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More "Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... in a letter to his constituents, of which the pith is in the final sentences: '"But," I think I hear some one say, "after all, friend Howe, was not the supposititious case, which you anticipated might occur, somewhat quaint and eccentric and startling?" It was, because I wanted to startle, to rouse, to flash the light of truth over every hideous feature of the system. {86} The fire-bell startles at night; but if it rings not the town may be burned; and wise men seldom vote him an incendiary who ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... fanatic Marxist; her brother, Tokarev, whose soul is a field for spiritual battles; and Varenka, a village school-mistress. There are several eccentric characters around them, such as Serge, a young apostle of a somewhat Nietzschean egoism, Antsov and others. Tanya is none other than Natasha of "Astray," with this great difference, however, that Tanya has found truth already formulated ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... hereditary enemies of all good Cornishmen, so many of whom had gone to man the fleet that won at Trafalgar. The obscure feeling of distrust that always stirs in the lower classes of remote districts at anything alien did not, of course, extend to the educated people, but Mr. Eliot, being poor and very eccentric, refused such championship from his equals as might ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... girl and a virgin, gave herself to Pope Sergius III, a capricious, fantastic man, who had once had the witty idea of digging up Pope Formosus and subjecting him, putrefied as he was, to the judgment of a Synod. By this eccentric man Marozia had a son, and afterwards was married three times more. She exercised an omnipotent sway over the Holy See. John X, her mother's lover, she deposed and sent to die in prison. With his successor, Leo VI, whom she herself had appointed Pope, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... the Father bade the poor plant do, than his tender dwelling upon grasses and lilies, sparrow and sheep. The withering of the tree made an allegory: while the love of flowers and streams was to those simple hearts perhaps an unaccountable, almost an eccentric thing. But had Christ drawn human breath in our bleaker Northern air, he would have perhaps, if those that surrounded him had had leisure and grace to listen, drawn as grave and comforting a soul-music from our homely cuckoo, with her punctual ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... rattle. Song lacking. Birds of low trees and undergrowth, where they also nest; partial to neighborhood of streams, or wherever the tent caterpillar is abundant. Habits rather solitary, silent, and eccentric. Migratory. Yellow-billed ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... powers boded no good; that if the fishman once became slightly irritated he would sic the nonapus on Ray and himself. (Probably, in fact, Garf would try to conquer the world anyway; that was how it went in stories as corny as this situation.) Farmer further decided that Ray was too egocentrically eccentric to be trusted to get them out of this fix; he decided he'd ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... it also tends to harmonize it by the preventing of excess development of certain traits. The social person is on the whole well balanced, though he may be mediocre. On the other hand, the non-social person usually tends to unbalance in the sense that he becomes odd and eccentric. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... might be so ill-advised as to tell the whole story in the end. Of course, I would try to prevent you, and as far as the trial is concerned, I think I could use means to prevent you. But if the result was unfavourable—and knowing what eccentric things juries do, we must recognise the possibility of an unfavourable verdict—you might consider it advisable to disclose everything in the hope of having the conviction ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... the features would be blotted out and the hair made to snap. When the body was affected the sufferer was hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed on the ground, to bounce about like a ball." The eccentric Lorenzo Dow, whose freaks of eloquence and humor are remembered by many now living, speaks from his ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... see this eccentric representative of Anglo-Turkish political-and-mercantile-combination, and found very little exaggeration in the description, except that the distance was 187 paces instead of 200 which he had to perform, whenever the character of the article was beyond the sphere of his experience. As this happened ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... hand many of the views and habits of those with whom he found himself associated were very distasteful to him. In a new social movement, such as that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is certain to be great attraction for restless and eccentric persons, and in point of fact many such joined it. The beard movement was then in its infancy, and any man except a dragoon who wore hair on his face was regarded as a dangerous character, with whom it was compromising to be seen in any public place—a person in sympathy with sansculottes, and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... But if he should, what of it? I am known to be somewhat eccentric—particularly so in my love of hard work, fresh air and exercise—besides, he has not commanded my attendance. He will not, therefore, be surprised at my absence. I tell you, Roger,—I must go! Who would have expected the King to take it into his head to visit The Islands ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... variety of characters which fall in a traveller's way, I became acquainted during my sojourn in London, with an eccentric personage of the name of Buckthorne. He was a literary man, had lived much in the metropolis, and had acquired a great deal of curious, though unprofitable knowledge concerning it. He was a great observer of character, and could give ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... when he would start back to the Hotel his Shoes would be Full of Cold Perspiration. Finally, when he began to decline Invitations, against the advice of his Manager, it was said of him that he was Eccentric and appeared to have a Case of the ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... of his eccentric friend and the threatened disaster loomed almost personal. He felt himself to blame too, for the advice which had thrown Spence directly from the frying-pan of Aunt Caroline into the fire of a sterner fate. Add to all this a keen feeling of unwarranted ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... were out. And he was very sound in his views, not extreme in anything; not an evangelical, much less inclining towards the section of the Church which began to be known in the world under the name of Puseyists. Eustace Thynne had no exaggerated ideas; he was not eccentric in anything. The Thirty-Nine Articles sat as easily upon him as his very well made coat; he never forgot that he was a clergyman, or wore even a gray checked necktie, which the rector sometimes did, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... had no ambition to parade in Bloomer costume, or to be otherwise eccentric, even where it happened to be more comfortable. Neither have I figured as the chairman or secretary of a woman's convention, nor had my name ringing through the newspapers as an impatient struggler after more rights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... other. The free use of white paint all over the sloping tiers of pews has prevented the interior from being as dark as it would have otherwise been, but the result of all this painted deal has been to give the building the most eccentric ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... anything athletic, and eccentricities paid a very heavy price among all boys. Thus, though I was glad to lend my protection to my friend, we never went about together—as such boys as he always lived the life of hermits in the midst of the crowd. I well remember one other boy, made eccentric by his peculiar face and an unfortunate impediment of speech. No such boy should have been sent to an English public school as it was in my day. His stutter was no ordinary one, for it consisted, not in repeating ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... different variety-theaters. His sight was beginning to fail. She wanted smartness; wasn't—how should he put it? The husband looked for a word—wasn't "Tottie" enough. However, they managed somehow, as "eccentric duetists." Lily thought that very nice, those two talents combined, very original; but could they give her any news of Ave Maria ... a great artiste ... on ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... to be alone at home, and his reserved, eccentric nature had caused his relatives to shun his house, which doubtless seemed to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... her out, checking a strong disposition to giggle. Her viewpoint was that of the average person, and the average person cannot see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things. The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman, making a great to-do about nothing at all. Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan. It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace, if he had happened to possess ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... closet as he hung up his hat on his arrival, and he again opened the closet door. The coat and stick were still there; so Rochester had come to the office immediately after leaving him, and carelessly left the safe open! Kent smiled in spite of his vexation; the act was typical of his eccentric partner. ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... a wealthy and eccentric Philadelphia merchant, financier, philanthropist and the founder of Girard College, was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1750, the son of a sea captain. He lost the sight of his right eye when eight years old and had only ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... life. Her retinue, her reserved compartment in the train, her pile of unnecessary trunks, portmanteaux, and strong-boxes, all helped to increase her prestige; while her wheeled chair, her sharp tone and voice, her eccentric questions (put with an air of the most overbearing and unbridled imperiousness), her whole figure—upright, rugged, and commanding as it was—completed the general awe in which she was held. As she ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... alluding to an eccentric work of rationalizing tendencies written by an English scholar, and using M. Renan as his mouthpiece, expresses the opinion that 'an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling a learned ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... attached to you, which you will find no difficulty in doing, that the following classes of letters are destroyed—first, those that are inequitable; next, those that are contradictory; then those expressed in an eccentric or unusual manner; and lastly, those that contain reflexions on anyone. I don't believe all I hear about these matters, and if, in the multiplicity of your engagements, you have let certain things escape ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I looked upon her proceedings as simply the whims of an eccentric old lady, yet I felt some considerable ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... tea, in the vestibule of the reading-room, an eccentric citizen of Arkansas varied the entertainment. A short, thin man, of the cracker type, swarthy, long-bearded, and untidy, he was dressed in well-worn civilian costume, with the exception of an old blue coat showing dim remnants of military garniture. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the eccentric Marquis de Valentin was the talk of Paris. He lived in monastic silence and seclusion, and Jonathan never permitted any of his friends to enter the mansion. But one morning his old tutor, Porriquet, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... marriage things went smoothly. His wife's impression was that Byron "had avowedly begun his revenge from the first." It is certain that before the child was born his conduct was so harsh, so violent, and so eccentric, that she believed, or tried to persuade herself, that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of the reception given by his contemporaries to his "physio-philosophical ideas." "They spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression 'Darwinising' (as employed, for example, by the poet Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... she saw herself a Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... that soldiers would be likely to follow on the way to the lake. It was not the shortest way to the world outside the Park. It was considerably longer than a footpath would have been. But Lockley expected tanks, at least, against which eccentric unearthly weapons would be useless. So they headed down the main highway. Lockley was unarmed. They had no food. He hadn't eaten ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... sometimes, so that he might have painted even more, and not have come to ruin in the end! How I loved the gentle Van Ruysdaels, and how pathetic the everlasting white horse got to seem, after I had seen him repeated again and again in every sort of tender or eccentric landscape! Poor, tired white horse! I thought he must have been as weary of his journeyings ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... of the thing," was not without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him—I could wish to say honestly—those historic and statistical data which, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Anyone with a name like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do. There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got some new business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes 'TUM dee-dee DUM dee-dee ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... situation were too striking for one who used his mind and acted on principle, to run any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet, might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of common hearsay ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... you have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?" ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... it from him, looked at the title, and laughed. He knew it well. It was the 'Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London,' the eccentric record of a seventeenth-century dealer in books, who, like Daddy, had been ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... village had one or two eccentric characters who were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very eccentricities, whether ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Rome, and it was pronounced to be a forgery perpetrated by Roman diplomats.[505] History furnishes evidence of the reality of the testament, but none of the influences under which it was made.[506] It is quite possible that the last eccentric king was jealous enough to will that he should have no successor on the throne, and cynical enough to see that it made little difference whether the actual power of Rome was direct or indirect. It is equally possible ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... place Bob Power was not smuggling. In the next place the Chancellor of the Exchequer would never see Godfrey's letter. It would be opened, I supposed, by some kind of clerk or secretary. He would giggle over it and show it to a friend. He would also giggle. Then unless the spelling was unusually eccentric the letter would go into the waste-paper ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... mansion was gambled away at a card-party when the stakes were high and the players were the third Duke, grandfather of the eccentric peer, and Earl Harcourt. Thus it came into possession of ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... a sigh, "how I wish I didn't wish they weren't coming! If they are fearfully eccentric, all the neighbourhood will be talking about it in a week, and thinking it funny we have such relations. One can't explain to every one that they really are ladies and gentlemen ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... to say that a chattering young lady, who stood close to Eustace, exclaimed, "Dear me, what a handsome young foreman!" making Eustace blush to the eyes, and say, "It is my cousin—he is so very eccentric—you'll ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric marvels as the Odes et Ballades may be forgiven for its eccentricities. William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... and her boy sat staring at one another. She saw the tall, eccentric figure of Ramsey Burr before her, yet she saw also the soul of her son within that form. The eyes were Allen's, the voice was soft and loving, and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... figures rather than remembered embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch. 'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always. Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered only after his death and found it his shrine to her. 'Dear Bella,' it was all he ever said to me, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... attention of the audience; and a goodly number of spectators, among them Robin Poussepain, and all the clerks at their head, gayly applauded this eccentric duet, which the scholar, with his shrill voice, and the mendicant had just improvised in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... so had Jules, but everything else was going on just as before; the bandsman still twanging out his czardas; the waiters serving drinks; the orientals trying to sell their carpets. I paid the bill, sought out the manager, and apologised. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and said: "An eccentric, your friend, nicht wahr?" Could he tell me where M. Le Ferrier was? He could not. I left to look for Jules; could not find him, and returned to my hotel disgusted. I was sorry for my old guest, but vexed with him too; what business had he to carry his Quixotism ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... can settle it between you: you are a pair of eccentric geniuses, and know how you like to manage your own affairs better than a sober-minded man such ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... was the genius of Warburton, it delighted too much in its eccentric motions, and in its own solitary greatness, amid abstract and recondite topics, to have strongly attracted the public attention, had not a party been formed around him, at the head of which stood the active and subtle ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... The eccentric Count de Caylus, when on his death-bed, was visited by some near relation and a pious Bishop, who hoped that under such trying circumstance he would manifest some concern respecting those 'spiritual' blessings which, while in health, he had uniformly treated with contempt. ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... generally admired in France; learned men, well-informed officers, and celebrated artists appreciated the extent of his information. He made less impression at Court, and very little in the private circle of the King and Queen. His eccentric manners, his frankness, often degenerating into rudeness, and his evidently affected simplicity,—all these characteristics caused him to be looked upon as a prince rather singular than admirable. The Queen spoke to him about ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... certain village or district—if the full quantity could not be produced by the inhabitants, their habitations were reduced to ashes to detect the concealment. These seem to have been ordinary modes of proceeding under the military system; there were others more irregular and eccentric which the zeal of the soldiers frequently prompted them to ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... rode on to Mrs Keswick's house, and when he reached the second, or inner gate, he saw, on the other side of it, an elderly female, wearing a purple sun-bonnet and carrying a purple umbrella. There was something very eccentric about the garb of this elderly personage, and many an inexperienced city man would have taken her for a retired nurse, or some other domestic retainer of the family, but there was a steadfastness in her gaze, and a fire in her eye, which indicated ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... of a century ago. He enjoys, perhaps, the most notable bit of superstition to be found anywhere in this country, in or out of Connecticut. He owns the farm on which he lives, and it is valuable; not quite so valuable though as it once was, for Mr. Stokes's eccentric disposition has somewhat changed the usual tactics that farmers pursue when they own fertile acres. The average man clears his soil of stones; Mr. Stokes has been piling rocks all over his land. Little by little the weakness—or philosophy—has grown upon him; and not ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... passions are so powerful he lived a life of austerity, drank nothing but water, never entered a tavern, and never joined in a dance. He was always very awkward and shy with women, who, it must be owned, found little to please in his eccentric character, stern face, and somewhat sarcastic wit. As if to avenge himself for this by showing his contempt, or to console himself by displaying his wisdom, he took a pleasure, like Diogenes of old, in decrying the vain pleasures of others; and if at times he was to be seen passing ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... stage of thought. It was a feature of the recurring childishness of ideas and the renascence of wonder at common things which is apparent on many hands. To have denied the powers of numbers would have seemed as absurd and eccentric then as to deny the powers of electricity to-day. And in all ages people have been found to regard numbers mystically as a link between God and earth, and a means of solving all physical and metaphysical problems. The Hebrew intellect, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Gordon, who had effectually aided and abetted the riots in Scotland. Of all men in the world Lord George Gordon was the most unfit to preside over a Protestant Association. He was a member of parliament it is true, but he was chiefly remarkable there for his eccentric habits, slovenly dress, and by a progressive insanity, which on some occasions partook of the nature of oratorical inspiration. He was, however, known to be firm in his hatred towards the Papists, and adverse to any relief being afforded to them. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... earnest endeavor to split the table asunder when playing a winning card. People may think you are eccentric if you try to make kindling wood of the table every time you ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... lived mostly in Paris or at his magnificent villa outside Florence. It was common knowledge that he had, during the war, invested a level million sterling in the War Loan, while he was constantly giving great donations to various charities. Somewhat eccentric, he preferred living abroad to spending his time in England, because, it was said, of some personal quarrel with another Member of the House of Commons which had arisen over a debate soon after he had ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... that—if he would only see it—poor dear Claire did not belong to the most fascinating type of woman. She was too tall and thin, too stiff and cold; her mouth was too wide and her nose too narrow. She had no dimples anywhere. And then she was eccentric, eccentric in cold blood; she was an Anglaise, after all. Newman was very impatient; he was counting the minutes until his victims should reappear. He sat silent, leaning upon his cane, looking absently and insensibly ...
— The American • Henry James
... their revered rector's love, and the elder ladies had also shown a marked interest in her. The Dennings' fine house was now talked about and visited. Men of high financial power respected Mr. Dan Denning, and advised the social recognition of his family; and Mrs. Denning was not now found more eccentric than many other of the new rich, who had been tolerated in the ranks of the older plutocrats. Even Bryce had made the standing he desired. He was seen with the richest and idlest young men, and was invited to the best ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... half a mile from the blacksmith's cabin, but unknown to him—for the reception of specimens. For a long time its existence was kept a secret between Peggy and her loyal friends. Her parents, aware of her eccentric tastes only through the introduction of such smaller creatures as lizards, toads, and tarantulas into their house,—which usually escaped from their tin cans and boxes and sought refuge in the family slippers,—had ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... to a position not very far from that taken by my eccentric friend. General or regular correspondence is useless, baneful, and in most cases impossible; but special correspondence, born of the necessities of man as a social being, and circumscribed by them, may be from time to time possible. There can be no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the mountain to old Sainte-Agnes, in the gorge of Saint-Louis, along the Boulevard du Garavan, and out to the Giardino Hanbury. You say giardino instead of jardin because Mortola is just across the Italian frontier. The eccentric Englishman chose this spot, without regard to political sovereignty present or future, as the best place to demonstrate the catholicity of the Riviera climate to tropical flora. I simply mention these drives; for you do not ride at Menton any more than you walk. The man ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... squalid garb attir'd, Do now the world with much regard In mem'ry hold the dirty Bard, Who credit gain'd for genius rare By shabby coat and uncomb'd hair? Or do they, said a Shade of prose, With many a pimple's ghost on nose, Th' eccentric author still admire, Who wanting that same genius' fire, Diving in cellars underground, In pipe the spark ethereal found: Which, fann'd by many a ribbald joke, From brother tipplers puff'd in smoke, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... except on market days, when she came to the village for her weekly provisions, none of my parishioners ever held any intercourse with her. She was evidently insane, and although she did harm to nobody, yet she often caused considerable alarm and wonderment by her eccentric behavior. It is, as you must know, often the case in intermittent mania that its victims are insane upon some particular subject, some point upon which their frenzy always betrays itself,—even when, with regard to other matters, they conduct themselves like ordinary ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... plays to be performed, Ghosts for example, or Hedda Gabler, no doubt most of the dialogue would be given right at the back of the stage, out of ear-shot of the audience. In ordinary dramas the Villain who may have to use strong language, or in farce the Eccentric Comedian who frequently has to utter more or less playfully a meaningless "big big D," would by Imperial command be compelled to "retire up" to deliver himself of the expletive, and then would have to "come ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread: "Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns... quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats... old English hunting... ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... imagination, nervously excitable and fragile in constitution, rather easily fall into little eccentric ways which grow very rapidly and are hard to overcome. One of the commonest of these is talking to themselves. Sitting still, making efforts to apply their minds to lessons for more than a short time, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... orders to clean out and remove the old chest from the landing. Hippy and Jessica, as the two mischievous prying servants, enacted their part to perfection. Hippy carrying a broom and dust pan, did one of the eccentric dances, for which he was famous, while Jessica, armed with a huge duster, tried ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... the beautiful wife of Maurice Grey, the misanthropic and eccentric Englishman who lived in a castle near Prague, ran off with Count Mimo Sykypri, her daughter, then aged thirteen, had run with her, and the pair had been wiped off the list of the family. And Maurice Grey, after cursing them both ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... been blasted in rock which had been unchanged since the beginning of time. Here there was a human structure. Typically, it was a dust-heap leaning against a cliff. There was an airlock and another jeep waited outside, and there were eccentric metal devices on the flat space, shielded from direct sunshine and with cables running to ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will. The intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every one else, a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not finally be. Provisionally, she was very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was an Englishman, an eccentric. We then advertised in the papers, we gave an account of our methods, we invented some attractive instances. But the great impetus was given ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Yes, there is something in that. He certainly could not have carried about him 50,000 pounds in gold and as much in jewelry; it would have been the act of a madman, and Colonel Thorndyke, although eccentric and cranky, was not mad. But, on the other hand, he may have carried about a banker's passbook, or what is equivalent to it, for the amount that had been deposited with a native banker or agent, together with a receipt for the box containing the ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... father mad," she went on, with a simple directness that was the most wonderful thing he had ever heard come from human lips. "The world did not know that he was mad. It called him eccentric. But he was mad—in just one way. I was nine years old when it happened, and I can remember our home most vividly. It was a beautiful home. And my father! Need I tell you that I worshipped him—that to me he was king ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... feet from indulging in a fancy for a couch of snow on one of the coldest nights of the preceding winter, when, to use a charitable phrase, 'she was not quite herself.' I believe that, even after this melancholy warning, that eccentric person was frequently somebody else. 'However,' as Mrs. Bull said, 'she didn't disturb any one'—and although I could not exactly see the force of this reasoning, I treated it with respectful ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... strongest manifestation of this character is efficiency. Not one man in a thousand is capable of accomplishing so much. The strong points are very strong; the weak points are weak; so that he is an eccentric ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... terms of nothing else than actual human experience. So we are not only permitted but compelled to put out of court this conscience-less cave-man of pure speculation. It is true that we encounter certain eccentric human beings who deny that they possess this "moral sense"; but one has only to observe them for a little while under the pressure of actual life to find out ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... but cheerful; it is built entirely of wood, with an oil lamp fixed in the wall over the occasional table. The room is comfortably furnished, though in fussy and eccentric Victorian taste; stuffed birds, Highland cattle in oils, antimacassars, and wax fruit are unobtrusively in evidence. On the mantelpiece, an ornate chiming clock. The remains of breakfast on a tray on ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... believe that you cannot write alone, that you must take alcohol into partnership, as it were. Even little people are ruled by imagination; how much more so a great faculty in which imagination must follow many morbid and eccentric tracks? And habit, no doubt, is the greatest of all forces, while it is undisturbed. But that old habit of yours has been shattered these last months. You made no attempt to resist before. You could resist now. If I have been the inspiration of this poem, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Words—now with the words—was the piece. This was in 1807. He was now without a rival in Vienna. Gluck had been dead twenty years, and Mozart had died in 1791; Beethoven was regarded as a great eccentric genius who would not rightly apply his undoubted talents. The last time Haydn was seen in public at all was on November 27, 1808. He was far too weak to dream of conducting. He was carried to the hall, and great ladies disputed as to who ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... taste: and possibly where we should differ from him, he is right and we are wrong. You could not say that Shakspeare was mentally a screw. The noblest of all genius is sober and reasonable: it is among geniuses of the second order that you find something so warped, so eccentric, so abnormal, as to come up to our idea of a screw. Sir Walter Scott was sound: save perhaps in the matter of his veneration for George IV., and of his desire to take rank as one of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence but must either worship or hate,—and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccentric,—he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 'man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,' by illuminating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... time-worn documents, which have been lying for generations concealed in a wooden box. The only regret of the writer is, that it was impossible for him to gain access to all the old musty and defaced papers in the box. The old gentleman, in whose possession they were found, is very old and eccentric, and by no effort or persuasion could the writer induce him to part company with the documents, but for a short time. But although the task of procuring them was extremely difficult, and that of deciphering ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... Roger de Coverley sketches, Gally typifies the increasingly tolerant attitude of the Augustans toward eccentric behavior.[5] Like Sterne and Fielding he is delighted by people whose idiosyncracies are harmless and appealing. As for the harsh satiric animus of a character-writer like Butler, it is totally alien to Gally, who would chide good-naturedly, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... by the sects who have always adhered to it as offensively presuming, and, in a slight degree, "arisdogradic!" I am a little afraid that your out-and-outers in politics, religion, love of liberty, and other human excellences, are somewhat apt to make these circuits in their eccentric orbits, and to come out somewhere quite near the places ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... house insisting on having "Che faro" all over again. Orchestra, under Signor BEVIGNANI, admirable. Recreations of Demons and Furies, when let out of Gates of Erebus for a half-holiday, peculiar, not to say eccentric. Demons lie on rocks, with silver serpents round their necks as comforters, claw the air, and trot round in circles, after which they exhibit Dutch-metalled walking-sticks to one another with sombre pride. Furies ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... Civil! Philip was the only one he liked. I've heard him talk in the queerest way; he once said to me: 'My dear fellow, never let your poor wife know what you're thinking of! But I didn't follow his advice; not I! An eccentric man! He would say to Phil: 'Whether you live like a gentleman or not, my boy, be sure you die like one! and he had himself embalmed in a frock coat suit, with a satin cravat and a diamond pin. Oh, quite an original, I can ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that by-and-by his daughter's affections, of which the absurdity would be evident to some women who were not less clear-sighted than merciless, would inevitably become a subject of constant ridicule. He feared lest her eccentric notions should deviate into bad style. He trembled to think that the pitiless world might already be laughing at a young woman who remained so long on the stage without arriving at any conclusion of the ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... it is probably safe to say that no denomination of Christians, however anti-prelatical or eccentric, would for a moment dream of adopting it, if, indeed, there be a single local congregation anywhere that could be persuaded to employ it. The characteristic of the devotions is lengthiness. The opening sentence of the prayer with which the book begins contains by actual count eighty-three words. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... his own dignity to show, under such circumstances, more than his usual courtesy—something, perhaps, amounting almost to cordiality. He had been supplanted, quoad doctor, in the house of this rich, eccentric, railway baronet, and he would show that he bore no malice ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... who heard his money chink, And saw the house he rented, And knew his wife, could never think What made him discontented. It never entered their pure minds That fads are of eccentric kinds, Nor would they own That fat alone Could make ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... what do you stare at?' said the eccentric. 'I broke nearly every pane three weeks ago; I couldn't hit them all. After you have broken a good many, the stones are apt to go through the holes you've already made. They only finished mending them the day before yesterday; I came out and asked the men when they were likely to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... telling a story so ardently that he almost made himself believe it: Some day, Mother and he would be crawling along the road and discover a great estate. The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house—a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... shapeless pile of stone covered over with masses of ivy. Viewed from the harbor, the town presents a striking picture, and the most remarkable feature is the great colosseum on the hill. This is known as McCaig's Tower and was built by an eccentric citizen some years ago merely to give employment to his fellow townsmen. One cannot get an adequate idea of the real magnitude of the structure without climbing the steep hill and viewing it from the inside. It is a circular tower, pierced by two rows of windows, and is not less than three hundred ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations. From this spirit it happens, that in every political association which is formed upon the principle of uniting in a common interest a number of lesser sovereignties, there will be found a kind of eccentric tendency in the subordinate or inferior orbs, by the operation of which there will be a perpetual effort in each to fly off from the common centre. This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for. It has its origin in the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Georgia, had a truly wonderful memory. He seemed to remember every sample he had ever seen—goods, lines, trimmings, price, and all. He was an eccentric man. Sometimes he would receive a crowd of salesmen in rapid succession, inspect their merchandise and hear their prices without making any purchase. Later, sometimes on the same day, he would send out orders for the "numbers" ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of slight mystification appeared on the broad brow of the waiter, but he was inured to eccentric gastronomic requests, and fulfilled this one with ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... trade, and the like ponderous subjects, concluded to overlook the mad behavior of the morning, and, joining him, gave him a long account of the Indian Missions of the Church. Unconscious of having done anything that might be regarded as eccentric, Sir Robert was all affability, soon grew interested, asked a number of questions as to the death-rate among the tribes, the prevalence of smallpox and cholera among them, the spread of civilization, confirmed nomadism, traces of Jewish rites, and so on, thanked him ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... person!—while the attraction of the strange-looking Russian seemed to increase. In spite of the grotesque hair and unusual beard, there was an air of great distinction about him. His complete unconsciousness and calm were so remarkable. You might take him for an eccentric person, but certainly a gentleman, and with an extraordinary magnetism, she felt. When once you had talked to him, he seemed to cast a spell over you. But, beyond this, she only knew that she was growing more unhappy every ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his Constitutional Societies, might capture the support of an eccentric peer like the Duke of Richmond; but the vast majority remained, if irritated, unconvinced. It needed the realization that the new doctrines were part of a vaster synthesis which swept within its purview the fortunes ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... listen with curious awe, as they heard his step, pacing to and fro, in that deserted and inauspicious chamber, while his voice, in broken sentences, was also imperfectly audible, as if maintaining a muttered dialogue. These eccentric practices gradually invested him, in the eyes of his domestics, with a certain preternatural mystery, which enhanced the fear with which they habitually regarded him, and was subsequently confirmed by his giving ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... one trapper who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild life, and such a man always surpasses the coarser and duller Indian or half-breed ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... of the day he passed in a state of such humility that he could have wept when the waiters were civil to him. On the Monday morning he made his way to Park Row to read the files of the Chronicle—a morbid enterprise, akin to the eccentric behaviour of those priests of Baal who gashed themselves with knives or of authors who subscribe to ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... noticeable facts about Carcassonne. Here was born that eccentric revolutionary and poetic genius, Fabre d'Eglantine, of whom ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the same spectacle, and pounds of stocks, larkspur and poppy seeds, were annually saved by the eccentric old man, to ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another day he got on the engine at Charleston station ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... uncomfortably warm, and the little man was nervously anxious to see his farm. So were the nieces, for that matter, who were always interested in the things that interested their eccentric uncle. Besides Patricia Doyle, whom we have already introduced, these nieces were Miss Louise Merrick, who had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and Miss Elizabeth—or "Beth"—De Graf, now well past fifteen. Beth lived in a small town in Ohio, but was ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... with O'Riley?" said Fred, pointing to that eccentric individual, who was gazing intently at the bears, muttering between his teeth, ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... a pink or white shirt, red sash, and a glazed hat with tri-colored streamers, or small bonnet and wig, with cue behind. Considerably more than half of the carnival masques take up this dress, the remainder attiring themselves as hussars, pierrots, and all sorts of eccentric and anomalous costumes. The balls are kept up until six o'clock in ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... exactly side by side with the first-mentioned, but a little aback, though not so far as to prevent the possibility of conversation. At this time it may be mentioned here that every man that could afford it wore a wig, with the exception of some of those eccentric individuals that are to be found in every state and period of society, and who are remarkable for that peculiar love of singularity which generally constitutes their character—a small and harmless ambition, easily gratified, and involving no injury to their fellow-creatures. ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... know, to pass the hot weather term in the town of Meridian. The relative at whose house I had intended to stay was ill, so I sought other quarters. After some difficulty I succeeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had been occupied by an eccentric doctor of the name of Mannering, who had gone away years before, no one knew where, not even his agent. He had built the house himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about ten years. His practice, never very ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... place of the child in the moral order. Those who derive their theology by reading and interpreting isolated passages of the Scriptures sometimes arrive at unexpected, and, from the point of view of rational living, eccentric and positively harmful conclusions. Some devoted readers find in the writings of Paul something about "Whereas in Adam all die, in Christ all are made alive"; and in Christ's words the utterance to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again he shall ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... this place who could have written such a letter. What would a New York society man, whose compliments are as extravagant as meaningless, think of it? Truly he doesn't know the world, and isn't like it. I supposed him an awkward, eccentric young countryman, that, from his very verdancy, would be difficult to manage, and he writes to me like a knight of olden time, only such language seems Quixotic in our day. The foolish fellow, to idealize poor, despised, faulty Edith Allen into one of the grand heroines of his ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... much indebted to you for the introduction to your friend G—-. He is one of us; or rather, he moves in an eccentric sphere of his own, which crosses, I believe, almost all the orbits of all the classed and classifiable systems of London. I found him exactly what you described; and we were on the frankest footing of old friends in the course ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... rendered Rome under Innocent VIII. almost uninhabitable. Venice, praised for its piety by De Comines,[2] was the resort of all the debauchees of Europe who could afford the time and money to visit this modern Corinth. Tom Coryat, the eccentric English traveler, gives a curious account of the splendor and refinement displayed by the demi-monde of the lagoons, and Marston describes Venice as a school of luxury in which the monstrous Aretine played professor.[3] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... not have treated my visitor so cavalierly if I had not felt sure that she was eccentric and unconventional—qualities extremely tiresome in a woman no longer young or attractive. If she were not eccentric she would not have persisted in coming to my door day after day in this silent way, without stating her errand, leaving a note, or presenting ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... illustrations of this neglected truth is Thomas Carlyle. How often has it been said that Carlyle's matter is marred by the harshness and the eccentricities of his style? But Carlyle's matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you read one of Carlyle's fierce diatribes, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... a brigade, is but a pawn in the game. But there is a charm also in the more free and adventurous life of partisan warfare, where, if the total sphere be humbler, yet the individual has more relative importance, and the sense of action is more personal and keen. This is the reason given by the eccentric Revolutionary biographer, Weems, for writing the Life of Washington first, and then that of Marion. And there were, certainly, hi the early adventures of the colored troops in the Department of the South, some of the same elements ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... one really palatial mansion in Gartley, and that was the ancient Georgian house known as the Pyramids. Lucy's step-father had given the place this eccentric name on taking up his abode there some ten years previously. Before that time the dwelling had been occupied by the Lord of the Manor and his family. But now the old squire was dead, and his impecunious children were scattered to the four quarters of the globe ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... eager conversation of the old gentleman. He was acquainted in his earlier days with my predecessor, of twenty-five years previous date, Dr. West, himself a remarkable man in his day, [72] and almost equally so, both for his eccentricity and his sense. An eccentric clergyman, by the by, is rarely seen now; but in former times it was a character as common as now it is rare. The commanding position of the clergy the freedom they felt to say and do what they pleased brought that trait out in high ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... "We were an eccentric family, especially in our peculiar aloofness from others. We clung desperately to one another long after the necessity was past. Neither eviction nor commerce could disband us. Only marriage or death could separate us. Though we were ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Board" is regarded with no small anxiety by principals, masters and scholars alike. It marks an epoch in their lives, and is the only period of the year in which there is anything like a rapprochement between them, as if in the presence of some imminent crisis. The eccentric jackanapes who is by turns the butt and witling of the school stands for once consciously on equal terms with his principal, and can for once even "cheek" the school-bully with perfect impunity. All is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... character. Preston's flexible voice and graceful gestures invested his eloquence with resistless effect over those whom it was intended to persuade, to encourage, or to control. Barrow, of Louisiana, the handsomest man in the Senate, spoke with great effect. Phelps, of Vermont, was a somewhat eccentric yet forcible debater. Silas Wright, Levi Woodbury, and Robert J. Walker were laboring for the restoration of the Democrats to power. Benton stood sturdily, like a gnarled oak-tree, defying all who offered to oppose him. Allen, whose loud ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... I see her Majesty's ship Arethusa. Of course I am familiar with her stern First Lieutenant, her eccentric Captain, her one fascinating and several mischievous midshipmen. Of course I know it's a splendid thing to see all this, and not to be seasick. Oh, there, the young gentlemen are going to play a trick on the purser. For God's sake, let ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses. Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn words ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... considerable wealth, being the widow of Sir George Donaldson, the great distiller; but she seems to have been decidedly eccentric. Latterly she had astonished all her family—who were rigid Presbyterians—by announcing her intention of embracing the Roman Catholic faith, and then retiring to the convent of St. Augustine's at ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... of his personal appearance. In stature he was short and of a shuffling gait. As he affected nether garments of extreme brevity, very broad-brimmed hats, and was excessively negligent in the matter of clothing, etc., his habitual aspect was quaint and eccentric to ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... the too common names (anything but proper ones) are the eccentric. The colors are well represented; for, beside Oil and Paint for materials, there are Brown, Black, Blue, Green, White, Cherry, Gray, Hazel, Plum, Rose, and Vermilion. The animals come in for their share; for we find Alligator, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... by Coates, was awaiting me when I returned to the Abbey Inn. The postal deliveries in Upper Crossleys were eccentric and unreliable, but having glanced through the cuttings enclosed, I partook of a hasty lunch and sat down to the task of preparing a column for the Planet which should not deflect public interest from the known central figures in the tragedy but which at the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Hornblower, it should be stated, was a romantic soul; and, in his tanned, weather-beaten old body, there throbbed a heart as ardent as ever beat in the breast of a boy of eighteen. Its manifestations, however, were often a little eccentric, for its owner was as ignorant and unworldly as a child. For years he had fed his elderly imagination upon the most impassioned love scenes to be found in the pages of novel or biography. Unfortunately for him, there was nothing in the least ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... gentle boniface, "that I could not reserve better rooms for you—for there are some choice views from some locations. I had a corner suite saved for your party, a suite I consider the most desirable in the hotel; but an eccentric individual arrived yesterday who demanded the entire suite, and I had to let him have it. He will not stay long, and as soon as he goes ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... the clue. When the unskippingly conscientious peruser of GEORGE M.'s novels is most desirous that the author shall go ahead, GEORGE, like an Irish cardriver, will stop to "discoorse us," and at such length, and so diffusely, and with such a wealth of eccentric word-coming and grammar-dodging, that at last the Baron gasps, choked by the rolling billows of sonorously booming or boomingly sonorous words, battles with the waves, ducks, and comes up again breathlessly, wondering where he may be, and what it was all about. "Story! ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... into swift and eccentric motion. Lacking an object of known size for comparison, there was no scale. The golden ship might have been the size of an autumn leaf, and in fact its maneuvers suggested the heedless tumblings and scurrying of falling foliage. It fluttered in swift turns and somersaults and ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... stimulant when and where procurable. From the standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when not engaged ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... pant legs to fit so much like lengths of stovepipe? They was kind of a bilious brown and cut gen'rous in the seat; but, as far as real comic relief went, they wa'n't in it with the cute little short tailed cutaway that he sported above 'em. Honest, that coat was enough to make an eccentric song and dance artist green in the eyes! And you can believe me when I say I didn't lose any time in scootin' 'em down Fourth-ave. to a dollar a day house patronized by some of our swellest Texas buyers. My next move is to make a ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the hid eclipse, The coming of eccentric orbs; To mete the dust the sky absorbs, To weigh the sun, and fix the ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... performed, Ghosts for example, or Hedda Gabler, no doubt most of the dialogue would be given right at the back of the stage, out of ear-shot of the audience. In ordinary dramas the Villain who may have to use strong language, or in farce the Eccentric Comedian who frequently has to utter more or less playfully a meaningless "big big D," would by Imperial command be compelled to "retire up" to deliver himself of the expletive, and then would have to "come down to the front" and continue the stage-business. But, ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... year, and was distinctly ahead of his coevals. A Christmas examination was on the point of being held, and it happened that a singular test of the lad's moral character coincided with the proof of his intellectual progress. In a neighbouring house lived an old man named Rawmarsh, kindly but rather eccentric; he had once done a good business as a printer, and now supported himself by such chance typographic work of a small kind as friends might put in his way. He conceived an affection for Godwin; often had the boy to talk with him of an evening. On ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Slick says he has UNDER and not OVER rated its advantages. He appears to be such a shrewd, observing, intelligent man, and so perfectly at home on these subjects, that I confess I have more faith in this humble but eccentric Clockmaker, than in any other man I have met with in this Province. I therefore pronounce ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the tables were occupied by a man and a woman, but at a few were four and six of both in equal numbers, and here and there parties of men. At one or two, women with eccentric heads sat together in curious garments which had the appearance of being made at home on the spur of the moment. They smoked between mouthfuls and laughed without restraint. Some of the men wore longish hair and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... of the Citizens' Patrol, like her brother. Suddenly she heard a shot, and extinguishing the candles hastily she peered out of a window from behind the curtains. The sentry was pounding on a door opposite with the butt of his rifle. It was the home of an eccentric old bachelor who possessed a fine collection of ceramics and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... discovery he showed his understanding of the principle by making his exposition—strange as the proceeding appears to us—as short and as clear as the most admirable literary skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... told, she must be convinced soon, or assuredly she would become an eccentric, a strange character, a Matching's ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... thoughtful, as at first. Doctors were consulted: they talked of a shock to the nervous system; of great hope from time, and their patient's strength of mind; and of the necessity of acceding to her wishes in all things. Then, the advice of the aunt was sought. She was a woman of an eccentric, masculine character, who had herself experienced a love-disappointment in early life, and had never married. She gave her opinion unreservedly and abruptly, as she always gave it. "Do as Jane tells you!" said the old lady, severely; "that poor child has more moral courage and determination ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a round rattling noise, almost equal to that of many small bells. It seems doubtful, however, whether this part of their garb be intended to strike terror in war, or is only to be considered as belonging to their eccentric ornaments on ceremonious occasions. For we saw one of their musical entertainments, conducted by a man dressed in this sort of cloak, with his mask on, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Ferdinand and Isabella died young. Their daughter Joanna married Philip of Burgundy, son of Maximilian and Mary; but he died in 1506, at the age of twenty-eight. They had been recognized as the rulers of Castile. But the mind of Joanna, who had always been eccentric, became disordered, so that the government devolved on Ferdinand, her father. He placed her in the castle at Tordesillas, where the remainder of her life, which continued forty-seven years longer, was spent. Ferdinand ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the clock, and fasten a spring to one end of the pawl and a small wire to the other end. Make a slit in the case of the clock opposite the pawl. Fasten the spring on the outside in any convenient way and pass the wire through the slit to an eccentric or other oscillating body. To make the dial, paste a piece of paper over the old dial, pull the wire back and forth one hundred times, and make a mark where the minute hand stops. Using this for a unit divide up ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... admitted. What was best, moreover, in French poetry at that time—the return to Nature and the struggle of the beauty of reality against the fetters of an antiquated conventionalism—remained to him a sealed book. For a long time he looked upon Rousseau as an eccentric vagabond, and upon the conscientious and accurate spirit of Diderot even as shallow. And yet it seems to us that there often appear in his poems, especially in the light improvisations which he made to please his friends, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); she owned a magnificent ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... quarter of a century ago. He enjoys, perhaps, the most notable bit of superstition to be found anywhere in this country, in or out of Connecticut. He owns the farm on which he lives, and it is valuable; not quite so valuable though as it once was, for Mr. Stokes's eccentric disposition has somewhat changed the usual tactics that farmers pursue when they own fertile acres. The average man clears his soil of stones; Mr. Stokes has been piling rocks all over his land. Little by little the weakness—or philosophy—has grown upon him; and not only ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... that time I did not understand the only valid reason for living in London, which is the satisfaction of meeting with intelligent people who know something about what interests you, and do not consider you eccentric because you take an interest in something that is ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... places the "wearing away" of the bank operates so rapidly that in a few days the whole site of a village, or even a plantation, may disappear. Not unfrequently, too, during the high spring-floods this eccentric stream takes a "near cut" across the neck of one of its own "bends," and in a few hours a channel is formed, through which pours the whole current of the river. Perhaps a plantation may have been established in the concavity of this bend,—perhaps ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... rest of the evening. He was pondering how he might gain access to Mme. de Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy matter. She was believed to be extremely clever. But if men and women of parts may be captivated by something subtle or eccentric, they are also exacting, and can read all that lies below the surface; and after the first step has been taken, the chances of failure and success in the difficult task of pleasing them are about even. In this particular case, moreover, the Vicomtesse, besides ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... than incur the ridicule of the Christian gentleman who may, without incurring the protest of society, remain unmarried and sow an unlimited quantity of wild oats. It is this doctrine which was indirectly responsible for the hanging and burning of eccentric old women on the charge that they were witches. As men found a divine sanction for keeping women in subjection, so in those days of superstition did they blaspheme their Creator by digging out of the Old Testament, as a justification for their brutality, the ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... head turned quickly, and passing objects drew his attention. On the third day, too, he uttered his first genuine woodpecker cry of "pe-auk!" He had not the least embarrassment before me. I think he regarded me as a part of the landscape,—the eccentric development of a tree trunk, perhaps; for while he never looked at me nor put the smallest restraint upon his infant passions, let another person come into the wood, and he was at once silent and on his guard. All this time he had become more and more fascinated with the view without his door; one ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... which I learned that said cousin sees me every Sunday in St. Stephen's. Oho! thought I, at the "every." The aunt was very anxious to know who that strange, wild man was? (didn't I wish Samuel in Tophet!). Of course, in reply, I drew it strong about eccentric genius and my never having known him before, and a good deal that was perhaps "strained to the extremest limit of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Arbitrary rearrangements of these thick and thin lines, differing from the arrangement of them in the classic examples, have, [2] indeed, been often attempted; but such rearrangements have never resulted in improvement, and, except in eccentric lettering, have ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... the seat of Lady Dowager Onslow, of whom the Princess purchased the whole property, was built by Mr. Bateman, uncle to the eccentric Lord Bateman. This gentleman made it a point in his travels to notice everything that pleased him in the monasteries abroad; and, on his return to England, he built this house; the bedchamber being contrived, like the cells of ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... talk was almost too brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonised entirely with the mayonnaise and champagne. I should mention, too, Miss Hosmer (but she is better than a talker), the young American sculptress, who is a great pet of mine and of Robert's, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly 'emancipated female' from all shadow of blame by the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at twenty-two); dines and breakfasts at the cafes precisely as a young man would; works from six o'clock in the morning ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... ridable mule-paths are found along this valley as I follow the course of the little stream eastward; they are by no means continuous, by reason of the eccentric wanderings of the rivulet; but after climbing the rough pass one feels thankful for even small favors, and I plod along, now riding, now walking, occasionally passing little clusters of mud huts and meeting ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... a smile. I knew the eccentric genius of old, from the days when I had been Dixon Wells, undergraduate student of engineering, and had taken a course in Newer Physics (that is, in Relativity) under the famous professor. For some unguessable reason, ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... walk round it. It was approached by a short carriage-way; the chief door was in the back of the building; and the front of the house looked on to one of the parks. Miss Dunstable in procuring it had had her usual luck. It had been built by an eccentric millionaire at an enormous cost; and the eccentric millionaire, after living in it for twelve months, had declared that it did not possess a single comfort, and that it was deficient in most of those details which, in point of house accommodation, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... State of Ohio, there resided a family, consisting of an old man, of the name of Beaver, and his three sons, all of whom were hard "pets," who had often laughed to scorn the advice and entreaties of a pious, though very eccentric, minister, who resided in the same town. It happened one of the boys was bitten by a rattlesnake, and was expected to die, when the minister was sent for in great haste. On his arrival, he found the young man very penitent, and anxious to be prayed ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... after many a year of poorly requited toil; there he sat, with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet—an eccentric animal of the genuine regimental breed, who, born amongst red-coats, had not yet become reconciled to those of any other hue, barking and tearing at them when they drew near the door, but testifying his fond reminiscence of the former by hospitable waggings ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Acclimatization Society will be thrown away until they can persuade the streams themselves to remain in their beds like more civilised waters. At present not a month passes that one does not hear of some eccentric proceeding on the part of either rivers or creeks. Unless the fish are prepared to shift their liquid quarters at a moment's notice they will find themselves often left high and dry on the deserted shingle-bed. But eels are proverbially accustomed to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... whose portraits hung in dreary dignity in the disused dusty galleries of the chateau, which now, turned into a citadelle, stood upon a high point of the cliffs commanding the town. The term rambling might well be applied to this house, for in its eccentric construction it seemed to have wandered at will half-way up the hill-side on which it was built. It had wings and abutments, and flights of stone steps leading from one part to another. There was "la grande maison de Madame," "la maison du jardin," and "la maison de Monsieur." This ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... to one of the deceased wearing a watch by a chain attached to his ears appears strange, but I give the statement as he made it. The chain may in some way have become attached to the ears, or, ridiculous as the story sounds, there may have been some eccentric person in the party who wore his watch in that way, and if such should prove to be the case, this would certainly identify him beyond doubt. While the old woman sat in our igloo giving her statement, or trying to recollect the circumstances, I succeeded ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... an end in the autumn when he was sent to study with the Reverend Caleb Bradley, a somewhat eccentric graduate of Harvard, who resided at Stroudwater, Maine, and with whom he remained during the winter. [Footnote: S. T. Pickard's "Hawthorne's First Diary."]He refers to this period of tuition in the short story of "The Vision ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... The feed-pump eccentric-shaft of this engine, which was very poor and flaky, suddenly gave out about five in the afternoon, and I had to stop in a hurry, and that sweet invisible mechanism which had crooned and crooned about my ears in the air, and followed me whithersoever ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear You're the puppet of your women! What's an eccentric? a child ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... end to wear on his head the mask of a goat. At other times, "as a mark of his confidence in devils," he would appear hidden beneath a plaited straw extinguisher which fitted him from head to foot. He was eccentric in other ways which need not be particularized, but he was never so eccentric ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... of the strong,' and that unless we are accustomed to live very much alone, we shall not live very much with God. But on the other hand, if you cut yourself off from the limiting, and therefore developing, society of your fellows, you will rust, you will become what they call eccentric. Your idiosyncrasies will swell into monstrosities, your peculiarities will not be subjected to the gracious process of pruning which society with your fellows, and especially with Christian hearts, will bring to them. And in every ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... already getting uncomfortably warm, and the little man was nervously anxious to see his farm. So were the nieces, for that matter, who were always interested in the things that interested their eccentric uncle. Besides Patricia Doyle, whom we have already introduced, these nieces were Miss Louise Merrick, who had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and Miss Elizabeth—or "Beth"—De Graf, now well past fifteen. Beth lived in a small town in Ohio, but was then visiting ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... we English, like the Americans, have too much good sense to worry about drama. There are a certain number of cranks and faddists who get an unholy delight out of eccentric plays, but they are few in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where good sense reigns. We only take fairy tales seriously when we are children; we never get intoxicated by ideas; this is where we differ from the Continentals. Art is all very ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... flowers. She seemed much sun-burnt, and her complexion was of a deep olive: Her eyes looked fiery and strange; and in her hand She bore a long black Rod, with which She at intervals traced a variety of singular figures upon the ground, round about which She danced in all the eccentric attitudes of folly and delirium. Suddenly She broke off her dance, whirled herself round thrice with rapidity, and after a moment's pause She sang ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... air from the velocity of motion, must be, probably, sufficient to ignite the mass; and all the phenomena may be explained, if falling stars be supposed to be small bodies moving round the earth in very eccentric orbits, which become ignited only when they pass with immense velocity through the upper region of the atmosphere; and if the meteoric bodies which throw down stones with explosions, be supposed to be similar bodies which ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different colour from that on which it rests. I tried the knight's ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... as he studied her (which having put aside the personal he could now do), "She has the New England alertness of mind inherited from her mother without the New England reticence, and from her Kentucky father, eccentric as he is, she gets the vivacity and charm which is the ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... to see more of this lovely island, went off by train to the western extremity of Jamaica. The engineer who surveyed the Jamaican Government Railway must have been an extremely eccentric individual. There is a comparatively level and very fertile belt near the sea-coast, extending right round the island. Here nearly all the produce is grown. Instead of building his railway through this flat, thickly populated zone, the engineer chose to construct his line across the mountain ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... notably eccentric, but he was nearer than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest short-cut, and, having reached ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... resident of that suburb, where he has carried on his business as a builder for many years. Mr. Oldacre is a bachelor, fifty-two years of age, and lives in Deep Dene House, at the Sydenham end of the road of that name. He has had the reputation of being a man of eccentric habits, secretive and retiring. For some years he has practically withdrawn from the business, in which he is said to have amassed considerable wealth. A small timber-yard still exists, however, at the back of the house, and last night, about twelve o'clock, an alarm ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... myself have seen him attack a boar single-handed. Often enough you couldn't drag a word out of him for hours together; but then, on the other hand, sometimes, when he started telling stories, you would split your sides with laughing. Yes, sir, a very eccentric man; and he must have been wealthy too. What a lot ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... quarters as though it were a mere error of judgment on the part of some gifted friend; a thing to be regretted, of course, as causing more or less disturbance to the relation of amity and esteem heretofore existing between those charged with the repression of such eccentricities and the eccentric actors; in fact, as a slight political miscalculation or peccadillo, rather than as an outrage involving the desolation of a continent, and demanding the promptest and severest retribution ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... against them. The first is a persecution effected by the provocation, organization, and arming of that herd instinct which makes men abhor all departures from custom, and, by the most cruel punishments and the wildest calumnies, force eccentric people to behave and profess exactly as other people do. The second is by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... bellies in pigeon-holes; three Double-Basses tied to the wall, covered with sacking. This was the sight that met the gaze of the authorities. Little did they imagine they were surrounded with gems no money would have bought from their late eccentric owner. Here were some half-dozen Stradivari Violins, Tenors, and Violoncellos, the chamber Gasparo da Salo Double-Bass now in the possession of Mr. Bennett, and the Ruggeri now belonging to Mr. J. R. Bridson, besides upwards of one hundred Italian instruments of various makers, and others of different ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... politeness with which they were always received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the solemn act of making his will would overlook the superior claims of wealth. Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to banish from his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should have kept away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no shadow of such claims. They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good egg, and should be laid ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Christ and perhaps of a closest human brother, and must wear smiles before men and go on with life's work as if all were gladness within the heart. If we knew the inner life of many of the people we meet, we would be very gentle with them and would excuse the things in them that seem strange or eccentric to us. They are carrying burdens of secret grief. We do not begin to know the sorrows of ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... York in 1746, Berkenmeyer had him subscribe to the Loonenburg Church constitution. His parish included the congregations at Rheinbeck, Camp, Staatsburg, Ancrum, and Tar Bush. The capriciousness with which Hartwick, who remained an eccentric bachelor all his life, performed his pastoral duties soon gave rise to dissatisfaction. Complaints were lodged against him with Berkenmeyer, who finally wrote against him publicly. In 1750 Muhlenberg conducted a visitation in Hartwick's congregations, and reports ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... natures, and the exquisite adjustments may suffer in the rude handling of a stupid and clumsy environment, wrecking the whole system. This, and not natural proclivity, is the reason why genius so often shows a tendency to eccentric and abnormal conduct. The fault is with society, which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... yielding in all else, on this point she was inflexible. "I am wiser than you in just a few things," she would say, playfully, for she firmly believed him infallible; "my position would suffer, were I thought eccentric. You cannot stand in rank without a uniform. I shall not yield to Sarah Jay nor even Kitty Duer. I am a little Republican, sir, and know my rights. And I ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... so that they normally run concentric with the shaft, but weighted so that the center of gravity is slightly displaced from the center. The centrifugal strain due to this is balanced by helical springs. But when the speed increases the centrifugal force moves the ring into an eccentric position, when it strikes a trigger and releases a weight which, falling, closes the throttle and shuts off the steam supply. The basic principle upon which all these stops are designed is the same—the centrifugal force of a weight balanced by a spring at normal ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... clear, legible hand. Form a, o, u, n, e, i, properly. Write out and horizontally. Avoid unnecessary flourishes in capitals, and curlicues at the end of words. Dot your i's and cross your t's; not with circles or long eccentric strokes, but simply and accurately. Let your originality express itself not in ornate penmanship, or unusual stationery, or literary affectations, but in the force ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... originally through his marriage with a Demoiselle de Ronquerolles. Therefore, on her mother's side Clementine du Rouvre had the Marquis de Ronquerolles for uncle, and Madame de Serizy for aunt. On her father's side she had another uncle in the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, a younger son of the house, an old bachelor who had become very rich by speculating in lands and houses. The Marquis de Ronquerolles had the misfortune to lose both his children at the time of the cholera, and the only son of ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... There were very, very few women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still open for this shift's trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... a very kind-hearted simple man," the Baronet said "eccentric, but he has been more than thirty years away from home. Of course you will call upon him to-morrow morning. Do everything you can to make him comfortable. Whom would he like to meet at dinner? I will ask some of the Direction. Ask him, Barnes, for next Wednesday or ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doubt assert that all rumors have some degree of truth, however slight, for a foundation. This may be true; at least I will not deny that it is so, but the instigators of the cruel slanders in this case have nothing but ignorance upon which to base them. Hugh Wyman is what some might call eccentric. The fact is, he is so far beyond the majority of his fellow men that he stands alone, and is the cause of great clamor among those who do not know him. He expresses his views upon social questions freely but wisely. His opinions respecting the social relations that should exist between ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... generation it was merely an out-of-date story, for young Australia has scant heed for everything which does not come within his own personal range of experience or knowledge. But the legend, as extant, gave some significance to the seemingly unreasonable actions of the eccentric old man. ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Farquharson of Invercauld and Lord Glenesk. During his annual visits to Homburg, for many years, and in the rest and liberty which he allowed himself there, the Prince's favourite companion, as he was his most devoted friend, was the late Mr. Christopher Sykes. Lord Brampton—the clever, witty and eccentric Judge who was better known as Sir Henry Hawkins—the Right Hon. "Jimmy" Lowther, M.P., Lord Charles and Lord William Beresford, and Sir Allen Young were also special friends of the holiday season. Admiral Sir Henry Keppel was a very old friend of ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... a placid temper in ordinary circumstances, and accustomed to take the world with as much philosophy as any ploughman, the Prince of Bohemia was not without a taste for ways of life more adventurous and eccentric than that to which he was destined by his birth. Now and then, when he fell into a low humour, when there was no laughable play to witness in any of the London theatres, and when the season of the year was unsuitable to those field sports in which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "before telling its history, you must see the proofs I have in my possession, for I shall have to relate one of the most remarkable stories you have ever heard. So strange indeed are the circumstances connected with that old Service that I have kept them to myself, lest people should think me an eccentric musician. Our late Dean knew part of them and witnessed some of the things I shall tell you. The story will take some little time, but if you will come across to my house you shall hear it and also see the proofs I hold in ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... then 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... are too big to wear my cast-off suits now. My valet will bless the increase of your outward man, and I don't think you have at all profited by the circumstance. Where the deuce did you get that eccentric turn-out? It certainly does not remind one ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... the rude seats, inside, idly discussing crops and cattle and lapsing into silence, frequently, that bore the signs both of expectancy and reflection. Young men and young women sat together on one side of the house whispering and giggling. Alone among them was the big and eccentric granddaughter of Mrs Bisnette, who was always slapping some youngster for impertinence. Jed Feary and Squire Town sat together behind a pile of books, both looking very serious. The long hair and beard of the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... head would be thrown from side to side so swiftly that the features would be blotted out and the hair made to snap. When the body was affected the sufferer was hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed on the ground, to bounce about like a ball." The eccentric Lorenzo Dow, whose freaks of eloquence and humor are remembered by many now living, speaks from his own ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... when there was a fair opening for new candidates for the laurel. The uniformity of Pope's style began already to pall upon the public ear. Thomson was indolent, and Young eccentric; Gray had not yet appeared on the stage; and Akenside's metaphysical subject and diffuse style were not calculated to engross the general taste. Johnson had taken possession of the field of satire, but there are too ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... be seen that a month had already passed since Loveday had been the excitement of society, and that this conversation between the eccentric Mr. Constantine and the charming Miss Le Pettit was almost the last flickering of interest in her fate. The life of one moon had been enough to see the waxing and waning of what Mr. Constantine had surprisingly called ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... never cured. The blow may have done some permanent injury to his brain. At any rate, he became strikingly eccentric and reckless, giving way to every mad whim that came into his mind. The stories of his wild doings formed the scandal of Madrid. In 1564 one of his habits was to patrol the streets with a number of young nobles as lawless as himself, attacking the passengers with their swords, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... town which shelters the Secret House," he said, as he rose, "but the eccentricities of lovesick Americans, who build houses equally eccentric, are not matters for police investigation. You can share my car on a fog-breaking expedition as far as Chelsea," he added, as he slipped into his overcoat and pulled on his gloves; "we may have the ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... to live out of Australia, and that is the opossum; but, then, the opossum is no fool, and can take care of itself in the outer world. Here at the Zoo, besides the opossum, we have kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, wombats, and certain other eccentric things, including the Tasmanian devil; but none is a bigger fool than the biggest marsupial, the kangaroo. This is natural, because he has most room to store his imbecility. The kangaroo's general weakness of character is visible all over him. He has never quite made up his ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... difference in the world between departure from recognized rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... took this up; two or three members of the House of Commons, wild, eccentric men, who would not betray their country to secure their re-election to some dirty borough, sided with outraged law; and by these united efforts a Commission was obtained. The Commission sat, and, being conducted with rare skill and determination, squeezed out of an incredible mass of ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... ideas upon any subject unless imperatively forced upon them, did not understand him. They did not appreciate either his originality or the real strength of his character. He differed from them and their mediaeval usages—therefore he must be wrong. He was called eccentric by his friends, a lunatic by his enemies. He was neither. But he lived much alone; he had dreamed rather than reflected, and he ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... rapidity of a running fire through all countries, the great German poet's conception of it, two hundred years later, found no responding echo in either French or English bosoms. Here and there some eccentric genius may have taken it up, as, for instance, Monk Lewis, who, in 1816, communicated the fundamental idea to Lord Byron, reading and translating it to him viva voce, and suggesting to him, in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... detail, which was at once in the highest degree amazing and amusing. As Nannette had been assured, no one appeared to interfere with us in any way, and full of a curious wonder at such a manifestation of eccentric ingenuity, we seated ourselves upon a wooden box, evidently kept more for the purpose of protecting the odd out-of-door plaything in bad weather, and proceeded to give it the minute inspection which it merited; the result of which ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... face—would she ever disclose it—would she listen to him—would she ever love him? feverishly asked Passion; and Common Sense (or what little of that useful commodity he had left) answered—probably because she was eccentric—possibly she would disclose it for the same reason; that he had only to try and make her listen; and as to her loving him, why, Common Sense ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... much for the old gentleman, but art little, so far as his personal appearance was concerned; for nothing could have been more quaint and out of keeping with Pall Mall and its fashionable surroundings than his eccentric costume. ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... she had said not more than she meant, but more than she meant to say. "My dear Colonel, how hot we are! how angry you Indian gentlemen become with us poor women! Your boy is much older than mine. He lives with artists, with all sorts of eccentric people. Our children are bred on quite a different plan. Hobson will succeed his father in the bank, and dear Samuel, I trust, will go into the church. I told you before the views I had regarding the boys; but it was most kind of you to think ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line who stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate. father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure, terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... action of his religion upon his conscience. He was well known for his common-sense way of teaching the truths of the Bible. He would speak just as he thought and as he felt, although he might offend Miss Precision and Mr. Itchingear. He gained the name of being an eccentric preacher, as most preachers do who never prevaricate and always speak as they think. The failing of Sister Hopkins had reached the ears of Superintendent Robson. He had no patience with such a failing, and he was resolved to cure her. On his first visit to the village to preach, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... response the aesthetic feeling of subsequent ages,—as they possess the true poetic quality. This gift of imagination varies greatly among races as among individuals, and the earliest manifestations of it frequently throw a clear light upon apparently eccentric tendencies developed in a literature in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... or Old Believers, profess to be the real Church; yet the simplest civic rights were always denied to them. Besides those Old Believers, numerous other sects exist. They in their turn are surrounded by a strange fringe of "Runners," "Jumpers," "Flagellants," "Self-Mutilators," and other eccentric or anti-social pests which crop up most thickly in the dank shadow of an obscurantist despotism, whose very roots, however, they gradually destroy and encroach upon. Persecuted men often seek solace in wild hopes and prophetic beliefs, which, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... known locally as the Devil's Ring—a sort of miniature Stonehenge in fact. I had seen it several times, and happened to have been present not long ago at a meeting of an archaeological society when its origin and purpose were discussed. I remember that one learned but somewhat eccentric gentleman read a short paper upon a rude, hooded bust and head that are cut within the chamber of a tall, flat-topped cromlech, or dolmen, which stands alone in the centre ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... if any suspicious craft had been seen lately, and, on hearing that a barque, flying British colours, had put in there only a day or two before, said that he had been sent out in chase of that barque, as she was commanded by a celebrated and rather eccentric pirate, ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... bottle, were you?" said Horace, blandly. "How singular!" He began to realise that he had to deal with an Oriental lunatic, and must humour him to some extent. Fortunately he did not seem at all dangerous, though undeniably eccentric-looking. His hair fell in disorderly profusion from under his high turban about his cheeks, which were of a uniform pale rhubarb tint; his grey beard streamed out in three thin strands, and his long, narrow eyes, opal in hue, and set rather wide apart and ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... She withheld it because she could make out now, that, for all his seeming wildness, he had no lawless instincts in himself. Generations of great doing and great mixing among men had created him, a creature perfectly natural and therefore eccentric; but the same generations had handed down from father to son the law-abiding instinct of the rulers of the people. He could be careless of the law. He was strong in it. In his own mind he and the law were one. His perception of the relations of life was ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... father had said, was a wonderful man. He came of an eccentric family. Borlsovers' sons, for some reason, always seemed to marry very ordinary women, which perhaps accounted for the fact that no Borlsover had been a genius, and only one Borlsover had been mad. But they were great champions of little causes, generous patrons of odd sciences, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... obliquities our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is anomalous, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Harlow. He could not give credit for ability to a man who was so calm and elegant and placid amidst all the entrancements of his profession. He thought a great painter should gesticulate more, should sacrifice the gentlemanly to the eccentric as he did, should be feverish and frothy and unconventional and absurd as he was. And then he possessed a quick mimetic talent. He had soon acquired great part of Lawrence's manner. People are always prone to think themselves equal to those they can imitate, and he was far ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... intercourse. The west parlour and all the rooms on that side of the house, which had been unused for so many years, were opened up again, and delivered over to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Wynne, who kept their own establishment there, thus avoiding the necessity of interfering with Meurig Wynne's eccentric habits, and still enabling them to meet round the cheerful hearth in the evening, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... absorbing and capacious receptacle of self. I do not claim for my father any peculiar quality in this respect, for I have often observed that many of those who (like giddy-headed horsemen that raise a great dust, and scamper as if the highway were too narrow for their eccentric courses, before they are fairly seated in the saddle, but who afterward drive as directly at their goals as the arrow parting from the bow), most indulge their sympathies at the commencement of their careers, are the most apt toward the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... students. "In you, mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage—an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought. You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that—I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered at, I ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... a scamp of the first water goes without saying, insinuating yourself into an eccentric old man's confidence in hopes to be his heir! I dare say, Amy is his daughter, and you will have to work for a living after all, and serve you right, too. But have a good time while you can, and I'll help you after a little, as I accept ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... scorn of nearly all things beyond his "old Dominion," and his withering wit, never restrained by any pity, and his passion for destroying all fabrics of policy or reputation of which he was not himself the architect, but will read with anticipations of keen interest the announcement of a life of the eccentric yet great Virginian! Such a work, by the Hon. Hugh A. Garland, is in the press of the Appletons. We know little of Mr. Garland's capacities in this way, but if his book prove not the most attractive in the historical ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... spilling over with unused vitality from the cramped space of the Eugenie's deck, scampered down the beach in a hurly-burly of joy, scenting a thousand intimate land-scents as he ran, and describing a jerky and eccentric course as he made short dashes and good-natured snaps at the coconut crabs that scuttled across his path to the safety of the water or reared up and menaced him with formidable claws and a spluttering and foaming of the ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... one moved by the small ambitions of fashionable life—her husband would have been all well enough. She would have been adjoined to him in a way altogether satisfactory to her tastes, and they would have circled their orbit of life without an eccentric motion. But the deeper capacities and higher needs of Mrs. Dexter, made this union quite another thing. Her husband had no power to fill her soul—to quicken her life-pulses—to stir the silent chords of her heart with the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... tete-a-tete with the Colonel, and took care that even old Getchen, my housekeeper, now deceased, should not trouble me during my work. I had substituted for the wearisome lever of the old fashioned air-pumps, a wheel arranged with an eccentric which transformed the circular movement of the axis into the rectilinear movement required by the pistons: the wheel, the eccentric, the connecting rod, and the joints of the apparatus all worked admirably, and enabled me to do everything by myself. The cold did not impede the play of the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... which Teichman also mentions in his "Leaves of Memory of Goethe in Berlin," has been often related to me by Ludwig Tieck exactly in this manner. Teichman believes it was the poet Burman. But I remember distinctly that Ludwig Tieck told me that it was the eccentric savant, Philip Moritz, with whom Goethe made the acquaintance in this ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... exactly informed with regard to the nature of his disease and the way in which it affected his physical and mental constitution. Perhaps it might assist us to a more satisfactory explanation of the eccentric vein in his life, that singular mixture of religious enthusiasm bordering insanity; but we are left wholly ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... his cigar (John declining to join him on some plausible pretext, having on a previous occasion accepted one of the brand), and after rolling it around with his lips and tongue to the effect that the lighted end described sundry eccentric curves, located it firmly with an upward angle in the left-hand corner of his mouth, gave it a couple of vigorous puffs, and replied ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... dragging along in the wake of a comet, very much as boats are sometimes towed off by a wounded whale. Every effort had been made to so adjust the electric charge upon the ships that they would be repelled from the cometic mass, but, owing apparently to eccentric changes continually going on in the electric charge affecting the clashing mass of meteoric bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... bakehouse as he came from church, and noticed her precarious footing; and, with the grave dignity with which he did everything, he relieved her of her burden, and steered along the street by her side, carrying her baked mutton and potatoes safely home. This was thought very eccentric; and it was rather expected that he would pay a round of calls, on the Monday morning, to explain and apologise to the Cranford sense of propriety: but he did no such thing: and then it was decided that he was ashamed, and was keeping out of sight. In a kindly pity for him, we began to say, "After ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... my father. One is that he is an eccentric psychologist with peculiar, not to say extraordinary, ideas about the bringing up of children. Another is that because of his own convenience or circumstances, he does not care to own me as I am now. The third is that because of my convenience or circumstances, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Worldedness, as represented by Margaret Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... to vocalists, "Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves" (November, 1892), had, curiously enough, been spoken years before by the eccentric Duchess in "Alice in Wonderland;" and his conceit that there is no fear for the prosperity of Ireland under Home Rule "so long as her capital's D(o)ublin'" dates from still earlier times. Then there was the fine old Scotch joke of a Glasgow ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia, who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a chamberlain in her household that her husband was compelled to divorce her, whereupon ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... that, in my experience of mediums and professional spiritualists, one always, as it were, hears the rattle of the collection-box behind the "messages" from another sphere—either that, or the person is so eccentric that "mediumship" in his case has become merely another form of mental affliction. Well, the artist who sent me this picture is, except for this fixed idea that he is a medium between this world and the next, as normal as you or I, and his belief ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Banner, who had turned to look at the ship's spec-scanner. "Looks like we're in a belt of meteorites. We'll be able to match velocities, but we could still be creamed if the path gets too eccentric. Show him the way, Harcraft. I don't want to take any longer than necessary, ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco
... quite unknown to her; but from the back part of the carriage a head extended itself,—an elderly head, with a bang of oddly frizzled gray hair and a pair of watery blue eyes, all surmounted by an eccentric shade hat, and all beaming and twittering with recognition and excitement. It took Clover a moment to disentangle her ideas; then she perceived that it was Mrs. Watson, who, when she and Phil first came out to Colorado, years before, came with them, and ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... as Bonbright's and Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, neither eccentric, both abundantly well. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright had even a hint. After Dulac burst in upon her she perceived the game must be brought to an end; that their life of make-believe was weighted ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... wealthy and eccentric Philadelphia merchant, financier, philanthropist and the founder of Girard College, was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1750, the son of a sea captain. He lost the sight of his right eye when eight years old and had only a ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... the quieting of my conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.' My father had been English, but my mother was Scotch, and she had sent me to my uncle, Deacon Abercrombie, to be entered as apprentice to his craft of the goldsmiths. He was a widower, lived alone, and was reputed to be eccentric, but as far as worldly gear was concerned the Deacon was a highly responsible citizen; as burgess, guild brother, and deacon of his craft he could hold his head as high on the causeway as any other, be he who he might, ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... or a hundred years ago. In the centre of it there was the dial of a clock, but the inner machinery had been removed, and the hands, hanging listlessly, moved to and fro in the wind. It was quite a novel symbol of decay and neglect. On the wall, close to the street, there were certain eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense of them. At the end of the house opposite the turret, we peeped through the bars of an iron gate and beheld a little paved court-yard, and at the farther side of it a small piazza, beneath which seemed to stand the figure of a man. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... principal dramatis personae, the Hawthorne household, are unchanged. The additions are Miss Barnicroft, an eccentric old lady from the village; Kettles, an impoverished child from Nearminster, the cathedral city close by; Dr Budge, a learned old man in the village, who takes on the grounding of one of the boys in Latin; Mrs Margetts, who had spent her life in the Hawthorne family's employment as a children's ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... to be an exact portrait of CARDINAL WOLSEY. Personally, I prefer Mr. IRVING's picture of WOLSEY to the extant portraits, which concur in representing him as a heavy, jowly-faced man, who might be taken as a model for one of GUSTAVE DORE'S eccentric-looking ecclesiastics in the Contes Drolatiques, rather than as the living presentment of the great Chancellor, Statesman, and Churchman who ruled a cruel, crafty, sensual tyrant, and successfully guided the policy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... that, when I examine the substance of Lord Ellenborough's proclamation, and consider all the consequences which that paper is likely to produce, I am forced to say that he has committed a grave moral and political offence. When I examine the style, I see that he has committed an act of eccentric folly, much of the same kind with Caligula's campaign against the cockles, and with the Emperor Paul's ukase against round hats. Consider what an extravagant selfconfidence, what a disdain for the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... admiration and applause from end to end of the Empire, he would, perhaps on the following day, exhibit something very like stupidity in debate. He would rise to address the House and take his seat again without having uttered a word. He was eccentric, said his admirers, but there were others who looked deeper for an explanation, yet failed to find one, and were ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... before the sand storm, a red wagon had been crawling over the alkali toward the barren hills. It was the eccentric vehicle affected by Professor Wandering William, and was headed for the barren range of hills in which lay ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... Egyptian actress. As to the Emperor, his waistcoat pockets were lined with leather, so that he could take a handful of snuff at a time; he used to ride at full gallop up the staircase of the orangery at Versailles. Authors and artists ended in the workhouse, the natural close to their eccentric careers; they were, every one of them, atheists into the bargain, so that you had to be very careful not to admit anybody of that sort into your house, Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his sister-in-law Augustine, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... time less than they are worth, they make a donation to the corporation. Neither filching something for nothing out of the returns of the corporation, nor giving it a gratuity, is to be here assumed as existent, since we are not dealing with the phenomena of quasi-plunder or eccentric benevolence. The character of wages of management, as the reward for a high grade of labor, is recognized in business life, and the salary of the manager, whether he is a stockholder or not, is usually expressed in a definite sum of money and is gauged, crudely ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... namesake near Gibraltar, I found a barren ridge growing only euphorbia. The Barranco Seco, on the top, showed in the sole a conspicuously big house which has no other view but the sides of a barren trough. This was the 'folly' of an eccentric nobleman, who preferred the absence to ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... been so anxiously expected, at length arrived, and the spell, which had bound every one to the spot was dissolved in a moment; they were then conducted to the king, and formally introduced to him, but the grave eccentric old man shook hands with them, without taking them from the tobe in which they had been enveloped, or even condescending to look in their faces, for he never made it a practice to raise his head above a certain height, fearing that he should discover the person to whom ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Eccentric and aggressive as he was, he was honored far and wide; and when he arose to take the witness stand, his white hair crowned with this cruel sorrow, the most indifferent spectator felt that his examination would ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Nothing must be allowed to disfranchise manhood; and he who manumits the poet from social and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend who assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet's sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown tall and sublime. To the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... reception given by his contemporaries to his "physio-philosophical ideas." "They spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression 'Darwinising' (as employed, for example, by the poet Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the foregoing observations is the unexpected success of a book which is of itself of so eccentric a character as to require some explanation. For its reception from the public, and the kindness and consideration with which it has been treated by the press, the author ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... and yet the story-writers won't avail themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a good moment—I'm sure you ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... which govern Style must be apprehended and understood before Individuality can be given full scope. Otherwise, what to the executant would appear as original might, to correct taste and judgment, appear ridiculous and extravagant. A genius is sometimes eccentric, but eccentricity is not genius. Vocal students should hear as many good singers as possible, but actually imitate none. A skilled teacher will always discern and strive to develop the personality of the pupil, will be on the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... got more cogs in his gearing wheels than all the rest of you put together. You call him a freak; you call him eccentric, because he isn't like you. Now let me tell you that that's a sort of eccentricity that you'll do well to cultivate. The less you are like yourselves and the more you're like him, the better it will be for you. He thinks. You don't. He does all he can. You do as little as you can. He shall have ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... he was sadly in need of money. It was fortunate that his old friend, Mr. Harrison, Margie's dead father, had taken it into his head to plight his daughter's troth to him while she was yet a child. Mr. Harrison had been an eccentric man; and from the fact that in many points of religious belief he and Mr. Paul Linmere agreed, (for both were miserable skeptics,) he valued him above all other men, and thought his daughter's happiness would be secured by the union he ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... back again through her state-room door, and be seen no more;—all this is quite pleasant and refreshing if you are tired of land, but you get quite enough of it in a couple of weeks. You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes about wishing "he vas a veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose, and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the deck occasionally through the sky-light instead ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all here," said Colonel Rolleston, who was to lead the procession, coming out with the great lady of the party, an eccentric dowager peeress, who having "tired her wing" with flying through the States, was now perching awhile before re-crossing the Herring-pond. Miss Kendal and a subaltern, pressed into the service, placed themselves in the back seat, well smothered in wolf-skins, and the first sleigh ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... and his indubitable right to consideration, he allowed himself to admit that he had seen Mrs. Ransom during the last three days and that he had every reason to believe that there was a twin sister in the case and that all Mrs. Ransom's eccentric conduct was attributable to this fact and the overpowering sense of responsibility which it seemed to have brought to her—a result which would not appear strange to those who knew the sensitiveness of her nature and the delicate ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... for the Salvation Army as a teacher of questionable ethics and of eccentric economics, as the legal adviser who recommends and practices the extraction of money by intimidation, as the fairy godmother who proposes to "mother" society, in a fashion which is not to my taste, however much it may commend itself to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Varney's gaze went round the circle of faces and saw inefficiency, shiftlessness, and failure everywhere stamped upon them. Suddenly his wandering eye was arrested by a face of quite a different sort. Directly opposite stood the eccentric young man of the row-boat, watching the show out of listless ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the bold Brederode was attempting a very extensive diversion, which, if successful, would have saved Valenciennes and the whole country beside. That eccentric personage, during the autumn and winter had been creating disturbances in various parts of the country. Wherever he happened to be established, there came from the windows of his apartments a sound of revelry and uproar. Suspicious ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the restaurant, I secured a position with a grocer. Shortly after entering his employ I made the acquaintance of an ex-army officer, a graduate of West Point and a well educated man, who afterwards became my boon companion. At that time he was an ex-pork merchant from Cincinnati; an eccentric old fellow without chick or child, and with plenty of money to loan at 3% a month. He owned a large warehouse on Cherry Creek in West Denver where he slept and did his own cooking. His evenings were passed ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... certain degree, undeservedly, his unfortunate affray with Mr. Chaworth had thrown upon the character of the late Lord Byron, was deepened and confirmed by what it, in a great measure, produced,—the eccentric and unsocial course of life to which he afterwards betook himself. Of his cruelty to Lady Byron, before her separation from him, the most exaggerated stories are still current in the neighbourhood; and it is even ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... indebted for these particulars, adds, "Eccentricity was strongly marked throughout the whole of Dr. Battie's career; many strange and curious anecdotes concerning him are on record," and he quotes from Nichol's "Literary Anecdotes" (vol. i. p. 18, et seq.) the following:—"He was of eccentric habits, singular in his dress, sometimes appearing like a labourer, and doing strange things. Notwithstanding his peculiarities, he is to be looked upon as a man of learning, of benevolent spirit, humour, inclination to satire, and considerable ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... replied Mr. Forbes. "He is an elderly bachelor, and, I think is a bit lonely, now and then. But he is also a little eccentric. He desires no company, usually. It is most extraordinary that he should ask these girls. But I think he wants to see his two nieces, and he fears he cannot entertain them pleasantly unless they have other companions ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... contemporaries, speaking from a lifelong experience, described him with perfect truth as an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered—he says he cannot think why or wherefore—a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, "Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius"—"May St. George be a present ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... his laboratory far into the night and in the morning he would appear at breakfast pale and silent. The boys had indulged in much speculation as to what the new invention could be, but had arrived at no satisfactory conclusion when, two days after their experience with the eccentric professor, Mr. Chadwick summoned them to his private workshop. The boys, who had been at work on the Wondership, the flying automobile with which they had met such surprising adventures in Brazil, obeyed the summons with ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... said Fred, pointing to that eccentric individual, who was gazing intently at the bears, muttering between his teeth, and ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... shaded border opened into the lane about ten yards from the gate of the Pagoda, as Colonel and Mrs. Brownlow and the post office laboured to call it; the Folly, as came so much more naturally to everyone's lips. It had been the work of the one eccentric man in Mrs. Robert Brownlow's family, and was thus her property. It had hung long on hand, being difficult to let, and after making sufficient additions, it had been decided that, at a nominal rent, it would house the family thrown upon the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... taciturn manner, produced a singular impression on his comrades. They never suspected that under the rough exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses, something almost childlike was concealed. They thought him an eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being able to do very well without him. And he, for his part, avoided them. During the first two years he passed at the university, he became intimate with no one except the student from whom she took ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... had dropped in to see her and to chat familiarly—all sorts of strange men and women that seemed to flock round her, anomalous citizens of Bohemia, vague hangers-on of the theatrical cosmos; all that strange melange of the happy-go-lucky, the eccentric, the ill-balanced, the blackguardly, the unprincipled, the hapless, the shiftless, the unclassed, the sensual and the besotted that shoulder and hustle one another in the world of the theatre; all the riff-raff recruited ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... to explain that Mademoiselle was Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orleans, by his first wife, the heiress of the old Bourbon branch of Montpensier. She was the greatest heiress in France, and an exceedingly vain and eccentric person, aged twenty-three at the ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a little detail, how immensely the resources and inspirations of future practitioners were enriched and strengthened, varied and multiplied, by Gargantua and Pantagruel. The book as a whole is to be classed, no doubt, as "Eccentric" fiction. But if you compare with Rabelais that one of his followers[108] who possessed most genius and who worked at his following with most deliberation, you will find an immense falling off in richness and variety as well as in strength. The inferiority of Sterne to Master ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... oppression like that which is said to intervene when one is placed in unconscious proximity with the object of a natural antipathy—an undefined but overpowering sensation, while standing in the presence of the eccentric stranger, which made him very unwilling to say anything which might ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... must beg you to excuse me for leaving you, my uncle; it is most annoying, but I am compelled to go out. The fact is, I have consented to collaborate with Capus, and he is so eccentric, this dear Alfred—we shall be at ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... in reality with scarcely any income at all, just enough to satisfy the mortgagees, and leave himself a pittance not much more than the wages of a gamekeeper. If his aunt, Lady Randolph, had not been so good to him it was uncertain whether he could have existed at all, and when the heiress, whom an eccentric will had consigned to her charge, fell in his way, all her friends concluded as a matter of certainty that Sir Tom would jump at this extraordinary windfall, this gift of a too kind Providence, which sometimes will care ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... not quite so frequent after his return from London as before, although he made it a point to call upon Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Drury at least once a week. On one of these occasions he made the acquaintance of a very eccentric elderly gentleman, who, cold at first and almost offensive in speech, subsequently proved himself a warm friend. This was Dr. Bell, a retired army surgeon, who had long resided near Stamford, and was on good terms with many of the gentlemen of ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... any adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Perhaps there is more grim truth than humor in Mark Twain's vision of heaven where Captain Stormfield saw a poet as great as Shakespeare who hailed, I think, from Tennessee. The reason why the world had never heard of him was that his neighbors in Tennessee had regarded him as eccentric and had ridden him out of town on a rail and assisted his departure to a more congenial ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... was a Senior Fellow of University College. Lord Stowell informed me that he was very eccentric. He would on a fine day hang out of the college windows his various pieces of apparel to air, which used to be universally answered by the young men hanging out from all the other windows, quilts, carpets, rags, and every kind of trash, and this was called an ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... an interesting and lively family, and after a preliminary half-hour of painful politeness, they thawed over schoolroom tea, and adopted her into their midst. Monty, the eldest, was an eccentric, clever lad in spectacles, fond of making scientific and chemical experiments, which generally ended in odours that caused the others to hold their noses and open the schoolroom windows, top and bottom. He had a philosophical mind and a love of argument, and would thrash ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Day's History of Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes, 1783-1789. Day died in the latter year at the early age of forty-one. He was a "benevolent eccentric." Since he was well to do he could devote himself to the attempt to carry out the schemes of social reform which he had at heart. Influenced by Rousseau and the doctrines of the French Revolution, he believed human nature could be made over ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... when last I had the book, of that I am sure," Honor said meditatively. "Some one has been in here since, and that 'some one' sympathises with me, that 'some one,' I feel, is my long-sought ideal. Has destiny changed its frown into a smile at last for this lone, eccentric girl, I wonder?" She dropped her hands negligently, still clasping the mysterious volume, and looked wistfully into the space before her. She was undergoing the change that comes over each of us as soon as we yield our hearts to the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him—I could wish to say honestly—those ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... quarter of the present century. Among the distinguished men who were its guests were Louis Philippe, Count Volney, Baron Humboldt, Fulton (the inventor), Talleyrand, Jerome Bonaparte, Washington Irving, General St. Clair, Lorenzo Dow (the eccentric preacher), Francis S. Key (author of the "Star Spangled Banner"), with John Randolph and scores of other Congressmen, who used to ride to and from the Capitol in a large stagecoach with seats on the top and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses, should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk, and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto represented the higher ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... not much difference. In modern rotative land engines, the valves for admitting the steam to the cylinder or condenser, instead of being clack or pot-lid valves moved by tappets on the air pump rod, are usually sluice or sliding valves, moved by an eccentric wheel on the crank shaft. Sometimes the beam is discarded altogether, and malleable iron is more largely used in the construction of engines instead of the cast iron, which formerly so largely prevailed. But upon the whole the steam engine of the present day is substantially the engine of Watt; ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... must have accounted for the eccentric behaviour of the parasol by endowing it with an uncanny spirit. The horse that shies at inanimate objects by the roadside, and will sometimes dash itself against a tree or a wall, is actuated by a similar superstition. Is there any essential difference between ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... should like to let you know," she continued, "that I am no longer in the least anxious about my uncle. He is always doing eccentric things, and I am sure that he will turn up,—later to-night, perhaps, or at any rate to-morrow. I do not wish any inquiries made about him. It would only annoy him very much when he came to ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Cosmic Club Mr. Algernon Spofford was a figure of distinction. Amidst the varied, curious, eccentric, brilliant, and even slightly unbalanced minds which made the organization unique, his was the only wholly stolid and stupid one. Club tradition declared that he had been admitted solely for the beneficent purpose of ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with Jephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear that a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... conspicuous in this body than in any of the former assemblies of the people. It was composed of the lowest as well, and probably in as great proportion, as of the superior ranks and orders, and all had an equal voice. No eccentric or irregular motions were suffered to take place. All seemed to have been the plan of a few, it may be of a ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... who had received by education excellent principles, and moderate views, and who had fallen in love with Adeline's pretty face. Mr. Hopkins, his uncle and adopted father, was a very worthy man, though a little eccentric, and rather too much given to snuff, and old coats, and red handkerchiefs. No one stood better on Change than John Hopkins, whose word had been as good as his bond, throughout a long life. He was a ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... House, he attained his majority, in the unrestricted possession of a yearly income of several millions. From his mother, a very fine musician, he inherited artistic tastes and a keen appreciation of the beautiful; from his haughty and somewhat eccentric father a rugged, independent nature, which found every external constraint intolerable and wished to obey only the law of its ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... charming still. "In our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... fine gentlemen doing more usurious business than old Gobseck! To the shame of mankind, when I have wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft, persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... importance which can be converted into a "good story." That a great man should perform a great task is immaterial. Noble deeds make no scandal, and are therefore not worth reporting. But if you can discover that the great man has a hidden vice, or an eccentric taste in boots or hats, there is "copy" ready to your hand. All things and all men must be reduced to a dead level of imbecility. The Yellow Press is not obscene—it has not the courage for that. Its proud boast is that it never ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... planes, and perpetual-motion machines. The last-named contrivances, however, were only unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem which had effectually baffled hundreds of preceding inventors. His odd and eccentric contrivances often excited great wonder amongst the Killingworth villagers. He won the women's admiration by connecting their cradles with the smoke-jack, and making them self-acting. Then he astonished ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... limited basis, in none of them were the conditions so favourable for us as in this case they were for Japan. In none of them did our main offensive movement so completely secure our home defence. Canada was as eccentric as possible to our line of home defence, while in the Crimea so completely did our offensive uncover the British Islands, that we had to supplement our movement against the limited object by sending our main fighting fleet to hold the exit of the ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... boys to visit distant parts of the States. On one occasion they had taken a trip South, going to the Gulf of Mexico. Another time it had been a visit to the Rocky Mountains where they hunted big game. Then, on a houseboat belonging to an eccentric uncle of Will's, they voyaged down the great Mississippi River to New Orleans, meeting with numerous adventures on ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... Rowland Mallet remembered having seen her, as a child—an immensely stout, white-faced lady, wearing a high cap of very stiff tulle, speaking English with a formidable accent, and suffering from dropsy. Captain Rowland was a little bronzed and wizened man, with eccentric opinions. He advocated the creation of a public promenade along the sea, with arbors and little green tables for the consumption of beer, and a platform, surrounded by Chinese lanterns, for dancing. He especially desired the town library to be opened on Sundays, though, as he never entered it on ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... churches impart to their spiritual guides and helpers; and this possibly for the somewhat vulgar, but very sufficient reason, that "a breach of confidence" would as certainly involve the professional ruin of an attorney as the commission of a felony. An able but eccentric jurisconsult, Mr. Jeremy Bentham, was desirous that attorneys should be compelled to disclose on oath whatever guilty secrets might be confided to them by their clients; the only objection to which ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... their end That beautiful trust which habit gives That plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear You're the puppet of your women! What's an eccentric? ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... at such a rate that, ere the sun rose up to cheer us, over forty miles of Winnipeg's icy expanse lay between us and the snowy bed where we had sought shelter and slept during the raging storm. After stopping at Dog's Head, where were a few Indians, under the eccentric chief, Thickfoot, onward we travelled, crossing the lake to what is called Bull's Head, where we camped for the night. The face of the cliff is here so steep that we could not get our heavy loads up into the forest above, so we were obliged to make our fire and bed ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... with the sudden pain, and came down, his legs asprawl, surprised, enraged, outraged. Alighting, he instantly lunged—forward, sideways, with an eccentric movement which he felt must dislodge the tormentor on his back. It was futile, attended with punishment, for again the sharp spurs sank in, were jammed into his sides, held there—rolling, biting points of steel that hurt ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded as an eccentric character, to whom people of good society ought not to entrust even a finger-tip, for fear of being compromised. The mayor's wife was one day heard to say: "I would sooner die than be attended by that gentleman. He ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Ford, his great-uncle, known throughout the Adirondack region as "the lumber king," had offered to take him, train him to the lumber business, and make him his heir. An eccentric, childless widower, commonly believed to have broken his wife's heart by sheer bitterness of tongue, old Chris Ford was hated, feared, and flattered by the relatives and time-servers who hoped ultimately to profit by his favor. Norrie Ford ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... think that if Scott's is a fair test of deadness of soul, there must be a good many people in England who are as dead as door-nails! The Englishman is not very imaginative; and a farmer who was accustomed to kneel down like Antaeus, and kiss the soil of his orchard, would be thought an eccentric! ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cross it, dressed in riding costume. She went into the stable and came out again after a few moments. A groom brought her her horse, and assisted her in mounting. The man, accustomed to Julia's somewhat eccentric manners, saw apparently nothing alarming in that fancy for an early ride. Monsieur de Lucan, after a few minutes of excited thought, took his resolution. He directed his steps toward the room of the Count de Moras. To his extreme surprise, he found him up ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... palaces and a number of noble mansions about it. My uncle received me very hospitably, and would have me come and make my home with him while I am in London. That is nice for me, and in many ways. He is a character, this old uncle of mine; something of an antiquary, a good deal of a hermit, a little eccentric, but stuffed with local knowledge, and indeed with knowledge of many sorts. I think he has taken a fancy to me somehow, Queen Esther; at any rate, he is very kind. He seems to like to go about with me and show me London, and explain to me what London ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... how it is nowadays, but thirty-five years ago, certainly, schoolboys regarded the possession of ANY Christian name as rather unmanly. As we all had these encumbrances, we had to wreak our scorn on any one who was cumbered in a queer fashion. I myself, bearer of a Christian name adjudged eccentric though brief, had had much to put up with in my first term. Brown's arrival, therefore, at the beginning of my second term, was a good thing for me, and I am afraid I was very prominent among his persecutors. Trafalgar Brown, Tottenham Court ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... moneyless as in the other time—which was certain indeed, for any fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or "seedy" aspect—which, luckily for him, he wasn't at all: he looked, in his way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman, whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor none the less of the best. She wouldn't have been the least ashamed, had their connection lasted, of going about with him: so that ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... children of Ferdinand and Isabella died young. Their daughter Joanna married Philip of Burgundy, son of Maximilian and Mary; but he died in 1506, at the age of twenty-eight. They had been recognized as the rulers of Castile. But the mind of Joanna, who had always been eccentric, became disordered, so that the government devolved on Ferdinand, her father. He placed her in the castle at Tordesillas, where the remainder of her life, which continued forty-seven years longer, was spent. Ferdinand was, in form, constituted ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... not ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friendship for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt she was different from the girl who went away. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... the shaft of the mangle motion wheel, as it, at each end of the row of pegs —in the face plate (when it passes from the exterior to the interior range of them) in giving the feed motion to the tool in; the slide rest, "turned" the segmental exterior of the eccentric hoops. This it did perfectly, as the change of position of the small shaft occurred at the exact time when the cut was at its termination,—that being the correct moment to give the tool "the feed, or advance for the taking of the next cut. The ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... indefinable, subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key of the play—that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil or by a direct appeal to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... curiosity about his movements, the man hurried back to his bed. Merton's eccentric conduct of late had become so generally remarked and discussed among the servants, that Sir Wynston's man was by no means surprised at the oddity of the visit he had just had; nor, after the first few moments of doubt, before the appearance of blood had been accounted ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the larders presented; Such wondrous confections the bakers invented: Such pasties and cates of eccentric design; Such sparkling decanters of rarest old wine; And ready at hand was the great wassail-bowl, And the jolly old boar's head, with lemon, so droll. The nook for musicians was carefully planned, And carols and glees would be ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... Command Night my sister had bowed to him in the most marked way. So taken aback was he, that he had not acknowledged it. He, therefore, to make amends, had had himself photographed in an attitude of perpetual salutation. Other letters rained in on my sister from the eccentric individual, and he sent her almost weekly fresh presentments of his unprepossessing exterior, but always in a bowing attitude. We made, naturally, inquiries about this person, and found that he was an elderly ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... thus bedizened? Well, her husband, eccentric peer with a priceless collection of snuffboxes and a chronic deficiency of humour, had arranged the little dinner to effect a reconciliation, away from the prying eyes of their set. It was not a success. She ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... nor is it felt to be so. The evil is the bodily pain. Is it degrading to a child? Or if in any particular instance it would be so felt, it is sure not to be inflicted—unless in those rare cases which constitute the startling and eccentric evils, from which no society is exempt, and against which no institution of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... my illness, a lovely bouquet of flowers had been left at my door. They came direct from the greenhouse, and were left without card, or sign of the giver. I had an eccentric little friend who was quite devoted to me, and was fond of keeping her left hand in darkest ignorance of the performances of its counterpart—the right hand—and I attributed this delicate and beautiful token of sympathy ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... striking illustrations of this neglected truth is Thomas Carlyle. How often has it been said that Carlyle's matter is marred by the harshness and the eccentricities of his style? But Carlyle's matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you read one of Carlyle's fierce diatribes, you say to yourself: "This ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... it is eagerly urged, that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that is the point. England has forgotten the Feudal State; it is in the last anarchy ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... the vessel pitched and rolled in a way to satisfy the most critical taste. The impression of sublimity, however, which I had anticipated, was almost entirely lost in the sense of personal discomfort. A man who has just been pitched over a skylight by one of the ship's eccentric movements, or drenched to the skin by a burst of spray, is not in a state of mind to contemplate sublimity; and after going through a varied and exhaustive course of such treatment, any romantic notions which he ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... permission to visit the model farm and dairy. As the American still looked indifferent the porter pointed out with some importance that it was a Ducal courtesy not to be lightly treated; that few, indeed, of the burghers themselves had ever been admitted to this eccentric whim of the late Grand Duchess. He would, of course, be silent about it; the Court would not like it known that they had made an exception to their rules in favor of a foreigner; he would enter quickly and boldly alone. There would be a housekeeper or a dairymaid to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... be glad that I detained her, for she not only made my meeting with the equerries easy and pleasant, but was full of odd entertainment herself. She has a large portion of whimsical humour, which, at times, is original and amusing, though always eccentric, and frequently, from uttering whatever ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... of his henchmen; a justice of the superior court was his stepson; the Creole petitionists who had come to Washington to secure self-government had been cordially received by Burr and had a lively sense of gratitude. On his way down the Ohio, Burr landed at Blennerhassett's Island, where an eccentric Irishman of that name owned an estate. Harman Blennerhassett was to rue the day that he entertained this fascinating guest. At Cincinnati he was the guest of Senator Smith, and there he also met Dayton. At Nashville he visited ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... a walk in the Tuileries,—certainly the most eccentric proposal that his august master could have made to him at that hour of the day,—Popinot felt sure that he must intend to speak to him about setting up in business. He thought suddenly of Cesarine, the true queen of roses, the living ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... the window for a minute. Then she drew her head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. "Of course he is eccentric," she meditated. "But running about London—in the height of the season, too—in his socks!" A happy thought struck her. She hastily put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his hat and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... as strongly on his recollection. My servant Harris, who had shared my wanderings, and had continued in my service for eighteen years, led the advance with his companion Hopkinson; nearly abreast of them the eccentric Frazer stalked along, wholly lost in thought. The two former had laid aside their military habits, and had substituted the broad-brimmed hat, and the bushman's dress in their place, but it was impossible to guess how Frazer intended to protect himself ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... with whom he found himself associated were very distasteful to him. In a new social movement, such as that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is certain to be great attraction for restless and eccentric persons, and in point of fact many such joined it. The beard movement was then in its infancy, and any man except a dragoon who wore hair on his face was regarded as a dangerous character, with whom it was compromising ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... he said, smiling, "don't they clothe you in the regulars? You're as eccentric as ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... abnormal, abnormous^; anomalous, anomalistic; out of order, out of place, out of keeping, out of tune, out of one's element; irregular, arbitrary; teratogenic; lawless, informal, aberrant, stray, wandering, wanton; peculiar, exclusive, unnatural, eccentric, egregious; out of the beaten track, off the beaten track, out of the common, out of the common run; beyond the pale of, out of the pale of; misplaced; funny. unusual, unaccustomed, uncustomary, unwonted, uncommon; rare, curious, odd, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Bulwer and Dickens, we next find her as 'Maurice Flassan' in Les Francais Aeints par eux-memes. Rumor further whispereth that she had a finger in 'Albert Lunel,' one of the eccentricities of an eccentric law-lord, which was hurriedly suppressed, one knows not why; in the Edinburgh Review she wrote a paper on Moliere, and for Charles Knight's Weekly Volume a pleasant little book about Racine, on the title-page of which she is styled 'Madame Blaize Bury;' since that time you observe ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... your feet, my dear,' she said; 'you stick out your toes in such an eccentric fashion, and you lean on your legs as if they were table legs, instead of supporting yourself by my hand. Turn your heels well out, and bring your toes together. You may even let them fold over each other a little; it is considered to have a ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the war is popular, and that it is foolish and eccentric to oppose it. I doubt if the war is very popular in this House. But as to what is, or has been popular, I may ask, what was more popular than the American war? There were persons lately living in Manchester who had seen the recruiting party going through the principal streets of that city, ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... exquisite comparison. Persons, with her, could no more sing—or dance—than the cat. She found the cat, in the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been horrified if circumstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. She thought it was ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... Mr. Robert Audley?" cried Alicia, passionately. "What do you care what becomes of me, or whom I marry? If I married a chimney-sweep you'd only lift up your eyebrows and say, 'Bless my soul, she was always eccentric.' I have refused Sir Harry Towers; but when I think of his generous and unselfish affection, and compare it with the heartless, lazy, selfish, supercilious indifference of other men, I've a good mind to run after him ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... beginning of the travels described in these letters Jonas's father died and left a comfortable little property, which placed Pomona and her husband in independent circumstances. The ideas and ambitions of this eccentric but sensible young woman enlarged with her fortune. As her daughter was now going to school, Pomona was seized with the spirit of emulation, and determined as far as was possible to make the child's education an advantage to herself. Some of the books ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... is one type of self so various and miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general epithet, "eccentric." These are the unexpectedly large number of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any of the usual categories, who display some small or great abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men. That some of these are accounted ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... they will expect me home at Greenbushes to-night; but, after all, they are too much accustomed to my eccentric comings and goings to be the least uneasy at my absence; so I think I will please myself and stay, thank you, Uncle Abel," replied ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... remarked at length to my venerable host, feeling, Englishman-like, a sudden great access of respect towards the owner of a big house. Men in such a position can afford to be as eccentric as they like, even to the wearing of Carnivalesque garments, burying their friends or relations in a park, and shaking their heads over such names as Smith or Shakespeare. "A glorious place! It must have cost a pot of money, and taken a long ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation—at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their orderliness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous. Each family had its big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... gloomily. "The issue has been suddenly forced, and may be settled any day. If I'm not there, according to the eccentric will of my uncle, Joshua Adams Kinkaid, that property will fall into the hands of my cousin, Randolph Carringford, who, as we both know, is just at present over here acting in a confidential capacity ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... the most picturesque villages with indifference, and it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,* and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... refreshed, thus renewed, thus rejuvenated! Perhaps, he had really died, had drowned and was reborn in a new body? But no, he knew himself, he knew his hand and his feet, knew the place where he lay, knew this self in his chest, this Siddhartha, the eccentric, the weird one, but this Siddhartha was nevertheless transformed, was renewed, was strangely well rested, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... said. "We've got a lot more velocity than I'd like, but we're on course. Our orbit would differ quite some, Seaman. Because of this speed we'd be somewhat more eccentric—maybe swing out a hundred miles beyond the birds we're chasing. Are you ...
— The Trouble with Telstar • John Berryman
... a year of poorly requited toil; there he sat, with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet—an eccentric animal of the genuine regimental breed, who, born amongst red-coats, had not yet become reconciled to those of any other hue, barking and tearing at them when they drew near the door, but testifying his fond reminiscence of the former by hospitable waggings of the tail whenever ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... pleased, he continued these devotions every day, until at last his constant and singular absence from the regular services attracted the curiosity of a monk, who kept watch on him and reported his eccentric ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... very fond of the old place and there were two good reasons for the charm it had in our eyes. In the first place, the old man who lived alone in it (for it had ceased to be the dwelling-house of a real farm) was an eccentric old miser, the chief object of whose existence seemed to be to thwart any attempt to pry into the daily details of it. What manner of stimulus this was to boyish curiosity needs no explanation, much ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fairly judged by its more grotesque expression. Beneath the rough surface he was a man not only of very vigorous intellect and great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm heart, unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, though eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was no stranger to good society. On himself, during his later years, he spent only a third part of his pension, giving away the rest to a small army of beneficiaries. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... vengeance simultaneously. The hapless fly is impaled with an inch or two of the flowering spike of blady grass to which a portion of the white inflorescence adheres, and is released. Under such handicap flight is slow and eccentric, often, indeed, concentric, and the boy watches with unfeigned delight while his ears are ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... least. The other is eccentric, explosive, amusing. This one is like a lawyer; very non-committal, not at all inclined to ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Americano. An invalid, and a bit eccentric. Lots of money. A long time ago he injured his spine and can hardly move. He fell down a few days ago, and now I've got to take him to Professor Landrini, in Turin. He's pretty bad. We've come from Hyeres. His doctor ordered me to ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... remarkable speeches of that day was made by a young man, whose eccentric career was destined to amaze Europe. This was Charles Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, widely renowned, many years later, as Earl of Peterborough. Already he had given abundant proofs of his courage, of his capacity, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is so very eccentric. He can't endure anything that comes from abroad. He does not allow peas to appear on his table, because they don't grow on his estate. They are for the same reason not allowed to bring coffee into the house, and he uses honey instead of sugar. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... a daring proposition, for both Mr. Campbell and the Awkward Man were regarded as eccentric personages; and Mr. Campbell was supposed to detest children. But where the Story Girl led we would follow to the death. The next day being Saturday, we started out in ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... first generally admired in France; learned men, well-informed officers, and celebrated artists appreciated the extent of his information. He made less impression at Court, and very little in the private circle of the King and Queen. His eccentric manners, his frankness, often degenerating into rudeness, and his evidently affected simplicity,—all these characteristics caused him to be looked upon as a prince rather singular than admirable. The Queen spoke to him about the apartment she had prepared for him in the Chateau; the Emperor ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... he had become involved in a difference of opinion with the authorities. Though the matter was never made quite clear, it was generally believed that Wyllard had quietly borne the blame of a comrade's action, for there was a vein of eccentric generosity in the lad. In any case, he left Toronto, and the relative, who was largely interested in the fur business, next sent him north to the Behring Sea, in one of his schooners. The business was then a remarkably hazardous one, for the skin ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... plain brown bread of honest everyday life, she saw herself a Madame Latournelle; she accepted a painful existence, she bore all the trials of a struggle with fortune. After that she went back to the romances: she was loved for her beauty; a son of a peer of France, an eccentric, artistic young man, divined her heart, recognized the star which the genius of a De Stael had planted on her brow. Her father returned, possessing millions. With his permission, she put her various lovers to certain tests (always carefully guarding her own independence); ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Brunswick, very justly provoked, have turned the Duke [Footnote: This was the eccentric Duke who died a few years ago at Geneva, bequeathing his whole property to the city, who have erected a monument to him.] out of the town and burnt his palace. He escaped with ten Hussars. He deserves his fate. I believe he is mad. He ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... hand in Dorothea's "plain" wardrobe. "She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery," but Celia "had that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation." Both were examples of "reversion." Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in character "in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that I felt not fear; and yet it was less cowardice, than a sort of vague vexation at risking my life in so causeless a conflict. There was something absolutely ludicrous in standing up to be shot at, merely to square with the whim of this eccentric squatter; and to shoot at him seemed equally ridiculous. Either alternative, upon reflection, appeared the very essence of absurdity: and, having ample time to reflect, while awaiting the signal, I could not help thinking how farcical was the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips; he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered him an eccentric. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... run any risk of that situation becoming his own. An ambitious timeserver like Lomenie, or a contented adherent of use and wont like Morellet, might well regard such considerations as the products of a weak and eccentric scrupulosity. Turgot was of other calibre, holding it to be only a degree less unprincipled than the avowed selfishness of the adventurer, to contract so serious an engagement on the strength of common hearsay and current usage, without ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... provided the erratic equation. Her woman's mind was not only the directing intelligence, it was as eccentric as quicksilver, infinitely supple and corrupt, Oriental in its trickishness and impenetrability. Already it had conceived some project involving him which he could by no means divine or even guess at without a ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... grotesque personage, and might easily be painted as a kind of eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess that when, in years to come, I read 'Dombey and Son', certain features of Mrs. Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past governess. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... is being constructed by Mr. De Branville, with the greatest care, in the form of a transmitter (Fig. 2) and receiver (Fig. 3). At A may be seen the magnet with its central pole, P, and its eccentric one, P'. This latter traverses the vibrating disk, M, through a rubber-lined aperture and connects with the soft iron ring, F, that forms the polar expansion. These pieces are inclosed in a nickelized copper box provided with a screw cap, C. The resistance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... stamp was one of the characters in Going into Society, who played the clarionet in a band at a Wild Beast Show, and played it all wrong. He was somewhat eccentric in dress, as he had on 'a white Roman shirt and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard skin.' We are told nothing about him, except that he refused to know his old friends. In his story of the Seven Poor Travellers Dickens found the clarionet-player of the Rochester Waits so communicative ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... sun was shining brightly in at the window. He rubbed his eyes, and stared about him, not at first remembering where he was. But almost immediately recollection came to his aid, and he smiled as he thought of the eccentric old man whose guest he was. He leaped out of bed, and quickly dressing himself, went downstairs. The fire was burning, and breakfast was already on the table. It was precisely similar to the supper ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... premises are not in the solidities, but in the oddities of thought and character, and whim stands stiffly up to the remotest inferences which may be deduced from its insanest freaks of individual opinion. Thus it is said that in one of our country towns there is an old gentleman who is an eccentric hater of women; and this crotchet of his character he carries to its extreme logical consequences. Not content with general declamation against the sex, he turns eagerly, the moment he receives the daily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... early misunderstanding between the two in their capacities of manager and author. As regards Theophilus Cibber, his desertion of Highmore was sufficient reason for the ridicule cast upon him in the Author's Farce and elsewhere. With Mrs. Charke, the Laureate's intractable and eccentric daughter, Fielding was naturally on better terms. She was, as already stated, a member of the Great Mogul's Company, and it is worth noting that some of the sarcasms in Pasquin against her father were put into the mouth of Lord Place, whose part ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... here. Father Tom Rayburn has just written me that Freddy has fallen heir to some queer old place on the New England coast. It belonged to his mother's great-uncle, an old whaling captain, who lived there after an eccentric fashion of his own. It seems that this ship was stranded on this island more than fifty years ago, and he fixed up the wreck, and lived there until his death this past month. The place has no value, Father Tom thinks; but he spent two of the jolliest ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... have yourself to thank for her having done so; did you never treat her with coldness, and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humour?' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... "Miss Stillman is very eccentric," she remarked, departing from the subject. "I offered to bring her home with me in the carriage. I knew you would not mind the extra money. She has such a cold that I really wondered that she came at all in such a storm; but, no, she seemed fairly indignant at the idea. I never saw any ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cuckoldom is not a lucky chance, the produce of brains well furnished and better made than all the others. Seek something better than ventosity beneath the sky. This will help to spread the philosophic reputation of this eccentric book. Oh yes; go on. He who cries "vermin powder," is more advanced than those who occupy themselves with Nature, seeing that she is a proud jade and a capricious one, and only allows herself to be seen at certain times. Do you understand? So in all languages does she belong to the feminine gender, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... her head, or even deigning to look at him. She did not appear more than forty, and she was still very beautiful, with her golden hair dressed high on the back of her head. Her costume, brilliant enough in hue to frighten a cab horse, was extremely eccentric in cut; but it certainly set off her peculiar style ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... ind expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper which commends him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... opinion) is Jewish in tone. The defence of Brandeis interests me and instructs me. But when the "New Republic" prints pacifist propaganda by Brailsford, or applauds Lane under the alias of "Norman Angell," it is—in my view—eccentric and even contemptible. "New Ireland" helps me to understand the quarrel of the younger men in Ireland with the Irish Parliamentary party—but I must, and do, ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But if a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to destruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Every nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the feature that balances it. The ordinary examples ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... my pleasure to wear in society the coxcombical and eccentric costume of character I had first adopted, and to cultivate the arts which won from women the smile which cheered and encouraged me in my graver contest with men. It was only to Ellen Glanville, that I laid ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now on land, out of his well, noticed that the other animals did not leap, but walked on their legs. And, not wishing to be eccentric, he likewise began briskly walking upright on his hind legs or waddling on ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... he might. No one imagined old Mark Brownson had anything to will. But he was a very eccentric man; and the economical style of his establishment was likely one ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman himself and ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the man who is supposed to be "the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of mortals? -his mind a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations-his features covered with mask within mask, which, when the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... against Ord, whom he accused of purloining Father Pandoza's shoes, when the soldiers in their fury about the ammunition destroyed the Mission. At the time of its destruction a rumor of this nature was circulated through camp, started by some wag, no doubt in jest; for Ord, who was somewhat eccentric in his habits, and had started on the expedition rather indifferently shod in carpet-slippers, here came out in a brand-new pair of shoes. Of course there was no real foundation for such a report, but Rains was not above small things, as the bringing of this petty accusation attests. Neither party ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... great, and the heat produced by the compression of the most rarefied air from the velocity of motion, must be, probably, sufficient to ignite the mass; and all the phenomena may be explained, if falling stars be supposed to be small bodies moving round the earth in very eccentric orbits, which become ignited only when they pass with immense velocity through the upper region of the atmosphere; and if the meteoric bodies which throw down stones with explosions, be supposed to be similar bodies which contain ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... and to fancy that Monsieur Maillard had been willing to deceive me until after dinner, that I might experience no uncomfortable feelings during the repast, at finding myself dining with lunatics; but I remembered having been informed, in Paris, that the southern provincialists were a peculiarly eccentric people, with a vast number of antiquated notions; and then, too, upon conversing with several members of the company, my apprehensions ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... reckoned, until the roll-call at the end of it. He therefore met truculence with diplomacy, threatening looks with flattery, and hard words with a long story. Moreover, all Calabasas knew that Elpaso, if he had to, would fight, and that the eccentric guard was not actually to be cornered with impunity. Even Logan, who, like Sandusky, was known to be without fear and without mercy, felt at least a respect for Elpaso's shortened shotgun, and stopped this side actual hostilities with him. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... are now all adjusted so that they normally run concentric with the shaft, but weighted so that the center of gravity is slightly displaced from the center. The centrifugal strain due to this is balanced by helical springs. But when the speed increases the centrifugal force moves the ring into an eccentric position, when it strikes a trigger and releases a weight which, falling, closes the throttle and shuts off the steam supply. The basic principle upon which all these stops are designed is the same—the centrifugal force of a weight balanced by a spring at normal speed. ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... we stood, a goatherd, in what—thanks possibly to the enchantment of the distance—appeared a picturesque costume, was slowly making his way along, piping as he went, and his flock, of some fifteen or twenty goats of every colour and size, following him according to their own eccentric fashion, some scrambling on the bits of rock a little way up the ascending ground, others quietly browsing here and there on their way—the tinkling of their collar-bells reaching us with a far-away, silvery sound through the still softer and ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... town that he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded as an eccentric character, to whom people of good society ought not to entrust even a finger-tip, for fear of being compromised. The mayor's wife was one day heard to say: "I would sooner die than be attended by that gentleman. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... it will be seen that a month had already passed since Loveday had been the excitement of society, and that this conversation between the eccentric Mr. Constantine and the charming Miss Le Pettit was almost the last flickering of interest in her fate. The life of one moon had been enough to see the waxing and waning of what Mr. Constantine had surprisingly called ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... to his present company, but the eccentric mannerism of one is much easier to imitate than the charm of another, and the subjects of the habitual mimic are all too ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Folies-Bergere. For drawing-room entertainments these girls reserved yet more indecorous dances—dances of such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed in a theatre. And the beau monde rushed to see them at the houses of the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the Princess, who in order to draw society ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it. You'll soon be reading in your morning paper that Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, the somewhat eccentric multi-millionaire, is about to start for South America, and that it is hinted he is planning to finance a gigantic exploring expedition. The accounts of what he's going to explore will vary all ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... of Australia, and that is the opossum; but, then, the opossum is no fool, and can take care of itself in the outer world. Here at the Zoo, besides the opossum, we have kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, wombats, and certain other eccentric things, including the Tasmanian devil; but none is a bigger fool than the biggest marsupial, the kangaroo. This is natural, because he has most room to store his imbecility. The kangaroo's general weakness of character is visible all over him. He has ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... you suggest!" the lady in waiting replied to me, almost taking offence. "I have never been eccentric or singular with any one in the world, and you want me to begin with my King! It cannot be, I assure you! Suggest to me reasonable and possible things, and I will enter into all your views with all ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... of the rural towns of Illinois lived, a few years agone, a very eccentric individual known as 'DICKEY BULARD,' whose original sayings afforded no ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the memorials of Burns the poet, as the most beautiful, and otherwise the most interesting, of his female aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo himself trod an eccentric path in literature and philosophy; and our tutor, who spent his whole life in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large family, found, no doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... train for Calais and crossed the Channel to Dover. This time the eccentric strip of water was as calm as a pond at sunset. No jumpy, white-capped billows, no flying spray, no seasick passengers. Tarpaulins were a ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... heavily scented handkerchief in the professional manner and grinned at Robert, whose open hostility did not so much as ruffle the fringe of her good humour. In her raffish, rakish world poverty and wry, eccentric-tempered people abounded, and were just part of an enormous joke. And Rufus Cosgrave, who gaped at her in wonder and admiration, saw that she was right. Poor old Robert and exams, and beastly, bullying fathers and hard-upness—the latter ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... with flowers, for she loves them. She reads a great deal; and when she has the use of her hands she works like a fairy. She has no conception of the horrible poverty to which we are reduced. This makes our household way of life so strange, so eccentric, that we cannot admit visitors. Do you now understand me, monsieur? Can you not see how impossible a neighbor is? I should have to ask for so much forbearance from him that the obligation would be too heavy. Besides, I have ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... fops and fools, and an indication of weakness of character. It is fundamentally inconsistent with good manners. Johnson was called ursa major, or big bear, from the gruffness of his manner. This was probably natural to him, but many affect a similar manner from a desire to be eccentric. The "big bears" of society are odious. Johnson's own words are applicable to such: "A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing than to act one—no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down." Those also who are ever trying to say things which they think ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... in the earlier Independent Labour Party. But now the Labour Party having made Mr. MacDonald its chairman, it can do no more for him. He is but forty-five years old, his health is good, his talents are recognised; by his aversion from everything eccentric or explosive, the public have understood that he is trustworthy. We may expect to see Mr. Ramsay MacDonald a Cabinet Minister in a Liberal-Labour Government. It may even happen that he will become Prime Minister in such a Government. He is a "safe" ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... is the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia, who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a chamberlain in her household that her husband was compelled to divorce ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... PULLER is in the highest possible spirits: surrounded by this company, all drinking his drinks, he as it were takes the chair and presides. He knocks on the table, which brings the waiter, to whom he says, holding up a couple of fingers "Two with you,"—whereat the waiter only smiles upon the eccentric Englishman, shakes his head, and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... quaint, eccentric, but she was, Evelyn reflected, perhaps more distinctly from the English upper classes than any of the nuns she had seen yet. She had not the sweetness of manner of the Reverend Mother, her manners ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the text, I have found that it has much more meaning if I read it with sub-vocalization, or aloud, rather than trying to read silently. Hobbes' use of emphasis and his eccentric punctuation and construction ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... dissimilar men had in common was good Anglo-Saxon manliness—which is after all the foundation of common-sense. They wished to live as other men had lived before them, and not in any new, unusual, or eccentric manner. They believed that virtue was to be found in the great world rather than out of it; among human habitations, and in dealing with all kinds of people rather than by an isolated life at Brook Farm or in Walden Woods. They ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... no point in trying to get out of the depression now, seeing we could as easily be rescued from one portion of the grass as from another. Again the grass was soft and pleasant to touch and Slafe's preoccupation with his pictures no longer seemed either eccentric or heroic, but rather proper and sensible. Like Alice and the Red Queen, since we had given up trying to reach a particular spot we found ourselves able to travel with comparative ease. We inspected Slafe's activities with interest and responded ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... they saw that the steam was escaping furiously from the two long boilers at the end farthest from where they stood, but the new bright engine, with its cylinders, pistons, rods, cranks, driving-wheel, governor, and eccentric, seemed to ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Clotilde, she was looked upon as eccentric. She spent her days, like her father, in the house, but in another part of it, and never ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... the game is up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original mould, one ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has a uniform tint, which thus acquires an advertising value in attracting attention to itself among a mass of other letters. Aside from this occasional and often doubtful advertising value, tinted stock tends toward the eccentric except in the cases of paper dealers, publishers, or printers who have a purpose ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... passing objects drew his attention. On the third day, too, he uttered his first genuine woodpecker cry of "pe-auk!" He had not the least embarrassment before me. I think he regarded me as a part of the landscape,—the eccentric development of a tree trunk, perhaps; for while he never looked at me nor put the smallest restraint upon his infant passions, let another person come into the wood, and he was at once silent and on his guard. All this time he had become more and more fascinated with the view without ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... to be somewhat eccentric, a thing which was not looked upon as strange in the daughter of a millionnaire. Nevertheless, the pranks of the young heiress never overstepped the bounds of propriety, and the numerous admirers of the beautiful Carmen thought her on this account ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... I should like to let you know," she continued, "that I am no longer in the least anxious about my uncle. He is always doing eccentric things, and I am sure that he will turn up,—later to-night, perhaps, or at any rate to-morrow. I do not wish any inquiries made about him. It would only annoy him very much when he came to hear ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... weak lungs. They have one kiddie, a child of seven or eight, and they were so pleased with the place that they stayed on, and were the only white people in the village, with the exception of a young Australian who had lost his money and went out there to try to grow vegetables, and a rather eccentric French artist who set up his studio in a sort of disused fort built on a high rocky plateau about a mile above the little settlement. He has gone back to France now, taking with him some really marvellous studies of the desert, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Carlisle and author of "Evidences of Christianity." Born in 1744 he went to Christ's College at the age of fifteen, with a Burton Exhibition and received a Carr Scholarship, when he entered. As a boy he had been a fair scholar with eccentric habits. His great delight was in cock-fighting and he must have looked forward to each Potation Day, March 12, with considerable joy. There are many anecdotes about him. He is supposed, whilst in company ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... captain—Fitzgerald—asked if any suspicious craft had been seen lately, and, on hearing that a barque, flying British colours, had put in there only a day or two before, said that he had been sent out in chase of that barque, as she was commanded by a celebrated and rather eccentric pirate, named Rosco. ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the domestic arts had evidently been defective, and her cooking was decidedly eccentric. The fowl turned up at table plucked, certainly, but looking very pale and anaemic with its long untrussed legs sticking helplessly out before it. It was such an absurd object that as soon as the landlady had departed from the room the ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... Green Mountain Boys, and often joined them in their operations against the Yorkers, on the other side of the mountains. Very little however, was known about the man, except that he was a shrewd resolute fellow, extremely eccentric, and perfectly impenetrable to all but the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... sought rest, and, praise be to God, found it, after many a year of poorly-requited toil; there he sat, with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet—an eccentric animal of the genuine regimental breed, who, born amongst red coats, had not yet become reconciled to those of any other hue, barking and tearing at them when they drew near the door, but testifying his fond reminiscence of the former by hospitable waggings of the tail whenever ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... was conspicuous in this body than in any of the former assemblies of the people. It was composed of the lowest as well, and probably in as great proportion, as of the superior ranks and orders, and all had an equal voice. No eccentric or irregular motions were suffered to take place. All seemed to have been the plan of a few, it may be of a ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... feel foot-weary. But another neighbor of ours, hardly less known to fame, though in a widely different line of usefulness, makes a very distinct picture in my mind; this was Ephraim Wales Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape. He was as eccentric as his name; but he was a genuine and substantive man, and my father took a great liking to him, which was reciprocated. He was short and powerful, with long arms, and a big head covered with bushy hair and a jungle beard, from which ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... them with other, subtle, refined, barely perceptible cases, the origin of which is a subject for supposition, for guessing rather than for clear comprehension. It is, moreover, a sort of imagination belonging to very few people: certain artists and some eccentric or unbalanced minds, scarcely ever found outside the esthetic or practical life. I wish to speak of the forms of invention that permit only fantastic conceptions, of a strangeness pushed to the extreme ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the same. I been watching her. There's a world of money in that woman, whoever she is. She's eccentric and they make her play straight, but if I could get hold of her—My God! Millie, I—I can't ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... subsequently participated in the Commune and was transported to New Caledonia, officiated as high-priestess; and at another located at the Triat Gymnasium in the Avenue Montaigne, where as a rule no men were allowed to be present, that is, excepting a certain Citizen Jules Allix, an eccentric elderly survivor of the Republic of '48, at which period he had devised a system of telepathy effected ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... horsemen might have been seen—." The new story has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two aviators will be seen—." The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... though he is better known to the world, not so much in that capacity, but as Sir Henry Thompson, certainly not the least distinguished surgeon of our day. In Lord Beaconsfield's last novel, 'Endymion,' we have a passing reference to one Wrentham lad, Sir Charles Wetherell, as 'the eccentric and too uncompromising Wetherell.' Assuredly the fame of another lad, Sir Henry Thompson, connected with Wrentham, will ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... almost forgotten the hermit and it was with a shock of surprise that they remembered they had not seen him since the new mining operations. Before that they had run across him quite often attempting to help Meggy and Dan in his rather eccentric way. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... was universally known in the neighborhood, was an eccentric scientist who had spent his life in studying the plants of the West Indies. He had lived in the Antilles for over forty years and knew as much about the people as he did about ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... leaders of the anti-British agitation in India itself. Even now it may be doubted whether they fully realize the importance of the support which the extremists receive from outside India. I am not alluding to the moral countenance which the Hindu reaction has received from eccentric Americans and Europeans on the look out for any novel religious sensation, or which "advanced" politicians have derived from sympathetic members of Parliament and journalists in England[13], but to the secret organizations established ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... which, to a certain degree, undeservedly, his unfortunate affray with Mr. Chaworth had thrown upon the character of the late Lord Byron, was deepened and confirmed by what it, in a great measure, produced,—the eccentric and unsocial course of life to which he afterwards betook himself. Of his cruelty to Lady Byron, before her separation from him, the most exaggerated stories are still current in the neighbourhood; and it is even believed that, in one of his fits of fury, he flung ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil or by a direct appeal to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was irreparably a bugbear. He ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to you, Mr. Robert Audley?" cried Alicia, passionately. "What do you care what becomes of me, or whom I marry? If I married a chimney-sweep you'd only lift up your eyebrows and say, 'Bless my soul, she was always eccentric.' I have refused Sir Harry Towers; but when I think of his generous and unselfish affection, and compare it with the heartless, lazy, selfish, supercilious indifference of other men, I've a good mind to run after ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... so especially appealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome—not without pleasure—by his fierce authority; and they can play the "little mother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is tender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but it would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether she is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... tale, told with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human motives—could teach an awful moral lesson in the guise of fascinating fiction, but he could not stick to a long story with simplicity. His dozens of shifting scenes, his fantastic coils ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the chief justice, that his conduct to this judge was decidedly reprehended by the crown. Mr. Horne's appointment and the amoval of Mr. Montagu were confirmed. Mr. Justice Montagu was an acute, eloquent, and impartial judge, but passionate and eccentric. His imprudence exposed him to a proceeding which, in the circumstances, it is difficult to approve, and, on general principles, not easy to condemn. The chief justice stood still higher in public estimation. For nearly thirty years he occupied a ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... situation. He was in America instead of France, without the slightest recollection of getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric, the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where he belonged in the land ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... with ridicule or contempt; married, and separated from his wife, no one knew for what cause, yet still claimed and supported her. She was the widow of Governor Claiborne, and a magnificent woman; she was a Spaniard by blood, aristocratic in her feelings, eccentric, and, intellectually, a fit companion for Grymes. She was to Claiborne an admirable wife, but there was little congeniality between her and Grymes. Grymes knew that it was not possible for any woman to tolerate him as a husband, and was contented to live apart from his wife. They were never ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... There is no place going which is so well adapted to the exhibition of handsome, fashionable, or eccentric eye-glasses as an art exhibition. You observe there all that is newest and classy in glasses, and you are insistently invited to admiring study of the art of wearing queer glasses effectively, and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... reason of his having come to India two boats earlier than the Inspector, drew Rs. 500 a month more than he did, this being the Senior Inspector's Allowance. That he was reported on as lazy, eccentric, and irregular, made no difference to the fact that he was a fortnight senior to, and therefore worth Rs. 500 a month more than, the next man. The recipient regarded the extra trifle (L400 a year) as his bare right and merest due. The ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... had himself prepared him; he purchased for a trifling sum a small house on one of the remote streets, and installed himself therein with all his books and "preparations." And of books and preparations he had many, for he was a man not devoid of learning ... "a supernatural eccentric," according to the words of his neighbours. He even bore among them the reputation of a magician: he had even received the nickname of "the insect-observer." He busied himself with chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he treated voluntary patients with herbs and metallic powders ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... astronomers think when they predict, at a given hour and place, the passage of a comet, that most eccentric of celestial travellers? What do the naturalists think when they reveal the myriad forms of life concealed in a drop of water? Do they think they have invented what they see and that their lenses and microscopes make the law of nature? What did the first law-giver think when, seeking ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... there was in a certain law school an aged and eccentric professor. "General information" was the old gentleman's hobby. He held it as incontrovertible that if a young lawyer possessed a large fund of miscellaneous knowledge, combined with an equal amount of common sense, he would be successful in ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... the attention of the audience; and a goodly number of spectators, among them Robin Poussepain, and all the clerks at their head, gayly applauded this eccentric duet, which the scholar, with his shrill voice, and the mendicant had just improvised in the middle ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Channing, most eccentric of the transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... the two in their capacities of manager and author. As regards Theophilus Cibber, his desertion of Highmore was sufficient reason for the ridicule cast upon him in the Author's Farce and elsewhere. With Mrs. Charke, the Laureate's intractable and eccentric daughter, Fielding was naturally on better terms. She was, as already stated, a member of the Great Mogul's Company, and it is worth noting that some of the sarcasms in Pasquin against her father were put into the mouth of Lord Place, whose part was taken by this undutiful child. All ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... more complicated, and, if possible, more insolently mythical. John Pinkerton, writing under the name of Robert Heron, Esq., in 1785, in his eccentric Letters on Literature, is its source. According to him Ralegh, who had just completed the manuscript of a second volume, looking from his window into a court-yard, saw a man strike an officer near a raised stone. The officer drew his sword, and ran his assailant through. The man, as he fell, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... thoughts; and it will be open to any one, without serious impediment, to abstract stones from it, even to take the whole, if it suit him. A rabbit-hutch is property; the work of the mind is not. If the animal has eccentric views as regards the possessions of others, we have ours ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... a lunatic," corrected Rupert, gently, "merely as slightly eccentric on certain points. Though, indeed, if you had seen him during those first months after his return, I think even you with your optimistic spirit would have feared, as we did, that he was falling into melancholia. Thank heaven ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... one was carried by rough but not ungentle hands to the dead-house on the hill. I went with it. I overheard the superintendent tell the master of the work-house that I was a rich man—an invalid—and that I passed a great deal of my time at Brighton. In a lowered voice he added that I was very eccentric, and that happening to be on the Chain Pier that morning, I had insisted upon paying the expenses ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... if the wife of that man is alone, and in others no brother goes into the house where his sister is unless she has a companion. This is an ancient law and belongs to many tribes. The Crows have an eccentric custom that a sister after marriage is not allowed to be seen in public with her brother. Should an Indian alienate the affections of the wife of another Indian or steal his horse the injured one would be justified in taking his rifle and killing the offender. The whole camp would sanction the ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... What an eccentric freak is this German Emperor! One day he sends the Sultan a sword of honour, a bitter jest for one who has never known anything but defeat! The next, he proposes to take back the command of the fleet from his brother ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... land in Camaret Bay. It was therefore desirable to ascertain with accuracy the state of the coast. The eldest son of the Duke of Leeds, now called Marquess of Caermarthen, undertook to enter the basin and to obtain the necessary information. The passion of this brave and eccentric young man for maritime adventure was unconquerable. He had solicited and obtained the rank of Rear Admiral, and had accompanied the expedition in his own yacht, the Peregrine, renowned as the masterpiece of shipbuilding, and more than once already mentioned ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for there is no reason why they should answer all the calls made upon them—a course which would soon impoverish them. They must discriminate somewhere, and how this shall be done is a question which each must decide for himself. Longworth exercised this discrimination in an eccentric manner, eminently characteristic of him. He invariably refused cases that commended themselves to others. A gentleman once applied to him for assistance for a widow in ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... Mongol dynasties. In that fatal list of monarchs one is reduced to apologizing for a Tiberius, who only attained thorough detestableness toward the close of his life; and for a Claudius, who was only eccentric, blundering, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... positively tell you. But before I say more, will you kindly satisfy my curiosity? He is perhaps an eccentric person,—this Mr. Waife?—a little—" The Oxonian stopped, and touched his forehead. Mrs. Crane made no prompt reply: she was musing. Unwarily the scholar continued: "Because, in that case, I should ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mortgagees, and leave himself a pittance not much more than the wages of a gamekeeper. If his aunt, Lady Randolph, had not been so good to him it was uncertain whether he could have existed at all, and when the heiress, whom an eccentric will had consigned to her charge, fell in his way, all her friends concluded as a matter of certainty that Sir Tom would jump at this extraordinary windfall, this gift of a too kind Providence, which sometimes will care for a prodigal in a way which ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... man increases in vitality and the employment of his powers, he will be forced to reverence and desire the solidarity of the race, and consequently to relinquish or neglect whatever in his own ideal militates against such solidarity. And this will be the case whether he judge such eccentric elements to be nobler or less noble than the qualities which are fostered in him by the co-operation of his fellows. Jesus, at any rate, affirmed that the law of the kingdom within a man's soul was: "Love thy ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the publisher (in the words of that eccentric Puritan, Lorenzo Dow), "He'll be damned if he does, and be damned if he don't." He is between "Scilla and Carribdes," requiring versatility of ability, courage of conviction and a wise discretion, that he may steer "between the rocks of too much danger and ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... I went to hear the celebrated Edward Irving. His preaching, for the most part, I considered commonplace; his manner, eccentric; his pretensions to revelations, authority, and prophetic indications, overweening. I was disappointed in his talents, and surprised at the apparent want of feeling manifested throughout ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... black, but ornamented with a series of rough panels, upon each of which was painted a human face, giving it a somewhat fantastic appearance. Paul could not help glancing above, toward the mysterious regions with which this eccentric stairway communicated. An antique sofa, studded with brass nails, exhibited upon its towering back a picture of Tsong Kapa reclining under the tree of a thousand images at the Llamasary of Koomboom. There ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James River ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... not work until the thing got up in the air where his feet would have free play. He would sit astraddle of a bench, Alfred would hold the frame off the floor, and Node would work his feet. Her "tail" would wobble and fly up and down at a great rate. Its eccentric actions excited the admiration of Alfred. He assured Node that her tail would be the wonder ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh. There were days when she was quite silent; but there were others when I could not account for the sounds she made. Sometimes I saw her: she would come out of her room with a basin, or a plate, or a tray in her hand, go down to the kitchen ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... became his intimate friend. The rapacious Agujari, who sang for nobody else under fifty pounds an air, sang her best for Dr. Burney without a fee; and in the company of Dr. Burney even the haughty and eccentric Gabrielli constrained herself to behave with civility. It was thus in his power to give, with scarcely any expense, concerts equal to those of the aristocracy. On such occasions the quiet street in which he lived was blocked up by coroneted chariots, and his little drawing-room ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... unbridled eddies twisted it this way and that with sickening lurches. The tree was torn from it and snatched off reluctant all by itself, rolling over and over in a fashion that must have made the cub rejoice to think that he had quitted a refuge so eccentric in its behavior. As a matter of fact, the flood was now sweeping the raft over what was, at ordinary times, a series of low falls, a succession of saw-toothed ledges which would have ripped the raft to bits. Now the ledges were buried deep under the immense volume of ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... but hitherto wholly selfish life had known. There was only one note in her conversation which jarred upon me. She was apt to drift into the extraordinary views of life and death which were interesting when formulated by her eccentric brother, but pained me coming from her lips. In spite of this, the purpose I had contemplated of joining Brande's Society—evoked as it had been by his own whimsical observation—now took definite form. I would join that Society. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... renewed, thus rejuvenated! Perhaps, he had really died, had drowned and was reborn in a new body? But no, he knew himself, he knew his hand and his feet, knew the place where he lay, knew this self in his chest, this Siddhartha, the eccentric, the weird one, but this Siddhartha was nevertheless transformed, was renewed, was strangely well rested, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... the sexes is sweet, though shameful. So poignant is the sweetness that the accompanying shame is ignored, with open eyes. There is no hatred, or only among a few eccentric persons." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... knew that he had the field to himself, and that he was a well-made, handsome, agreeable officer—not so young as to make the thing absurd, yet young enough to inspire the right sort of feeling. To be sure, there were a few things to be weighed. She was, perhaps—well, she was eccentric. She had troublesome pets and pastimes—he knew them all—was well stricken in years, and had a will of her own—that was all. But, then, on the other side was the money—a great and agreeable arithmetical ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... old doctor, who was trembling with emotion, interrupted him. "Yes, yes, I am late. But ten minutes ago, just as I arrived, I caught sight of that eccentric fellow, the Commander, and had a talk with him over yonder. He was sneering at the sight of your people taking the train again to go and die at home, when, said he, they ought to have done so before coming to Lourdes. Well, all at once, while he was talking like this, he fell on the ground before ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed save by one's request. It wasn't in the least what she had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... way and that in eccentric lines, Tom brought into play all his acquired knowledge of a pilot's tricks in order to avoid being made a victim of this hot fire. He fully expected that, after all, the enemy would get him, but he was grimly determined that ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... composition, not decoration; upon masses, not details; upon the use and shaping, not the ornamentation of features; and very few show half so plainly that mediaeval architects could realize this fact. We are too apt to think that Gothic art cannot be individual without being eccentric, or interesting without being heterogeneous ... but Salisbury is both grand and lovely, and yet it is quiet, rational, and all of a piece, clear and smooth, and refined to the point of utmost purity. No building in the world is more ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... in his easy-chair, wrapped in contemplations of his future greatness. The mysterious light appeared more brilliantly than before, dancing, to all appearance, up and down the lane, crossing from side to side, and moving in an orbit as eccentric as comets themselves. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
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