ground, but its population scarcely amounts to six or seven thousand souls. The streets are very broad, the market place, (plaza mayor,) is of vast dimensions; and, the houses being low, the disproportion between the population of the town, and the space that it occupies, is still greater than at Caracas. Many of the whites, (especially the poorest,) forsake their houses, and live the greater part of the year in their little plantations of indigo and cotton, where they can venture to work with ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... voice and his hair—as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... powerful body of international troops ever at the beck and call of the Republic, vigilantly keeping watch and ward on the banks of the Rhine and with no reasonable prospect of a term to this servitude. For the real ground of this dependence upon foreign forces is the disproportion between the populations of Germany and France and between the resources of the two nations. The ratio of the former is at present about six to four and it is growing perceptibly toward seven to four. The organizing capacity in commerce and industry is said to be even greater. If, therefore, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... without a companion, she had to find what solace, what pastime she could. In the huge house there was not a piano fit to play upon; and her only source of in-door amusement was a library containing a large disproportion of books in old French bindings, with much tarnished gilding on the backs. But a native purity of soul kept her lovely, and capable ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... too often shortlived, have been read in their respective times and circles with great avidity, and produced a correspondent effect. THE PORT FOLIO alone raised, long ago, a spirit in the country which malicious Dulness itself will never be able to lay. Yet the disproportion in number of those miscellanies which have succeeded in America, to those which enrich the republic of letters in England, is astonishing, considering the comparative population of the two countries. London boasts of several periodical ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that of these sequestered ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... well. Good health on the whole is a kind of by-product. We suffer as distinctly from spiritual and mental maladjustments as from physical. We suffer also from the sense of inadequacy, the sense, that is, of a burdening disproportion between our own powers and the challenge of life. New Thought has addressed itself increasingly to such states and problems as this. Here it ceases to be a cult or a method of healing and has become a most considerable ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... nature, we see newspapers at their best. Witness the recent wreck of the steamship Republic. Only a few wireless dispatches were sent out by the heroic Binns during the first few hours, and yet every paper the next morning had columns about the disaster, all written without padding, inaccuracy, or disproportion. Also recall the way the press handled the recent Witla kidnaping case. Within twenty-four hours every newspaper reader in the United States was apprised of the crime in all its details, and in most cases the photograph of the little ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... Counting all the French dead we came across killed by artillery, they figured up about three hundred —a ridiculously small number; in fact, not much more than one dead man for each Krupp gun on that part of the line. Although the number of dead was in utter disproportion to the terrific six-hour cannonade, yet small as it was the torn and mangled bodies made such a horrible sight that we turned back toward Bazeilles without having gone ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... just Spirits that wear victorious Palms, Hymns devout and holy Psalms Singing everlastingly; That we on Earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against natures chime, and with harsh din 20 The fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience, and their ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... under the command of his veteran general, Prince Eugene. He was quite sanguine that here he would be abundantly able to repel the assaults of his foes. But here again he was doomed to bitter disappointment. The emperor found a vast disproportion between promise and performance. The diet had voted him one hundred and twenty thousand troops; they furnished twelve thousand. They voted abundant supplies; they furnished almost ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... shake us out of our equanimity. Consonant chords represent stability, satisfaction and, when over-used, inertia. The genius of the composer is shown in establishing just the right proportion between these two elements; but if there is to be any disproportion let us have too much rather than too little dissonance, for then, at any rate, the music is alive. Since Beethoven the whole development of music as a human language shows the preponderating ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... upon their rear. In numbers the two forces were strangely unequal, for the English fleet counted only eighty vessels against the hundred and forty-nine which composed the Armada. In size of ships the disproportion was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including the squadron of the Lord Admiral and the craft of the volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present day. Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed its main body, there were but four which equalled ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... astronomers who conclude that the moon is inhabited, because it is composed of nearly the same matter as our earth.—How weak soever this reasoning may be, it must yet appear demonstrative; for, say they, to what cause can be attributed the great disproportion of intellects observable between people who appear to have had the same education! In order to reply to this objection, it is proper first to inquire, whether several men can, strictly speaking, have the same education; and for this purpose ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... nothing to provoke this ungallant reply. "In respect to the sacrament, what is the proportion between the communicants, as to sex?" "Sir, there are one hundred women to twelve men." I wish I could say that this disproportion were ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual traveller, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in the first place, that, even in the biological domain of the "struggle for existence," the disproportion between the number of individuals who are born and the number of those who survive regularly and progressively grows smaller and smaller as we ascend in the biological scale from vegetables to animals, and from animals ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... young couple like himself and Marcia coming down from the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means. He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the Chronicle-Abstract, he interviewed them ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... difficult to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations. The villages are so small, the churches so vast. It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills. From any one spire ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... ta-ta at a great rate. She looked behind the mirror, turned it upside down, and at last, when she felt assured that it was the royal person it caricatured, she commenced measuring her cheeks to account for the extraordinary disproportion. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... having once more thoroughly brow-beaten the states, and having soundly lectured Buckhurst—as a requital for his successful efforts to bring about a more wholesome condition of affairs—she gave the envoy a parting stab, with this postscript;—"There is small disproportion," she said "twist a fool who useth not wit because he hath it not, and him that useth it not when it should avail him." Leicester, too, was very violent in his attacks upon Buckhurst. The envoy had succeeded in reconciling Hohenlo with the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... disposition for the reception of grace He makes suddenly, sometimes gradually and successively, as stated above (Q. 112, A. 2, ad 2). For the reason why a natural agent cannot suddenly dispose matter is that in the matter there is a resistant which has some disproportion with the power of the agent; and hence we see that the stronger the agent, the more speedily is the matter disposed. Therefore, since the Divine power is infinite, it can suddenly dispose any matter whatsoever to its form; and much more man's free-will, whose movement is by nature instantaneous. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... rights to the succession in France, and receiving in exchange for the crown of Spain the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, the states of the Duke of Savoy, Montferrat, and the Mantuan, the said Duke of Savoy succeeding you in Spain; I confess to you that, notwithstanding the disproportion in the dominions, I have been sensibly affected by the thought that you would continue to reign, that I might still regard you as my successor, sure, if the dauphin lives, of a regent accustomed to command, capable ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... council suggested the Senate of the United States. As originally established, however, the disproportion of power between the upper and the lower house was so great as to cause much just dissatisfaction. The council was in effect a body of seventy-two governors; the assembly, which more directly represented the people, could consider no laws save ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... was ill; that two-thirds of the commanders of the whole fleet have told him so: they all saying, that they durst not oppose it at the Council of War, for fear of being called cowards, though it was wholly against their judgement to fight that day with the disproportion of force, and then we not being able to use one gun of our lower tier, which was a greater disproportion than the other. Besides, we might very well have staid in the Downs without fighting, or any where else, till the Prince could have come up to them; ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... the order of society, had never known anything beyond their counting-house? No! both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers than to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous disproportion, the whole must needs ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the tale ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow—how spectral did its slender lines appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it in. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been proved to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole 'organismus' of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man already verging towards the decline of life, and who showed me marks of great esteem and affection; but although the heart of the uncle was set upon this marriage, which was much wished for by the nephew also, and I was greatly desirous to promote the satisfaction of both, the great disproportion of age, and the extreme repugnancy of the young lady, made me join with the mother in postponing the ceremony, and the affair was at length broken off. The colonel has since married Mademoiselle Dillan, his relation, beautiful, and amiable as my ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... own territory, the conflict with a power which ere three years had elapsed, carried on the war with fourteen legions, numbering an hundred and seventy thousand combatants, between the auxiliaries and Roman soldiers. It is in the magnitude of this disproportion, and the extremely small amount of the reinforcement which he received from home during the next fifteen years that the war lasted, that the decisive proof of the marvellous capacity of the Carthaginian general is to be found. It is a similar disproportion which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... looked on overawed as she entered Orleans and, riding round the walls, bade the people shake off their fear of the forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. "You have taken your counsel," replied Jeanne, "and I take mine." Placing herself at the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... fixed in order to occasion the least inconvenience to the traffic and commerce of the country. From the fact that nearly 2,000 miles of Railway are already made or sanctioned on the narrow gauge, while not more than 300 are sanctioned on the wide gauge, a disproportion which will be still more largely increased by the new Railways now in contemplation, an inference might be drawn in favour of confining the gauge which is in such a decided minority within the narrowest possible limits; and this inference might be strengthened by ...
— Report of the Railway Department of the Board of Trade on the • Samuel Laing
... bent down at their backs). They mistake their carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside which really are in a horizontal position must show a disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity, in regard to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... violence to themselves in order to bear with my shortcomings; therefore it is my duty to be patient with them, in imitation of God, who is patient with all, who supports all, and endures all, notwithstanding our many defects, and the disproportion that exists between us ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... and there No less the Marks of perfect skill appear. When first the Atoms to the Congress came, And by their Concourse form'd the mighty Frame, What did the Liquid to th' Assembly call To give their Aid to form the ponderous Ball? First, tell us, why did any come? next, why In such a disproportion to the Dry! Why were the Moist in Number so outdone, That to a Thousand ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier extinction had been dear at the expense of a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... iron side-wheel steamer bought from the merchant service and carrying a light battery. She was sent at night to speak a strange sail, which proved to be the Confederate steamer Alabama, and was sunk in a few moments. The disproportion of force was too great to carry any discredit with this misfortune, but it, combined with the others and with yet greater disasters in other theatres of the War, gave a gloomy coloring to the opening ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... so valuable for the improvement of other and less perfect races, may become a fault when wanted for the table. The very rapidity with which they increase in size is thought by some to prevent their meat from ripening up sufficiently before being hurried off to the butcher. The disproportion of the fatty to the muscular flesh, found in this to a greater extent than in races coming more slowly to maturity, makes the meat of the thorough-bred short horn, in the estimation of some, less agreeable to the taste, and less profitable to the consumer; since the ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... the province. But on the other hand it may be seriously modified; because when we review the work of the province as a whole, we may find that the institutional work of the province as a whole is out of proportion to the evangelistic work, and in that case we should think the disproportion at the station more serious. On the other hand we might find the institutional work in the province inadequate, and in that case the emphasis which seemed undue in the one place, and may really be improper in that one place, nevertheless, in view of the situation in the whole province, may be ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... therefore little familiar with the requirements of a building intended for astronomical observation, perceive at once the futility of any such arrangement, and the enormous, one may almost say the infinite disproportion between the cost at which the raised small platform would have been obtained, and the small advantage which astronomers would derive from climbing up to it instead of observing from the ground level. Yet we have seen this notion not only gravely advanced by persons ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... ascending stage the man sustain, His breath, his food, his physic and his bane. In due proportions where these atoms lie, A certain form their equal aids supply; And while unchanged the efficient causes reign, Age following age the certain form maintain. But where crude atoms disproportion'd rise, And cast their sickening vapors round the skies, Unlike that harmony of human frame, That moulded first and reproduce the same, The tribes ill form'd, attempering to the clime, Still vary downward with ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... each inference we judge that the conclusion follows from the premises, our sole warrant for that judgment being that we can not conceive it not to follow. Consequently if the postulate is fallible, the conclusions of reasoning are more vitiated by that uncertainty than direct intuitions; and the disproportion is greater, the more numerous ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the disproportion of their marriages to that of their younger sister. This consideration made them far from being content, though they were arrived at the utmost height of their late wishes, and much beyond their hopes. They ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Monte Cavallo from the statues of the two Hippodamoi or tamers of horses, thought to be meant for Castor and Pollux which stand on this hill; this group is surmounted by an Egyptian obelisk. These statues are said to be the work of Phidias; but there is a terrible disproportion between the men and the horses they are leading; they give you the idea of Brobdignagians leading Shetland ponies. The Quirinal palace is every way magnificent and worthy of the Sovereign Pontiff; there are large grounds annexed to it; it stands nearly in the ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... fell like a thunder-clap on Joan and her husband. The Hungarian army consisted of 10,000 horse and more than 7000 infantry, and Aversa had only 500 soldiers under Giacomo Pignatelli. In spite of the immense disproportion of the numbers, the Neapolitan general vigorously repelled the attack; and the King of Hungary, fighting in the front, was wounded in his foot by an arrow. Then Louis, seeing that it would be difficult to take the place by storm, determined ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... confederation so detestable, as to be sufficient of itself to prove it to be unjust; and that it is so disproportionate, from its nature, to the offence, as to afford an additional proof of its injustice. We shall add now, as a second argument, its disproportion from its continuance: and we shall derive a third from the consideration, that, in civil society, every violation of the laws of the community is an ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... the same year, when the nobles, fatigued with the service, had persuaded the king to retire earlier than usual, the queen, dissatisfied with the proceeding, addressed a letter to her husband, in which, after representing the disproportion of the results to the preparations, she besought him to keep the field as long as the season should serve. The grandees, says Lebrija, mortified at being surpassed in zeal for the holy war by a woman, eagerly collected their forces, which had been partly disbanded, and returned ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... rewards of toil there should be deterioration of moral condition, and abridged facilities for intellectual cultivation, but it was incontestable that men were more moral and better instructed than in any previous centuries. The increasing disproportion between the share of the landlord and that of the laborer was calculated to increase the inequality of condition, and yet it was not to be doubted that the two were nearer together than they were in the days of Elizabeth or of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the corporations and on goods sold in the market-halls were levied. For in the fourteenth century for the 228,000 inhabitants of Paris there were only twenty-four "hotels" and eighty-six "taverns," and the similar disproportion in Rouen was only made up for, in the case of the "genuine traveller," by the unstinted hospitality of such monasteries and hospitals as those at St. Catherine, St. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the expiration of the sentence, good conduct was, if not easy, at least generally possible. If any one is surprised at these contradictions of the law, what would he be when he compares certain penalties to certain crimes—either on account of their inevitable consequences, or on account of the disproportion which exists in their punishment? The conversation of the prisoner whom the bailiff came to see will offer to us ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... arguments, urged with all the fervency of almost paternal affection for both Mr. Morton and his seamen. Unable to oppose or refute the arguments of Captain Williams, proving the innocence of the prisoners, or, at least, the veniality of their offence, if guilty, and the unreasonable disproportion between the crime and the punishment; wearied by the perseverance of the petitioner, and convinced, though unwilling to own it, by his arguments;—convinced, too, that he was making a very ridiculous figure in the eyes of his officers and several merchants who were present, he did, as all obstinate ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him! And with a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ourselves, because the Divine Majesty only communicates itself to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as a ray of the sun penetrating into a room, discovers ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery"; and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of Berar—amounting in all to over fifty thousand, of whom ten thousand five hundred were disciplined troops, commanded by Frenchmen. The news excited the utmost enthusiasm among the troops, as the disproportion of numbers was far greater than it had been at the ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... idea of beauty. "He," says Proclus, "who takes for his model such forms as nature produces, and confines himself to an exact imitation of them, will never attain to what is perfectly beautiful. For the works of nature are full of disproportion, and fall very short of the true standard of beauty. So that Phidias, when he formed his Jupiter, did not copy any object ever presents to his sight; but contemplated only that image which he had conceived in his mind from Homer's description." And thus Cicero, speaking ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks. [Mitford well refers ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... edifices than any city in the British islands, London itself not excepted, can now boast. It was the same all over the East, and in all the southern provinces of the Roman empire. Whence has arisen this astonishing disproportion between the great things done by the citizens in ancient and in modern times, when in the latter the means of enlarged cultivation have been so immeasurably extended? It is in vain to say, it is because we have more social and domestic happiness, and our wealth is devoted to these objects, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... probably make them more nearly correct. That would give a total population of about 715,000. Accepting the number of inhabitants as 715,000 the population per square mile is about 39.6. A comparison with the surrounding West Indian countries reveals considerable disproportion. The Dominican Republic is not quite one-half the size of Cuba but has only one-fourth the number of inhabitants; it is almost double the size of the Republic of Haiti but has less than one-half the inhabitants; it is five times the size of Porto Rico ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... have been an increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would have been more effective, but it would not have been ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have been distinguished by you by many expressions and instances of your goodwill towards me, I take a singular pleasure to congratulate you upon an action so entirely worthy of you. And as I had the happiness to be very conversant, and as intimately acquainted with Mr Dryden as the great disproportion in our years could allow me to be, I hope it will not be thought too assuming in me, if, in love to his memory, and in gratitude for the many friendly offices, and favourable instructions, which, in my early youth, I received from him, I take upon ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Correspondent expresses great Surprise and indignation at the Disproportion of Punishments in this Country. He says he read in a News paper that two Men were hanged together last Month in Kent, one of whom had committed a barbarous Murder on his Wife, and the other had stolen three Shillings and Sixpence. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... he has placed earlier than was conformable to history. I have now gone through all the unquestionably genuine works of Shakspeare. I have carefully abstained from all indefinite eulogies, which merely serve to prove a disproportion betwixt the feeling and the capability of expressing it. To many the above observations will appear too diffuse for the object and plan of these Lectures; to others they will perhaps seem unsatisfactory. I shall be ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... purposes of exchange, he would have found that altogether an immense sum amounting to many talents was withdrawn from the city. Men were quite amazed at the boldness of the scheme and the magnificence of the spectacle, which were everywhere spoken of, no less than at the great disproportion of the force when compared with that of the enemy against whom it was intended. Never had a greater expedition been sent to a foreign land; never was there an enterprise in which the hope of future success seemed to be better ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... however, they tacked and stood towards him. He had but fifteen ships, but he had sent to Admiral Bourne to join him with a squadron of eight ships. They were, however, not yet in sight; still, our ships were larger, with more men than were on board the Dutch, so that the disproportion of strength was not so great as might appear. Tromp, who led the van in the Brederode, fired into the James, when Admiral Blake instantly ordered his gunners to return the salute. The fight then became general. The James bore the brunt of the action. ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... inordinate, that he was oblig'd to discover it to Sir Francis; who, though he lov'd him very sincerely, had yet a Regard to his Daughter's Youth, and Satisfaction in the Choice of a Husband; especially, when he consider'd the great Disproportion in their Age, which he rightly imagin'd would be very disagreeable to Arabella's Inclinations: This made him at first use all the most powerful and perswading Arguments in his Capacity, to convince Sir Robert of the Inequality of such a Match, but ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... humanity as his predecessor, and the expression of his countenance agrees, somewhat singularly, with the account of his piety and good nature preserved by the legends. The Egyptians of the Theban dynasties, when comparing the two great pyramids with the third, imagined that the disproportion in their size corresponded with a difference of character between their royal occupants. Accustomed as they were from infancy to gigantic structures, they did not experience before "the Horizon" and "the Great" the feeling of wonder and awe ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... once was Lisbon, and has been since gazetically and pamphletically quite destroyed, consumed, annihilated! Now, upon comparing this simple narration of things and facts with the false and absurd accounts which have rather insulted and imposed upon us than informed us, who but must see the enormous disproportion?... Exaggeration and the absurdities ever faithfully attached to it are inseparable attitudes of the ignorant, the empty, and the affected. Hence those eloquent tropes so familiar in every conversation, monstrously pretty, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... at his throat, while the fingers of the other were rapidly insinuating themselves into the hair that shadowed one of his temples, with the evident intention to "gouge" him. Weak and emaciated as he was, Gerald was soon made sensible of the disproportion of physical strength thus suddenly brought into the struggle, and as the savage laugh of the settler, as his fingers wound themselves closer and closer within the clustering hair, proclaimed his advantage, he felt that his only chance of saving the threatened eye ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... of work, take the first respectable job that offers, heeding not the disproportion between your faculties and your task. If you put your manhood into your labor, you will soon be given something ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... with proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was associated, when he ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... populated parts of the world where we have trustworthy statistics. In Austria, England, and Wales, there are nearly one hundred and five women for every one hundred men. In Sweden they are as one hundred and nine to one hundred. In all cities the disproportion is greater than in the country. In London there are one hundred and thirteen women to every one hundred men; and in the large towns of Sweden they stand as one hundred ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... remarkably unsuccessful in the deeds it has witnessed on the high seas, as it has been remarkable for the reverse on land. The French have not been wanting in excellent sailors—gallant seamen, too; but the results of their exploits afloat have ever borne a singular disproportion to the means employed—a few occasional exceptions just going to prove that the causes have been of a character as peculiar, as these results have, in nearly all ages, been uniform. I have heard the want ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... was then consolidated; more than 60,000 Boians, Insubrians, and Ligures flocked in a few days to his standards, and raised his forces to 100,000 men. With such a disproportion between the nucleus of the Carthaginian army and its auxiliaries, Hannibal was in reality but a Gaulish chief; and if, in the moments of danger, he had no cause to repent his new situation, more than once, nevertheless, he cursed with bitterness its inconveniences. Nothing could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... them, and they yelled and screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes which in the east of these States ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... direct contrast with the polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this region considerably outnumber the females; yet, while that disproportion exists throughout the provinces, polyandry is confined to the Tibetans. Their wretched lands, verging on the line of perpetual snow, devoid of fuel, and in many places unable to ripen grain, keep them poor; and they assign as a justification for the practice the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... various statistics, embracing not only the period of childhood, but including as well the period of youth, we learn that girls constitute one-fifth only of the total number of youthful criminals. A number of different explanations have been offered to account for this disproportion. Thus, for instance, attention has been drawn to the fact that a girl's physical weakness renders her incapable of attempting violent assaults upon the person, and this would suffice to explain why it is that girls so rarely commit such crimes. In the case of offenses for which bodily ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... progeny. As before shown, it is certain that they sometimes are, which is sufficient reason to avoid such for breeding purposes. It is also well known that, in the horse, for instance, certain forms of limbs predispose to certain diseases, as bone spavin is most commonly seen where there is a disproportion in the size of the limb above and below the hock, and others might be named of similar character; in all such cases the disease may be caused by an agency which would be wholly inadequate in one of more perfect form, but once existing, it is liable to be reproduced in the offspring—all ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... I was impressed, on walking through the booths and galleries, on this occasion, was the great disproportion between the objects purely of taste and luxury, and the objects of use. The former abounded, were very generally elegant and well-imagined, while the latter betrayed the condition of a nation whose civilization has commenced with the summit, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and an excessive ambition of originality, can alone account for the disproportion which seems to exist between this author's taste and his genius; or for the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains. Solitary musings, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of a different kind. The disproportion between the cause assigned by my stepfather and its result in the terror from which he was suffering was too great. The dominion which Edmond Termonde exercised over his brother was not to be justified by the ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... while the millions of people who lead blameless lives of course go unnoticed and unchronicled. Such journals thus inculcate the vilest pessimism, instead of a wholesome and honest belief in the average decency of human nature. The prolixity of the narrative, too, is always in monstrous disproportion to its importance. "Does not the burning of a metropolitan theatre," says a great writer, "take above a million times as much telling as the creation of a world?" Here is where the art of skipping is to be rigorously applied. Read the newspaper by headlines only,—skipping all the murders, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... concerning certain artistic problems, did not appeal to her. She put the book aside, fearing that she was in no humour for reading that morning; and with little hope of being interested, she took up another book. The size of the volume and the disproportion of the type seemed to drag her to it, and the title was a sort of prophetic echo of the interest she was to find in the book. Her thoughts clouded in a sense of delight as she read; she followed as a child follows a butterfly, until the fluttering colour disappears ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the letters that there has been some division among the lively friends who had sworn to be comrades for life. There are explanations and justifications. George Sand discovers that there are certain inconveniences connected with intimacies in which there is such disproportion of age and of social position. Finally there are the following desperate letters, written in fits of irritation: "My dear friend, go to Jules and look after him. He is broken-hearted, and you can do nothing ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... her post, with the whole class in and on her hands. Rose had already taken off her hat and gloves, and she tried to compose her ruffled feelings before she began her round of the drawing-boards, as Mr. St. Foy inspected his easels. The analogy with its disproportion struck her, and moved her to silent, unsteady laughter, which she could not restrain, so that it broke out into a ringing peal at the first enormity in ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... face not only beautiful, but sweet and womanly. Take that bandage suddenly away and the change would have startled you, and startled you the more because you could detect no sufficient defect or disproportion in the lower part of the countenance to explain it. It was as if the mouth was the key to the whole: the key nothing without the text, the text ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... opened; the Dutch traders were scrupulously honest in their dealings and purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;—never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... [72] The disproportion between the two sexes is explained by the general custom, which does not allow the Parsi servants to bring their wives to the ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... arises from their combustion being complete; and the disproportion between the flame and heat shows you that these are by no ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... resolve to attack his enemy at home. The difficulties in his way he set contemptuously aside; "Fifteen millions of people," he said, in allusion to the disproportion between the population of England and France, "must give way to forty millions"; and the invasion was planned on a gigantic scale. A camp of one hundred thousand men was formed at Boulogne, and a host of flat-bottomed ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... the consideration of deviations. The great artist is thus able to recognize the beautiful in a detail even in the midst of other discordant details; and the more capable he is of possessing an absolute sense of the beautiful, the more readily will he perceive any disproportion of form. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... subject of agitation. He saw how want propagates itself like the plague, and gradually conquers all—a callous accomplice in the fate of the poor man. In a week to a fortnight unemployment would take all comfort from a home that represented the scraping and saving of many years—so crying was the disproportion. Here was enough to stamp a lasting comprehension upon the minds of all, and enough to challenge agitation. All but persons of feeble mind could see now what they were ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... them, before it come on too fast upon the majesty of kings. A numerous nobility causeth poverty, and inconvenience in a state; for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, between ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... was a pause so full of challenge that Lansing had time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion between his anger and its cause. And this made ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... towards explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and insufficiency—like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Claude Montigny's. Your mother is descended from a warlike Scottish line, your father's father was an English peer. Your parents are yet living; but their union, which was in many points unequal, was, alas! rendered the more unequal by a gulf-like disproportion in the passion that provoked it;—a gulf, too, that was undiscovered, till, too late, your mother saw it. Thence, their lives, their loves, so call it, their mutual progress (save on the course of fondness towards yourself, their child, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... the story of the unification of the traits or characters. Disharmony, disproportion of traits and characters may be progressive and lead to disaster and mental disease, or a balance may be reached after a struggle and what we call reform takes place. Though our social life tends to narrow and repress character, it also tends to harmonize it by the preventing of excess ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
Copyright © 2025 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
