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More "Enviable" Quotes from Famous Books



... of his country seat in Berkshire, he was very much struck by the sermon which was preached by a new curate. After the service he went into the vestry, and had a long conversation with the preacher, the result of which was that he told him that a curacy was not a very enviable position, and that he would do much better to go to London, and write for The Times at a salary of L1,000 a year. It is needless to add that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... by peace and neutrality for the whole 20th century, Sweden has achieved an enviable standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. It has a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labor force. Timber, hydropower, and ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... a crow to pick with you!" she said. "You'd make enviable bridegrooms for any of them; you're all good workers, and you don't drink—but you don't pay any attention to them. Besides, people are saying that girls of questionable character ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... and enviable locomotion with refining but instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he was the most meditative and refining ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... Should we ever see it again? This thought I am sure came to all of us. I know it came to me. But the perfect steadiness of the balloon won our confidence, and we soon gave ourselves up to the gratification of our enviable position; and enviable indeed it was. For who has not envied the eagle his power to skim the tree-tops, to hover above Niagara, to circle mountain peaks, to poise himself aloft and survey creation, or to mount into the zenith and gaze at ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... remembered in this part of the world, returned to Tours in the same train with us, and to our surprise we found that he also was stopping at the Pension B——. The manner in which he said "My family always stop at the Pension B——" seemed to confer an enviable distinction upon the little hostel, and in a way to dim the ancient glories of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... You dare to say that, and the lamp does not go out suddenly, and the walls don't fall down upon your head! But just think, wretch, that for two hours past, you have been setting before me the enviable spectacle of the very happiness you forbid me. Are you by chance like those odious millionaires whose well-being is in-creased by the sufferings of others, and who better enjoy their own fireside when they reflect that it ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet

... stood somewhat stiffly in that enviable situation, and the Countess instantly recovered from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the affirmation that Don Carlos is faithful to the good traditions of the old and glorious Spanish monarchy, and that he believed he would be found to act also as "a man of the present age." The last sentence is a prayer to his brother, "who had the enviable privilege of serving in the Papal army," to ask their spiritual king at Rome for his apostolic benediction for ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... Dr. Bird when he set out to make a favorable impression, and even a world's champion is apt to be flattered by the attention of one of the greatest scientists of his day, especially when that scientist has made an enviable reputation as an athlete in his college days and can talk the jargon of the champion's particular sport. Henry Ladd promptly capitulated to the charm of the doctor and allowed himself to be led away to supper at Bird's club. The supper passed off pleasantly, and when the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... laughed Traddles. 'But, indeed, I am in a most enviable state. I work hard, and read Law insatiably. I get up at five every morning, and don't mind it at all. I hide the girls in the daytime, and make merry with them in the evening. And I assure you I am quite sorry that they are going home on Tuesday, which is the day before the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... Electors are again aspirants for this enviable Throne. We have seen the beautiful Electress zealously soliciting Friedrich for help in that project; Friedrich, in a dexterously graceful manner, altogether declining. Hereditary Saxons are not to be the expedient this time, it would seem; a grandiose Czarina has decided otherwise. Why should ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... out, and in doing so he passed beneath the baignoire of Mademoiselle Noemie. She saw him as he approached and gave him a nod and smile which seemed meant as an assurance that she was still a good-natured girl, in spite of her enviable rise in the world. Newman passed into the foyer and walked through it. Suddenly he paused in front of a gentleman seated on one of the divans. The gentleman's elbows were on his knees; he was leaning forward and staring at the pavement, lost apparently in ...
— The American • Henry James

... in Hobart to the care of those important animals. A feeling of relief spread over the whole ship's company as the last dog passed over the side, for travelling with a deck cargo of dogs is not the most enviable thing from a sailor's point of view. Especially is this the case in a sailing-vessel where room is limited, and consequently dogs and ropes are ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... keen desire to go back to the original sources of religious truth and to read the New Testament and the Fathers in their own tongue induced him to learn Greek and Latin after he was thirty years of age. He possessed excellent gifts and natural abilities of mind, and he soon had an enviable reputation for skill and learning. Like Sebastian Franck, whom he resembled in many points, he was profoundly interested in history and in the stages of man's historical development, and, like the former, he undertook the translation of great masterpieces ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... take the happiest and best step of my life—the day on which I shall be a man more exulting and more enviable than any other man in the world—the day on which I give Bleak House its little mistress—shall be next month then," said ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... bid an eternal farewell to, doubtless, by far the dearest,—happiest period of our existence, the dawn of life's day—that enviable time when "we have no lessons;" when the colt presses, with his unshod foot, the fresh and verdant meadow, while he wonders at the team toiling under a noontide sun, over the parched and arid fallow ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.

... was shining, or it might have been because he had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and, remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight. In the notes to Pratt's poem, "Bread, or the Poor", is an account of an industrious labourer who, by working in a small garden, before and after his day's task, attained to an enviable state of independence.) The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... to all, is the embodiment of the goal toward which all graduates should strive. The consulting engineer has perfected himself in his chosen field; he has become an authority in his branch of engineering; his word is accepted as final in court and privy council. Having gained to this enviable position only after prolonged study and protracted and wide experience in his particular specialty, the consulting engineer has well earned whatever accrues to him in the way, among other things, of generous fees for ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton

... be prevented and the cook enjoy an enviable esteem by the judicious use of herbs, singly or in combination. It is greatly to be regretted that the uses of these humble plants, which seem to fall lower than the dignity of the title "vegetable," should be so little understood ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... is enviable enough: I have a pleasant room, with a fig-tree growing before my window, beneath which Captain B——n and myself breakfast daily, well shaded from sun and dust; not a musquito disputes possession with us; and the dinner-table at the "Pottery" is well ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... her own heart, not the common friendship. She continually contrasted Madame Recamier's beauty with her own plain appearance, her friend's power of fascination with her own lesser faculty of interesting, and she repeatedly declared that Madame Recamier was the most enviable of human beings. But in comparing the lives of the two, as they now appear to us, Madame de Stael seems the more fortunate. If her married life was uncongenial, she had children to love and cherish, to whom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... his stakes were high and he played every shot. His calm, impassioned countenance bore the unmistakable stamp of the professional gambler, and, serene as a quiet mill-pond, he bore his losses or pocketed his winnings with the enviable sang froid which results from a long and intimate acquaintance with the ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton

... diamonds, pearls, and all manner of precious stones will be your daughter's ordinary playthings. I recommend to you, my dear lady, to give yourself no uneasiness. Proserpina's sense of beauty will be duly gratified, and, even in spite of the lack of sunshine, she will lead a very enviable life." ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... be loaded with hay; and those who are to be the draught horses trail him thus loaded by the tail, taking care not to overset him. The task of thus serving as the vehicle being evidently the least enviable part of the business, is taken by every one ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst

... officers in rank, and whose fame stands unchallenged either for efficiency or zeal, were all so indifferent to any question of personal interest, that they had received their appointment before they were aware it was to be conferred. Each brought from the Army of the United States an enviable reputation, such as would have secured to him, had he chosen to remain in it, after the war commenced, any position his ambition could have coveted. Therefore, against considerations of self-interest, and impelled by devotion to principle, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... writer enjoys a more truly enviable popularity in America than M. DE TOCQUEVILLE. That he should have discussed the vital principles of our political and social life, in a manner which not only made him no enemies among us, but established his 'Democracy' as a classic reference, is as wonderful as it ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... who remained in the villages was not much better. Those of them who were fortunate enough to find places were raised at least above the fear of absolute destitution, but their position was by no means enviable. They received little consideration or respect from the peasantry, and still less from the nobles. When the church was situated not on the State Domains, but on a private estate, they were practically under the power of the proprietor—almost as completely as ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Next neighbor to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a clean, high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded, for some months to come: master of his own time and spiritual resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What "literary man" to an equal extent! I fancied I, for my own part, so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut out from me, could have written such a Book as no reader will here ever get of me. Never, O reader, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... drama. I own I had a hard tussle before I could make up my mind to spend another night in that room; and my feelings as I shut the door on my retreating maid, and prepared to get into bed, were not the most enviable. But nothing happened, nor did I again experience anything of the sort till the evening before I left. I had lain down all the afternoon—for I was tired after a long morning's tramp on the moors, a thing I dearly love—and I was thinking it was about time to get up, when a dark ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... was at the head of those who chaperoned Master Betty, the young Roscius, at the period when the furor of fashion made all the beau monde consider it an enviable honour to be admitted within throne-distance of the boy-actor. Amongst others who obtained the privilege of making a portrait of this chosen favourite ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various

... "Zug" or draught which gave him rheumatism—not a romantic complaint for a young lover. See vol. ii. 9. But his power of sudden invention is somewhat enviable, and lying is to him, in Hindustani phrase, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... me, who ask but the happy chance to serve you. Should there be any trouble, let me know at once, and I will see to it that all is well. Your brother must not suffer, since he is your brother. He is very blessed and enviable ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... but an entire century has been unhesitatingly proclaimed the favourite poet of the French nation, was by no means during his lifetime in so enviable a situation, and, notwithstanding many an instance of brilliant success, could not rest as yet in the pleasing and undisturbed possession of his fame. His merit in giving the last polish to the French language, his unrivalled excellence both of expression and versification, were ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... phrase was Lady Earlscourt's and it served very well to express her meaning,—she had made some careful inquiries on the subject of the girl's male visitors, and she had, of course, found out that no other man occupied that enviable position; no social oculist would be required to remove the element which, in Lady Earlscourt's estimation, caused Phyllis' ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... and loquacious, pouring out a stream of apology for his lateness to Olga, none of which was the least intelligible to Lucia. She guessed what he was saying, and next moment Olga, who apparently understood him perfectly, and told him with an enviable fluency that he was not late at all, was introducing him to her, and explaining that "la Signora" (Lucia understood this) and her husband talked Italian. She did not need to reply to some torrent of amiable words from him, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... to sigh, as he directed himself again to Mrs. Hawley-Crowles. "She does not see, Madam, that it was by the ladder of Holy Church that she mounted to her present enviable social height." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... exaggeration which belongs to the laudator temporis acti. But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the result of a Presidential election,—or the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... one of the most enviable possessions of the successful pianist. Just what magnetism is and how it comes to be, few psychologists attempt to relate. We all have our theories, just why one pianist who often blunders as readily as a Rubinstein, or who displays his many shortcomings at every concert can invariably draw ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... lived pleasantly. He pretended to take the waters in the morning, he went for a ride in his motor-car in the afternoon, he dined at the Cercle in the evening, and spent an hour or two afterwards in the baccarat-rooms at the Villa des Fleurs. An enviable, smooth life without a doubt, and it is certain that his acquaintances envied him. At the same time, however, they laughed at him and, alas with some justice; for he was an exaggerated person. He was to be construed in the comparative. Everything in his life was a trifle ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... so much as thanks. And yet there is one cause of thankfulness you have, and know not of. Here have I listened to your troubles, as you call them, for more than two hours, and never once told you any of my own. Troubles! you are, in my estimation, a very happy, enviable girl." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... represented this idea of education at its best, too much credit can not be given. Cravath at Fisk, Ware at Atlanta, Armstrong at Hampton, Graves at Morehouse, Tupper at Shaw, and Packard and Giles at Spelman, are names that should ever be recalled with thanksgiving. These people had no enviable task. They were ostracized and persecuted, and some of their co-workers even killed. It is true that their idea of education founded on the New England college was not very elastic; but their theory was that the young men and women whom they taught, before they were Negroes, were human ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... caricatures jested from the walls; the same tumbler of toddy was steaming on the table amidst the same litter of books and papers covered with the same dust and marked with the same circles from the bottoms of wet tumblers and glasses. The same cutty-clay, of enviable blackness, reposed between the teeth ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... even of present relief, since it is known to the whole world that she is behindhand on every one of her establishments. Since the year 1763, there has been no operation of any consequence on the French finances; and in this enviable condition is France at present with regard to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... close economy that her parents were able to keep her at such an expensive school. She made no secret of her lack of money, but worked away bravely and cheerfully, always sunny, always happy, with the enviable faculty of invariably saying the right thing at the right time. She had pronounced artistic tendencies, and Miss Preston was anxious to encourage them in every possible way. Her great desire was to go to Europe and there see the originals of the famous paintings of which she read. Each year Miss ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... Trujillo. Certainly it must have been a happy moment for the neglected {67} bastard who had been a swineherd to return to his native village under such enviable conditions. He set sail for America early in 1530, with three ships. His four brothers came with him, the able Hernando being made second in command. Almagro and Luque were very much chagrined at the meagre reward that had fallen to them, and Almagro ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... thy store of torments There's not a keener lash! Lives there a man so firm, who, while his heart Feels all the bitter horrors of his crime, Can reason down its agonizing throbs; And, after proper purpose of amendment, Can firmly force his jarring thoughts to peace? O happy, happy, enviable man! O ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... and, when the case opened, lost to all else in his case, he presented precisely that faculty (and that permission by convention) of complete detachment from his home that long she had known to be man's most outstanding and most enviable quality. He had no attention to spare for the consideration of her own problem and ambition, and she was too honourable to his interests, and too devoted to him in his interests, to bother him with hers. But, more significantly to her ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... And is it then 295 An enviable lot to waste away With inward wounds, and like the spirit of chaos To wander on disquietly thro' the earth, Cursing all lovely things? to let him live— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... was certainly fulfilled by Isaac Watts. His logical and other treatises have served to brace the intellects, methodise the studies, and concentrate the activities of thousands—we had nearly said of millions of minds. This has given him an enviable distinction, but he shone still more in that other province he so felicitously chose and so successfully occupied—that of the hearts of the young. One of his detractors called him 'Mother Watts.' He might have taken up this epithet, and bound it as a crown unto him. We have heard of a pious ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Christians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions, than they ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... nature of their duties into the most important state secrets, there was never the slightest reason to suspect their perfect discretion. They were, besides, very diligent, and endowed with much talent, so that his Majesty formed an excellent opinion of them. Their position was most enviable. Lodged in the palace, and consequently supplied with fuel and lights, they were also fed, and received each a salary of eight thousand francs. It might well have been thought that this sum would be sufficient for these ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... negotiated our first treaty with China on the 3d of July of the following year, and his ability at that time, as well as thereafter, won for him, irrespective of party affiliations, an enviable place in the history of American diplomacy. He was sent upon his mission to Spain in 1874 by the party which he had opposed from its first organization, and his diplomatic erudition was indispensable to the State Department during ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... some other families, always camped together in the mountains during this season, and they were off when school closed, in an enviable state of ecstasy and anticipation. Cherry had planned to join them, but an experimental week-end was enough. The camp was in the cool woods, truly, but it was disorderly, swarming with children, the tents were small and hot, the whole settlement ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... those last days of his radically artificial life he disclosed a welcome tenderness, a touch of the divine, none the less so for being common duty, shown in the few brief letters to his son's widow and to "our boys." This, and his enviable gift of being able to view the downs as well as the ups of life in the consoling humorous light, must modify the sterner judgment so easily passed upon his characteristic inculcation, if ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... refugees and repatriates, thrust into communities to which they came as paupers and crowded into buildings which were never planned for domestic purposes, has been far from enviable. In September, 1917, the American Red Cross handed over the solving of this problem to one of its experts who had organised the aid given to San Francisco after the earthquake, and who had also had charge of the ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... aside for a moment from the many duties, the interesting cares and soul-stirring pleasures of your enviable situation, and read a few lines from a stranger? They come to you, not from the cold and sterile regions of the North, nor from the luxuriant yet untamed wilds of the West, but from the bright and sunny ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... you any cause of offence, Jack, why don't you pitch into him?" suggested a half-drunken fellow who bore the enviable reputation of being ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson

... prosperous men of letters; N—- represents for me the best and brightest side of literary success. Say what one will after a lifetime of disillusion, the author who earns largely by honest and capable work is among the few enviable mortals. Think of N—-'s existence. No other man could do what he is doing, and he does it with ease. Two, or at most three, hours' work a day—and that by no means every day—suffices to him. Like all who write, he has ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... to enter upon, suffering from a deficient education. We have now to see how he overcame all the obstacles arising from his natural character, and from a youth wasted in idleness and dissipation; and how he gradually won his way from victory to victory, until he at length attained the noble and enviable eminence which is assigned to him by universal consent as the greatest, we had almost said the only, modern ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... money-making—even for those he is to leave behind—to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man speculate or become a miser—a very enviable condition to him who has the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the accumulation of money is the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... Port Colborne at a certain hour, which he did—exactly on time. He was handicapped in many ways, yet he did his duty and carried out the orders he received to the letter. He had neither cavalry, artillery or scouts with his column, so that his position was not a very enviable one. Had Capt. Akers remained with Col. Booker instead of going off on an excursion with Lieut.-Col. Dennis on the tug "Robb," his presence might have made some difference in the fortunes of the battle at Lime Ridge. Lieut.-Col. Booker had no staff officer to assist him, ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald

... adds lustre even to nobility itself; which, at the same time that it was a reward for the past, ought to have been an incentive for the future:—He had been raised by a grateful Country to the proud and enviable station of representative in Parliament for the city in which your Lordships are now sitting; which, at the same time that it imposed on him the duty of watching, and if necessary, of animadverting on the conduct of others, especially bound him to guard the purity ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney

... as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers carry about with them. Any part of it which was not portable or could not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would discard as valueless, however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit with a duchess, built up of the yearly accumulation of her desire to do him some favour for which she had never found an opportunity, been squandered in a moment ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... villa was to be finished shortly and that would necessitate a new round of entertainments and minor adjustments and no end of enviable publicity and comment. This diversion would take her through the late spring and summer, and in the fall she fully intended to take up dress reform and become a feminist. She had an idea of wearing ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... abode, neither talent, virtue, nor patriotism could, at one time, secure those who possessed such enviable qualities. Lavoisier, Malsherbes, Condorcet, &c. were here successively immured, previously to being sent to the guillotine. Here too the unfortunate Marie-Antoinette lived in a comfortless manner, from the 2nd of July, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... very partially enviable just then, but the bright north wind seemed to blow his troubles back from him as he faced it, walking home from his ineffectual attempt to meet Reanda. It was very unlike the man to return to his lodging without having accomplished ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet agreeability which so characterized ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... was in anything but an enviable frame of mind that Friday evening. Mr. Simkins had pointed out exactly four pages of chaff for his winnowing, and the winnowing was to be done with pen and ink and the "occasional golden kernels" indicated by Steve on the margin of his paper. Steve ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... proverbial. There are other pressing and exhausting pursuits, which wear away the spirit by the ceaseless care which they impose, or perplex and bewilder the intellect by the multiplicity and intricacy of their details. But the business of teaching, by a pre-eminence not very enviable, stands, almost by common consent, at the ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... him," sighed Bessie Duncombe; "he has only seen the best end of life, and has laid it down for something worth! I'm sure he and your brother are the enviable ones." ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... here, as in his other books, he fairly revels in stirring incident, lively and faithful conception of character, and the powerful but delightful description of natural scenery which have already given his work an enviable and lasting place in ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... magister at Rome held a position even less enviable than that held by the grammatist at Athens. "The starveling Greek," who was glad to barter his knowledge for the certainty of a good dinner, was sneered at by many Roman writers. Many slaves were engaged in this type of instruction, bringing in fees ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... of the men who silently (you couldn't hear yourself speak) must have shared that conviction with me. To be left to write about it is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate; but the point is that this impression resumes in its intensity the whole recollection of days and days of desperately dangerous weather. We were then, for reasons which it is not worth while to specify, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... After exhibiting their enviable mental health, and rebutting the cavils of some of the speakers,—who could not bear, in Christian times, by Christian ladies, that heathen Greeks ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... sometimes amused and sometimes saddened by what they saw. There was a big San Francisco policeman, who said he had cracked heads so long that he thought he knew how to crack some golden nuggets; a correspondent of a prominent New York newspaper, whose situation was enviable, since his salary and expenses were guaranteed, and he was free to gather gold when the opportunity offered; a voluble insurance agent, who made a nuisance of himself by his solicitations, in season ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis

... not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it. Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses. She wore on her shoulders - or rather on her back and not her shoulders, which it scarcely passed - a French coat of sarsenet, tied in front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... decided to publish "Antonio" at once. Lamb retained the MS. for criticism. The present letter in the original contains his comments, the only one of which that Mr. Kegan Paul thought worth reproducing being the following:— "'Enviable' is a very bad word. I allude to 'Enviable right to bless us.' For instance, Burns, comparing the ills of manhood with the state of infancy, says, 'Oh! enviable early days;' here 'tis good, because the passion lay in comparison. Excuse my insulting your judgment with an illustration. I believe ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... When we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific, acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored. ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... I am a person to be envied, but there may come a shipwreck one day, and then I shall not be in so enviable a position.' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr

... the insult," murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe where they were left bare by the clicking shears—a flush which was enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would have been creditable, for its promptness, to ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... slipped by, and the years dragged on sluggishly, and 'Miah and Dorcas were as happy as ever. They had a couple of bairns to toddle about their cottage, and 'Miah had been fairly fortunate on the fishery, so that their lives were generally sunny and enviable to an extent that made Elijah's blood ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... susceptible himself not to understand me well. This is Mr Swiveller, my intimate friend—a gentleman of good family and great expectations, but who, having rather involved himself by youthful indiscretion, is content for a time to fill the humble station of a clerk—humble, but here most enviable. What a delicious atmosphere!' ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... can't go," remarked Aunt Jennie placidly. Aunt Jennie was always a placid little soul, with a most enviable knack of taking everything easy. Nothing ever worried her greatly, and when she had decided that a thing was inevitable it did ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... was long faithful to him. Mademoiselle was jealous of it, and that often controlled him. I have heard Madame de Fontenelles ( a very enviable woman, of much intelligence, very truthful, and of singular virtue), I have heard her say, that being at Eu with Mademoiselle, M. de Lauzun came there and could not desist from running after the girls; Mademoiselle knew it, was angry, scratched him, and drove him from her presence. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... to face its consequences and pay its penalties in full. The only way to atone for a wrong deed is to do the next right thing. Take good care of your precious treasure. Good-by. His father will come soon. He will come. Good-by. Oh, you enviable thing, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... just the kiss you were thinking of—no more was when I got it—but, Robert, my son and fellow soldier, it's my recorded conviction that the most enviable member of the regiment this day of our Lord is your twin trooper friend Rawdon. I saw him off on his wedding tour, and he ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King

... and keen eyes, without much softness in them; a dark and sallow complexion; a slender figure, bent a little with age; but at once alert and infirm. It surprised me to see him so venerable; for, as poets are Apollo's kinsmen, we are inclined to attribute to them his enviable quality of never growing old. There was a weary look in his face, as if he were tired of seeing things and doing things, though with certainly enough still to see and do, if need were. My family gathered about ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the world enjoyed their dances a quarter as much as did "Mr. May," they were enviable people, and he contributed not a little to their pleasure, if merely by the sight of his blithe freshness and spirited simplicity, as well as the general sympathy with his sister's joy, and the interest in his adventures. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... was, at the period of which we write, in the flower of his age, and, it may be added, in the zenith of his fortunes. But even in that enviable situation, he was affable, and distinguished as much for his attention to the forms of courtesy, as for that chivalrous courage which, only two short years afterward, induced him to throw away his life on the plains of Abraham. Duncan, in ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... earliest childhood taught by their parents to look upon this destiny as an enviable one, these fair girls do not fail to appreciate and fully realize the captivating charms that Heaven has so liberally endowed them with, and wait with trembling breasts and hopeful hearts for the period when ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... business forced its way into a world of poverty, of disease, of depraved public life, of low morals in the main pervading the community,—a world for the most part of class distinctions in which the lot even of the privileged few was not a very noble or enviable one, while the state of the vast majority was little better than that ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw

... contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty, enviable promise and the dumb hostility of her youth; the other in the gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn—— ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... business-like fashion peculiar to his race; but it would be unfair to infer that such minds are, necessarily, unappreciative. At all events, that concentrative, synthetical power, that takes in surrounding objects at a single glance, and retains them in a tolerably distinct classification, is rather enviable, even ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... midst of his years and usefulness. Then old Styles appeared, and, with a salute, the detective mounted and rode away to join the forces in front, while the ladies journeyed homeward. Mr. Bangs soliloquized as he rode rapidly on. "Boys read detective stories, and think our life an enviable one. They dowte on the schemes, the plots and counterplots, the risks, the triumphs, and look beyond to fame and rewerd, but they know nothing of the miserable envies and jealousies, the sespicions, the checks and counterchecks, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... (A.D. 1197), does not appear to have possessed any property whatever, though he afterwards became the wealthiest man in Iceland. His rise in the world was chiefly owing to his marriage with Herdisa, the daughter of a priest called Bersi the Rich,—a very enviable surname, which no doubt enabled the Rev. gentleman to brave the decrees of Popes and Councils, and take to himself a wife—who brought him a very considerable fortune. If we may judge from Snorre's biography, Christianity ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... in a by-no-means enviable state of mind, he commanded the Jew to throw the body of Thames ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... to choose between life and death, and both are alike hateful to me. To die alone! Weep, ye tender souls! Fate has no sadder doom than mine. She shares with me the death-potion, yet sends me from her side! She draws me after her, yet thrusts me back into life! Oh, Egmont, how enviable a lot falls to thee! She goes before thee! The crown of victory from her hand is thine, she brings all heaven to meet thee!—And shall I follow? Again to stand aloof? To carry this inextinguishable jealousy even to yon distant realms? Earth is no longer a tarrying ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... of walking to church on holy-days, preceded by a phalanx of halberdiers, in habiliments fashioned as in former times, seems, in the eyes of many a guild brother, to be a very enviable pitch of worldly grandeur. Few persons were ever more proud of civic honours than the Thane of Fife, but he knew well how to turn his political influence to the best account. The council, court, and other business of the burgh, occupied much of ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott

... long in this semi-lawless land to take any chances. Re-turning to his place of observation at the window, he was just in time to see a decayed turnip come hurtling over the heads of the crowd and, with enviable accuracy, catch the Indian behind the ear. Simultaneously, with a roar and a puff of displaced air, the light train drew into the station, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... was in that sea-fight, who, then humble and unknown, was destined one day to win laurels of a purer and more enviable kind than those which grow on the battle-field. This was Cervantes, who, at the age of twenty-four, was serving on board the fleet as a common soldier. He was confined to his bed by a fever; but, notwithstanding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... gathering darkness he caracoled with an enviable lightness of heart. Was not his host for the next three weeks his bosom-friend, young Lord Tamerton? And was not the beautiful golden-haired Lady Margaret Tamerton with her brother? Little marvel that Ralph tossed his rifle high in the air and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various

... back to the evening meeting, and after that missed none of these privileges. In due course she was asked to address it, and then her position became enviable from all points of view, for people who did not draw up their chairs and admire her inspirations sat at a distance and admired her clothes. Very soon, at her special request, she was allowed to resign her original place at table and take a revolving ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... was not altogether beguiled into the hope that this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even in silence. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... at Oriel College, Oxford, of which he became a Fellow, and had Arnold, Keble, Newman, Pusey, and other eminent men as contemporaries; was a man of liberal views and sympathies, and much regarded for his sagacity and his skill in dialectics; his post as archbishop was no enviable one; is best known by his "Logic," for a time the standard work of the subject; he opposed the Tractarian movement, but was too latitudinarian for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... organization, however curtailed it was, and that the secular school was not forced upon them in the same brutal manner in which the Russian Crown schools had been imposed upon the Jews of the Empire. Taken as a whole, the lot of the Polish Jews, sad though it was, might yet be pronounced enviable when compared with the condition of their brethren in the Pale of Settlement, where the rightlessness of the Jews during that ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... was then no higher literary authority in America than Dr. Channing. However, a message from Chief Justice Marshall, through Judge Story, belongs with it: "Tell her I have read with great pleasure everything she has written, and wish she would write more." She had gained an enviable position in literature and she had done a great deal of useful work during the fifteen years since the timid appearance of "A New England Tale," but she seems to have regarded her books as simply a "by-product": "My author existence has always seemed something accidental, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... had such cases in court. Meanwhile his neighbours predicted his final ruin. Those of the higher rank, with some malignity, accounted him already a degraded brother. The lower classes, seeing nothing enviable in his situation, marked his embarrassments with more compassion. He was even a kind of favourite with them, and upon the division of a common, or the holding of a black-fishing or poaching court, or any similar occasion when they conceived themselves oppressed ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... won similar and enviable fame. His speech at the dedication of the state monument at Vicksburg will be a classic in American oratory for years. At the Marquette Club Banquet in Chicago last month his oration was reprinted in New York and Boston with flattering ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... low a temperature, yet I am far from wishing to have it thought that I would not induce a hardy state of the constitution, which would enable it to bear the vicissitudes to which it must be exposed in its journey through life, by every means in my power. Hardiness is the most enviable of all the attributes of animal nature, and can neither be acquired, nor recovered when it is lost, but upon certain terms, to which many people submit with reluctance, because they must give up many indulgences and gratifications with which it ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... the whole afternoon in eager whispered conversation, till the governess came to take her back to the fashionable boarding school where she was being trained to be a perfect great lady, and to make some enviable man happy in the future by ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... Morton exchanged looks of intelligence, but said nothing; their fair passenger, fortunately, understood not a word of the steward's intelligence; and the merchant and doctor were of that happy and enviable description of men, who, when they sit down to a well-furnished table, seem to adopt, with a slight variation, the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... thought nothing of these dividing lines of society; but as he had grown to be, as he considered, a young man—and, indeed, he really did possess more of that enviable bearing than most boys at the age of sixteen—he had come to realize that there was such a thing as a social difference between men ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey

... would be at widest variance with the truth. College mates of Taylor will recall the deceptiveness of this outward appearance. It concealed muscles of steel and a will that had only to be right in order to be invincible. He was the peer of any amateur baseball catcher in his day, and held the same enviable place as a student of the classics. He was the strong man for the D.K.E. initiations, and took the same ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship

... the prick of anxiety as to the future and the physical ache of longing; for as Commandant with two out of four subalterns on the 'sick list,' he had his hands full; and Desmond, the Colonel's chosen friend and ally in all regimental matters, was in the same enviable condition. The more so, since he and Meredith between them had anticipated the modern theory that the spread of cholera or fever can be partially checked by a determined assault on flies and mosquitoes, the great disease-breeders of the East; ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... days after her death he wrote to Richardson, the painter. "I thank God," he says, "her death was as easy as her life was innocent; and as it cost her not a groan, nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an expression of tranquillity, nay, almost of pleasure, that it is even enviable to behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint expired that ever painter drew, and it would be the greatest obligation which ever that obliging art could ever bestow upon a friend, if you would come ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... of Fahrenheit above zero, and was the degree of cold here in the year 1740. The long continuance of this severity, and the snow now on the ground, give physical prognostications of a hard winter. You will be in a privileged climate, and will have had an enviable escape from this. The Notables are not yet separated, nor is their treasonable vote against the people yet consolidated; but it will be. The parliament have taken up the subject, and passed a very laudable vote in opposition. They have made ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... it without ample cause that he was restless and disturbed; within the last three days he had by his own instability of purpose, and vacillating tastes and temper brought himself down from as enviable a position as well can be imagined, to one as insecure, unfortunate, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... Two editors of this age have made for themselves an enviable place in our literature. They are Richard Hakluyt (1552?-1616) and Samuel Purchas (1575?-1626). Hakluyt was a clergyman who in the midst of his little parish set himself to achieve two great patriotic ends,—to promote the wealth and commerce of his country, and to preserve the memory of all ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... of Domestic Relations.—One of the most significant improvements that has taken place is the establishment of a court of domestic relations, which already exists in several cities, and has made an enviable record. In the early experiments it seemed practicable in Kansas to make such a court a branch of the circuit and juvenile courts, so arranged that it would be possible to deal with the relations of the whole family; in Chicago the new tribunal ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... have answered your letter and told you with what pleasure we will execute your commission. [Footnote: See post, p. 54.] I was very sorry to have missed you here, though it would have been but a glimpse, as you were going next morning. I shall hope to see you before you start on your enviable Spanish tour, as I mean to go home as soon as my cure is complete, for Lady C. feels Alice's absence, [Footnote: Lady Alice Villiers, married on August 16th, 1860, to Lord Skelmersdale, created Earl of Lathom in 1880. She was accidentally killed by the overturning of her carriage on November 23rd, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton

... a pity to resort to machinery simply because one did not know how to write well. I would rather set to work to correct the error. I happen to know one of our number who can write a very enviable hand. Do you know, Ried, that the letter you wrote me was the first thing which attracted me to you? I remember I showed the note to one of our senior partners, who was particularly disturbed by poor writing, and he said: 'Engage him, Roberts, do! A young man who can write like that ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden

... These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... were performed by commissioners. A curious controversy, now settled, arose with the town as to which should look after the street crossings. The fire department from the start has been sustained by the zeal of its members, and now, directed by its Chief Engineer, George S. Willis, enjoys an enviable reputation for efficiency. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... an event, my dear friend, not only for me but for our Museum. . .How happy you are, and how enviable has been your scientific career, since you have had your home in free America! The founder of a magnificent institution, to which your glorious name will forever remain attached, you have the means of carrying out whatever undertaking commends itself ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... position of another, but I am free to confess that I would rather be two Earls engaged to Phyllis than any other half-dozen noblemen upon the face of the globe. LORD TOLL. (without enthusiasm). Yes. It's an enviable position when you're the only one. LORD MOUNT. Oh yes, no doubt—most enviable. At the same time, seeing you thus, we naturally say to ourselves, "This is very sad. His Lordship is constitutionally as blithe as a ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... both. The courage and patience with which she had faced our difficulties, while I on my part had tried to end them by dint of hard work, had linked us together with bonds of iron. Minna was rewarded for all these privations by Dresden successes, and more especially by the highly enviable position I had held there. Her position as wife of the conductor (Frau Kapellmeisterin) had brought her the fulfilment of her dearest wishes, and all those things which conspired to make my work in this ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... wounded wild-cat, with no weapon in his hands but an ax; but fighting a wild-cat and a rebel sharp-shooter were two widely different things. He had never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet, nor had he ever seen a rebel; and it is not to be wondered at, if his feelings were not of the most enviable nature. But he was not one to shrink from his duty because it was dangerous; and he drew on his clothes as quickly as possible, and seizing a musket and cartridge-box that stood in a rack close by the cabin door, ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon

... O enviable thou, and unaccused— Thou who wast art and part in all I dared! And now, let be! make this no care of thine, For Zeus is past persuasion—urge him not! Look to thyself, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... fall in love with Pet. She was so beautiful, so amiable, so apt to receive any true impression given to her gentle nature and her innocent heart, and make the man who should be so happy as to communicate it, the most fortunate and enviable of all men, that he was very glad indeed he had ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... instance, be one of the ferocious wild-cats for which the island had been famous long before Wesley Coombs ever dreamed of settling there, Max felt that he would hardly find himself in an enviable position; since the gloom under the trees must prevent him from seeing how to aim ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie

... in Baltimore who enjoy the widest—if not the most enviable—reputation, are the fire companies. They are all volunteer, and their engines are admirable. They are all jealous as Kilkenny cats of one another, and when they come together, they scarcely ever lose an opportunity of getting up a bloody ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... love with him; then in the boudoir of an opera singer; then at a fancy-dress ball in Spain, with crowds of alluring masqueraders about him. The further he seemed to soar away, unapproachable and enviable, the more miserable she felt herself to be, and all at once it seemed utterly inconceivable that she had so lightly surrendered her own hopes of an artistic career and given up her lover, in order to lead a sunless ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler

... and became a member of the firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur. The firm had numerous clients, and the junior partner soon became a successful practitioner, uniting to a thorough knowledge of the law a vigorous understanding and an untiring industry which gained for him an enviable reputation. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... Passy, April 11, 1804. We live in the most quiet, and, I think, enviable retired merit. Our house is larger than we require, but not a quarter furnished. Our view is extremely pretty from it, and always cheerful; we rarely go out, yet always are pleased to return. We have our books, our prate, and our boy—how, with all this, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... wretched, mine was not enviable; one solitary meal a day was all I allowed myself and those who remained with me; and I must do them the justice to say, that they submitted to these privations without a murmur, being aware that it was only by exercising the most rigid economy that our provisions ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean

... admit, a sort of recognition accorded to intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain, there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged assumptions of quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite of the fact that it goes almost as a matter ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... Thornberry had predicted as to the state of manufacturing Scotland duly occurred. Besides manufacturing distress, they had to encounter a series of bad harvests. Never was a body of statesmen placed in a more embarrassing and less enviable position. There was a prevalent, though unfounded, conviction that they were maintained in power by a combination of court favour ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... palace in the town of Vallanza, their winter palace, the Palazzo Rosso; and a splendid old mediaeval castle, Castel San Guido, on the hill behind the town; and two or three delightful villas in different parts of the island. A highly enviable family, are they not? Orange-trees are in blossom at Sampaolo the whole year round, in blossom and in fruit at the same time. The olive orchards of Sampaolo are just so many wildernesses of wild flowers: violets, anemones, narcissus; irises, white ones and purple ones; daffodils, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... no enviable notoriety is reported to have spoken of Dr. Franklin as "hard, calculating, angular, unable to comprehend any higher object than the accumulation of money." Not a few people who profess much admiration for Franklin in other respects seem to think that in money matters ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... enviable being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball—bestride the stick, (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistledown, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... which so many kings were led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms and States approached the seat of Empire, to deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman people."] or the enviable account of the alfresco meals which the party discussed in their coach as described ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it. Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses. She wore on her shoulders—or rather, on her back and not her shoulders, which it scarcely passed—a French coat of sarsenet, tied in front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... out to be regular ranchers!" he declared, and in less than a week Nort and Dick felt that they were, indeed, on their way to this enviable goal. ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... ambitious policy had been extreme, and his knowledge of mankind profound; but he should have followed up the objects of his high aspirations by a straighter road. His glory would have been truly enviable had he devoted his efforts to the happiness of his subjects, instead of harassing their minds by dissensions, and mowing down their lives by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... honor him for all future time with festive matches, in music and chariot-races, and such gymnastics as were practiced at the Grecian games. A magnificent monument was erected to his memory. "The mournful letters written by Plato after the death of Dion contrasts strikingly with the enviable end of Timoleon, and with the grateful inscription of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... continents—waits upon the development of Mexico; and that development can be sound and lasting only if it be the product of a genuine freedom, a just and ordered government founded upon law. Only so can it be peaceful or fruitful of the benefits of peace. Mexico has a great and enviable future before her, if only she choose and attain the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... thing. And she feels that she has not done rightly by you, and, through her friendship and a desire to see peace all around, believes she can arrange matters to suit all concerned. To be plain and blunt, Mr. Fairchild, you are not in an enviable position. I said that I had information for you, and I 'm going to give it. You are trying to work a mine. That demands capital. You have n't got it and there is no way for you to procure it. To get capital, one must have standing—and you must admit that you are lacking to a great extent ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... and her face to the lamp, trying to imagine herself in her comfortable sitting room at the hotel, or even in her own luxurious boudoir in her Sicilian home. The attempt was fairly successful, and the result was a passing taste of that self-satisfied beatitude which is the peculiar and enviable lot of very lazy people after dinner. She cared for nothing and she cared for nobody. San Miniato and Beatrice might sit over there by the water's edge, in the moonlight, and talk in low tones as long as they pleased. There were no tiresome people from the hotel to watch their proceedings, ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford

... melting voice and soft caressing accent by which her fair countrywomen are distinguished. Moreover she is pretty—I think her beautiful, and so do all who have heard as well as seen her,—but pretty, very pretty, all the world must confess; and perhaps that is a distinction more enviable, because less envied, than the 'palmy state' of beauty. Her prettiness is of the prettiest kind—that of which the chief character is youthfulness. A short but pleasing figure, all grace and symmetry, a fair blooming face, beaming with intelligence ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... alongside of me on the keel of the vessel Sandy McTavish, whose life he had thus so gallantly preserved, now came to his senses, and in a short time was sufficiently recovered to take care of himself. Our position, however, was far from enviable. Here were we, four human beings, seated on the keel of a vessel which might any moment go down, with neither land nor a sail in sight. For some time, after all our exertions, we ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... a painful sensation. The lot of a popular idol is in many ways an enviable one, but it has the drawback of uncertainty. Here today and gone tomorrow. Until this moment Raymond Parsloe Devine's stock had stood at something considerably over par in Wood Hills intellectual circles, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... who here sustained the enviable reputation he had so nobly earned at Williamsburgh, led his command across the open space in front of our line, a space not more than one-fourth of a mile wide, beyond which the ground was interrupted by forests, to attack ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... beautiful, blond, gentle; we walked trustingly side by side, each holding the other by the hand, and seeming to wish for nothing better in the world.... When, after the lapse of so many years, I look back upon my former state, it seems to me to have been a truly enviable one. Unexpectedly, in the same instant, I experienced the sentiments of friendship and of love; for as I unwillingly took leave of the beautiful child, I was consoled by the thought of explaining these ideas to my young boy-friend, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... Jocelyn rode slowly towards the royal gallery. Having now raised his visor, his features were fully revealed to view, and perhaps were never seen to such advantage as at this proud and happy moment. His emotions were indeed enviable—but one thing was wanting to complete his satisfaction—the presence of her, before whom, of all others, he was most eager to distinguish himself. What mattered it that scarves and kerchiefs were waved to him by some of the fairest dames in the land? What mattered it that his name ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... deplores, are still very far from this enviable state. "Your heart still burns with that fatal fire you cannot extinguish, and mine is full of trouble and unrest. Think not, Heloise, that I here enjoy a perfect peace; I will for the last time open my heart to you; I am not yet disengaged from you, and though I fight against my excessive ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... thank God," he says, "her death was as easy as her life was innocent; and as it cost her not a groan, nor even a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an expression of tranquillity, nay, almost of pleasure, that it is even enviable to behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint expired that ever painter drew, and it would be the greatest obligation which ever that obliging art could ever bestow upon a friend, if you would come and sketch it for me. I am sure if there ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... attractive at first sight, but inexpressibly monotonous and wearisome on a longer acquaintance. This was Lady Lundie the Second, now the widow (after four months only of married life) of Sir Thomas Lundie, deceased. In other words, the step-mother of Blanche, and the enviable person who had taken the house and ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... to the ladies' surprise, took the vacant place beside Sophy, instead of climbing up to the box. He had been to see his intended parish, and was an enviable man, for he was as proud of it as if it had been an intended wife, and Albinia, who knew it for a slice of dreary heath, was entertained with his raptures. Church, schools, and parsonage, each in their way were perfection or at least promised to be, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... football Yale's record was an enviable one. The schedules included, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Columbia, Stevens Institute of Technology, Dartmouth, Amherst, ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... caviller is anything but enviable, and if God were to take him at his word, his lot would be anything but comfortable. Happy are they who accept God's gifts as He presents them, with thankfulness, and use them in His service faithfully, rejoicing and trusting in His infinite wisdom ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... seen, simple; he had 900 pounds a year and a house; the neighbourhood was cheap, and for some time he had no children to be a drag upon him. Who was not to be envied, and if envied why then respected, if Theobald was not enviable? ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... a very young lady, being, in point of fact, still at a remote distance from an epoch to which she appears to look forward as a grand and enviable period of existence. She has not yet entered what she calls her 'teens,' and two years must elapse before she can enter them, as she is only eleven years old. She is the only daughter of my only sister, Marian Lester, and has been newly imported from Sydney, where my sister ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... the people who'd evacuated the cities. The high population of remote places was a protection for Soames and Fran. He worried, though, about Gail, her situation, and that of the three other children, was far from enviable. In the present increasing confusion and tension they were hardly likely to have any ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... to the possession of their enviable talents, still, if the author should succeed in affording his readers a few hours' pleasure from the perusal of his Journal, or enable any one to re-picture scenes he may himself have visited, the principal object of its publication will have ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... want of suitors," said courteous Mr. Engelman. "A most majestic person. Witty and accomplished. Possessed of an enviable little fortune, entirely at her ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... in one of the polite sections of New York City, up among the East Sixties, and at the insistence of my sister and aunt, who lived with me, our home was near enough the great boulevard to be designated by that enviable phrase, "Just off Fifth Avenue." We were on the north side of the street, and, nearer to the Avenue, on the south side, was the home of ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... being the result, which reflects credit on British methods generally and upon the contracting engineers in particular. This is the same firm[45] which carried out the great harbour works of Vera Cruz, and the drainage of the Valley of Mexico, and it has earned an enviable reputation in Mexico. The Tehuantepec Railway is 1,200 miles north of the Panama Coast, and may be expected to take a good deal of the United States and international transoceanic traffic, as it is nearest to the "axial line" of the world's commerce ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... damaged in some respects. It had lain in this condition for a long time, no one in or near the place being able to make the necessary repairs. In this extremity the owner bethought him of Jonas Chickering, who had acquired an enviable reputation for skill in his trade, and it was thought that a good cabinet-maker ought of necessity to be a clever piano-maker. Young Chickering, thus appealed to, consented to undertake the task, as much for the purpose of becoming familiar with the instrument as of earning the ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... her terrible stupor with the distaste to take up the thread of life which sometimes comes after a night of forgetfulness in sleep. This stupor, which might have destroyed her, and the fever which had shaken her, seemed to her sweet and enviable now compared to this punishment: To live! To live ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie

... come as near to being a disembodied spirit as any man can do and live. I noticed the preternatural sharpness of the ridge of his nose, the deep cavities of his temples, and I envied him. He was so reduced that he would probably die very soon. Enviable man! So near extinction—while I had to bear within me a tumult of suffering vitality, doubt, confusion, self-reproach, and an indefinite reluctance to meet the horrid logic of the situation. I could not help muttering: "I feel as if ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad

... England to punish and baffle the "uncivilised race," who, if they had their way, would blacken and defile for ever the old and glorious record of man upon the sea. You, who store such things in your enviable memory, will recollect how in the Odyssey, that kindly race of singers and wrestlers, the Phaeacians, are the escorts and conveyers of all who need and ask for protection at sea. They keep the waterways for civilised men, against pirates and assassins, as your nation ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... white skeletons of camels lying by the side of the track. Do you know the camel's way? He is an unfriendly, graceless beast, but he marches to within an hour of his death. He drops and dies with the load upon his back. It seemed to me, even in those days, the right and enviable way to finish. You can imagine how I must envy them that advantage ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... the possibilities of spirit, but those possibilities not yet realized. We accordingly reverence the child and delight to watch him. How charming he is, graceful in movement, swift of speech, picturesque in action! Enviable little being! The more so because he is able to retain his perfection ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... the reply the agents desired the landlords to make, but it did not conduce to making their own existences any the more secure or enviable. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... and woods were shining brightly, peacefully in the sun; it seemed incredible that there should be heartburnings about a land so smiling, that wrongs and miseries should haunt those who lived and worked in these bright fields. Surely in this earthly paradise the dwellers were enviable, well-nourished souls, sleek and happy as the pied cattle that lifted their inquisitive muzzles! Nedda tried to stroke the nose of one—grayish, blunt, moist. But the creature backed away from her hand, snuffling, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... versatile and capable though she was to cope with the world, her lot was not an enviable one. It was with Godspeed, not the maledictions of one's neighbors, that she had hoped to leave the place which had sheltered her so long. And Padre Antonio—how could ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast. With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... their land once in every few years. The litter in which they travelled was richly decorated with gold and emeralds, and surrounded by a numerous escort. The men who bore it on their shoulders were provided by two cities specially appointed for the purpose, and the service was no enviable one, since a fall was punished by death. Halts were made at the 'tambos,' or inns regularly kept up by the Government along all the principal roads, and the people assembled all along the line, clearing stones from ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... very miserable one to Phelim and the father. The loss of the ten guineas, and the feverish sickness produced from their debauch, rendered their situation not enviable. Some other small matters, too, in which Phelim was especially concerned, independent of the awkward situation in which he felt himself respecting the three calls on the following day, which was Sunday, added greater weight to his anxiety. He ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... at present is become public property, no very enviable distinction in these unhappy times, and neither wished nor sought by myself. I have of late been subjected to circumstances which have rendered me obnoxious to the hatred of those who never forgive, the Bloody Church of Rome, which I have [no] doubt will sooner ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... literary pursuits was destined to an early termination. On the 4th of March, 1809, Mr. Madison was inducted into the office of President of the United Slates. It was at that time far from being an enviable position. At home the country was rent into contending factions. Our foreign affairs were in a condition of the utmost perplexity, and evidently approaching a dangerous crisis. The murky clouds of war, which had for years overshadowed Europe, seemed rolling hitherward, filling the most sanguine ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... walking to church on holy-days, preceded by a phalanx of halberdiers, in habiliments fashioned as in former times, seems, in the eyes of many a guild brother, to be a very enviable pitch of worldly grandeur. Few persons were ever more proud of civic honours than the Thane of Fife, but he knew well how to turn his political influence to the best account. The council, court, and other business of the burgh, occupied much of his ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott

... over a thousand photographs of well-furnished rooms. The best were selected, and a series of photographic pages called "Inside of 100 Homes" was begun. The editor's woman friend had correctly pointed the way to him, for this series won for his magazine the enviable distinction of being the first magazine of standing to reach the then marvellous record of a circulation of one million copies a month. The editions containing the series were sold out as fast as ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... been seen, the reader will not be astonished on his arrival with us at the Dairy Farm, to find every arrangement in accordance with the fine condition of the cows, and the enviable (to all other cows) circumstances in which they live. The cow-sheds are divided into fifty stalls, each; and the appearance presented reminded one of the neatness and order of cavalry stables. Each stall is marked with a number; a corresponding number is marked on one horn of the cow to whom ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... only very partially enviable just then, but the bright north wind seemed to blow his troubles back from him as he faced it, walking home from his ineffectual attempt to meet Reanda. It was very unlike the man to return to his lodging ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... the clear net annual earnings of a field Negro on a sugar plantation to come up to 8 l. sterling. Now what does he earn in the course of a year when he is working for himself? I dare not repeat what some of the witnesses for the planters stated to the House of Commons, when representing the enviable condition of the slaves in the West Indies; for this would be to make him earn more for himself in one day than for his master in a week. Let us take then the lowest sum mentioned in the Book ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson

... it of you all, gentlemen," pursued the young man, with the same composedness of voice and manner, and turning particularly to the officers of the —— Regiment, who were grouped around their Chief; "Who is it, I ask, on whom has devolved the enviable duty of reporting me as capable of violating my faith as a subject, and my honor as ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... this: "Gentlemen,—My services are at your disposal as a candidate for re-election to the Legislative Council." Evidently his constituents were not troubled with burning questions. The position of a Governor in the Colonies is not altogether an enviable one. He has a high official and social position, but little real power, because, practically, he has to consent to any Bill passed by the two Houses. Any one can go to a Governor's reception, and their entertainments are necessarily extremely catholic in their nature. ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton

... Things were far from having reached this pass in the last century; but even then literature and society had outgrown the nursing of coteries, and although many salons of that period were worthy successors of the Hotel de Rambouillet, they were simply a recreation, not an influence. Enviable evenings, no doubt, were passed in them; and if we could be carried back to any of them at will, we should hardly know whether to choose the Wednesday dinner at Madame Geoffrin's, with d'Alembert, Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... earth and assigned him Paradise, the fairest place of all, as his royal dwelling. But man, beguiled by envy, and (wo is me!) caught by the bait of pleasure, miserably fell from all these blessings. So he that once was enviable became a piteous spectacle, and by his misfortune deserving of tears. Wherefore he, that had made and fashioned us, looked again with eyes of compassion upon the work of his own hands. He, not laying aside his God-head, which he had from the beginning, was made man for our sakes, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus

... this I pray; you have wasted a precious life upon our forlorn race. Alas! how often and how keenly do I feel, that had it not been for the name of Armine your great talents and goodness might have gained for you an enviable portion of earthly felicity; yes, Glastonbury, you have sacrificed yourself ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... everybody else the punctuality which he himself practised, began to suffer from what Elise called his "dinner-fever," and threw uneasy glances first at the dining-room door, and then at his wife, whose situation, it must be confessed, was not a very enviable one. She endeavoured to look quite calm, but often whispered something to the little Louise, which sent her very importantly in and out of the room. Elise's entertainment, both that part which was audible, and that which was inaudible, was ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... They asked, almost as cordially as if we were middle-class English people, whether we had actually survived that trip to Versailles, and forbore to comment when we said we had enjoyed it, beyond saying that if there was one enviable thing it was the American capacity for pleasure. Yet one could see quite plainly that the vacuum caused by the absence of the American capacity for pleasure was filled in their case by something very superior ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... invalid were such that in regard to him he had sunk his own will entirely. As to opinions—well, he did differ from him occasionally, but he did it mildly, and with an openness to conviction which was almost enviable. He called him Bill, Billie, or Little Bill, according to ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... answered, laying down my egg-spoon, "why in the world should I do anything? My position is a comfortable one. I have an income nearly sufficient for my wants (no one's income is ever quite sufficient, you know), I enjoy an enviable social position: I am brother to Lord Burlesdon, and brother-in-law to that charming lady, his countess. ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... would be a pity to resort to machinery simply because one did not know how to write well. I would rather set to work to correct the error. I happen to know one of our number who can write a very enviable hand. Do you know, Ried, that the letter you wrote me was the first thing which attracted me to you? I remember I showed the note to one of our senior partners, who was particularly disturbed by poor writing, and he said: 'Engage him, Roberts, do! A young man who can write ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden

... without divulging any of our plans regarding that young man, he had acquired considerable information concerning him. It was learned that Edwards had for some time been regarded as a very fast young man, and several episodes were related of him, in which he had figured in no very enviable light. ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... sitting now for the first time at the hearth of the American nation, I feel bound to respond to that high tribute made to Spain by publicly acknowledging here the enviable kindness shown by all classes of your people since I landed ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... you think me the most ungrateful woman in the world. I know only too well that to many women my position has always appeared enviable. Poor things, if they only knew! Of course, my husband is a good man. In all ways I do him perfect justice. He is everything that is kind and generous—only, alas, he is not the lover of my dreams. My children are nice handsome boys, but they are the every day children ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... absurdity, and the scorn was just which greeted one of the most important works of the critical school, Hitzig's "Explanation of the Psalms." A reviewer said: "We may entertain the fond hope that, in a second edition of this clever writer's commentary, he will be in the enviable position to tell us the day and the hour ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... Jr., Tulsa, Okla., reports an enviable situation. He says: "My nut trees are growing on a farm where more than 30 years of cultivation have failed to kill the native pecan sprouts. They come up year after year from the top roots. Since acquiring the place in 1936, I have allowed the pecan sprouts and the few native walnuts to grow unchecked ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various

... that he had been some weeks absent at the sea-side before settling in this domicile; for the "Endymion" had been begun, and he had made considerable advances in his plan. He came to me one Sunday, and I walked with him, spending the whole day in Well Walk. His constant and enviable friend Severn, I remember, was present on the occasion, by the circumstance of our exchanging looks upon Keats's reading to us portions of his new work that had pleased himself. One of these, I think, was the "Hymn to Pan"; and another, I am sure, was the "Bower of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... back to the original sources of religious truth and to read the New Testament and the Fathers in their own tongue induced him to learn Greek and Latin after he was thirty years of age. He possessed excellent gifts and natural abilities of mind, and he soon had an enviable reputation for skill and learning. Like Sebastian Franck, whom he resembled in many points, he was profoundly interested in history and in the stages of man's historical development, and, like the former, he undertook the translation of great masterpieces ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable cerebrum. He knew well it was a fancy. But it was a fact also, that since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked in the back of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... exhibited in all the streets, and especially in the market-place, where every corner provided with a shelter was converted into an hospital. The consequences were inevitable. Many; as might naturally be expected, perished, in the night, of hunger, agony, and cold. Their lot was enviable—they no longer needed any human assistance. What heart would not have bled at such scenes of horror!—and yet it was the very countrymen of these unfortunate wretches who seemed to care the least about them, and passed by with the most frigid indifference, probably because they are so familiarized ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)

... native possessor, and therewith the usual liability to pay tribute. He is inferior to other owners only in this one point, that he lacks the power of alienating his property. Let him who has derived so much benefit from our commiseration now relieve others. Fortunate and enviable has turned out his captivity[826], which enables him at one and the same time to enjoy the citizenship of Rome and ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... that the elder of Esmond's two kinswomen pardoned the younger her beauty, when that had lost somewhat of its freshness, perhaps; and forgot most her grievances against the other, when the subject of them was no longer prosperous and enviable; or we may say more benevolently (but the sum comes to the same figures, worked either way,) that Isabella repented of her unkindness towards Rachel, when Rachel was unhappy; and, bestirring herself in behalf of the poor widow ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... absolute monarchy, and his subjects the most contemptible slaves. When he lays upon them his cursed hand, they reel to the ground. When he strikes the stunning blow, they drop insensibly to the earth. The oppressions and scourges of the most wretched slave are enviable in comparison with those severe wounds inflicted by this merciless tyrant, this infernal scourge of the human race. Intemperance is a monster that may well be personified. He frolicks through the ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods

... regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... must declare—" and now Lord Fawn spoke very slowly—"then I must declare that under these circumstances, let the consequences be what they may, I must retreat from the enviable position which your favour has given me." The words were cold and solemn, and were ill-spoken; but they were deliberate, and had been indeed actually ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... He pretended to take the waters in the morning, he went for a ride in his motor-car in the afternoon, he dined at the Cercle in the evening, and spent an hour or two afterwards in the baccarat-rooms at the Villa des Fleurs. An enviable, smooth life without a doubt, and it is certain that his acquaintances envied him. At the same time, however, they laughed at him and, alas with some justice; for he was an exaggerated person. He was to be construed in the comparative. Everything in his life was a trifle ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and girl so enviable in their innocence and happiness. Gilian knelt and gathered up the flowers. It was, perhaps, more to hide his vexation than from courtesy that he did so, but the act was so unboylike, so deferring in its manner, that it restored to Nan as much of her good humour ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... British race into a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which, despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period, remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity—the multiplicity of her vernaculars—by giving English to the Western-educated classes as ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... without ample cause that he was restless and disturbed; within the last three days he had by his own instability of purpose, and vacillating tastes and temper brought himself down from as enviable a position as well can be imagined, to one ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... Don Inocencio, "yours is an enviable position. To distinguish yourself, to raise yourself above the base multitude, to put yourself on an equality with the greatest heroes of the earth, to be able to say that the hand of God guides your hand—oh, what grandeur and honor! My friend, this ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... forehead, and the enlargement of the back of his skull, which rose much higher than his large and coarsely shaped ears, combined to form a physiognomy anything but prepossessing, save in the eyes of such as considered that the owner of so splendid an equipage must needs be all that was admirable and enviable, more especially when they gazed on the enormous diamond that glittered in his shirt, and the red ribbon that depended ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... increase her triumph. I wish I had wit and importance enough to write her a congratulatory letter. The ladies should deify her, and consecrate a temple to her praise. It is a diverting thought, that the mighty Emperor of the Turks should be subdued by a woman. How enviable that she alone should be the avenger of her sex's wrongs for so many ages past. She seems to have awakened Justice, who appears to be a sleepy dame in the cause ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... well admire some of these handsome Granvillaises, living their free life by the sea, earning less in the day, generally, than our Staffordshire pit girls, but living much more enviable lives. Here they are by hundreds, scattered over the beach in the early morning, and afterwards crowding into the market-place; driving hard bargains for the produce of their sea-farms, and—with rather shrill and unpronounceable ejaculations and many most winning smiles—handing ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... looking his best to-night,—that enviable, thorough-bred best, which was the natural result of culture, money, and ease; and Dolly, catching sight of Mollie's guileless blushes, deplored, while she did not wonder at them, understanding her as she did. It was ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the feijao was stewing. It took hours and hours before those awful black beans had boiled sufficiently to be edible, and the man who acted as cook had to sit up the whole night to stir them up and watch them. Yes, the position of cook for the camp was not an enviable one, for it meant marching all day and sitting up all night to prepare the feijao for the following day. Yet the love they had for their feijao—I never ate the beastly stuff myself—was so great that those lazy devils, who could not be ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the whole period of her stay, two hundred daily. The multiplicity of duties in the charge of the household affairs of such an institution, with the uncertain assistance to be found in such a place, may be better imagined than told. Under her satisfactory management the Vicksburg Home acquired an enviable reputation, and was the favorite stopping-place on the river. The great difficulty in conducting a Soldiers' Home in time of war, as every one knows who has been connected with one, is to keep it neat and clean, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... bowed low. "An enviable lineage. My deepest respects.— There was a revolution in your kingdom not so long ago, wasn't there? I heard it from the messengers of the rebel swarm. Am ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels

... If I were not afraid of the patronizing tone I would say that there is little doubt that if as a painter he had not had to try to write in character, he would certainly have made a characteristic writer. He has the most enviable "finds," not dreamed of in timid literature, yet making capital descriptive prose. Other specimens of them may be encountered in two or three Christmas tales, signed with the name whose usual place is the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... people still remaining at Dusky Bay was not, we understood, the most enviable; their dependence for provisions being chiefly on the seals and birds which they might kill. They had all belonged to this colony, and one or two happened to ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... is the very apotheosis of success. And yet,—one sometimes questions whether a perfectly successful man is as enviable as he seems. What do you ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller

... condition may be prevented and the cook enjoy an enviable esteem by the judicious use of herbs, singly or in combination. It is greatly to be regretted that the uses of these humble plants, which seem to fall lower than the dignity of the title "vegetable," should be so little understood ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... literary authority in America than Dr. Channing. However, a message from Chief Justice Marshall, through Judge Story, belongs with it: "Tell her I have read with great pleasure everything she has written, and wish she would write more." She had gained an enviable position in literature and she had done a great deal of useful work during the fifteen years since the timid appearance of "A New England Tale," but she seems to have regarded her books as simply a "by-product": "My author existence ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... indisputably his leader in the courts, and for whose forensic abilities it is known, that he entertains, and has often expressed, the highest admiration. The position of the two men was singular, and to the ex-attorney not very enviable. Scarlett was in high practice before Brougham was even called to the bar. He kept a head of him in their profession throughout; and twice he had filled the first places at the bar, when the respective attainments of these eminent persons ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various

... when your wedding-day comes with the end of the year?" She sat down by the fire in her room, and for the first time in her life, the harmless existence of one of those domestic drudges whom she despised began to seem enviable to her. There were merits visible now, in the narrow social horizon that is bounded ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... long lawsuit, although he had never before heard that he had such cases in court. Meanwhile his neighbours predicted his final ruin. Those of the higher rank, with some malignity, accounted him already a degraded brother. The lower classes, seeing nothing enviable in his situation, marked his embarrassments with more compassion. He was even a kind of favourite with them, and upon the division of a common, or the holding of a black-fishing, or poaching court, or any similar occasion, when they conceived themselves, oppressed by the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... day of trial came, therefore, he was not in an enviable frame of mind. He knew that hundreds of eyes would be upon him, and that he would have a very undesirable publicity. Only a few weeks before the strike he had been spoken of as a possible candidate for the town council, and ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... circumstance, that under the disguise of Greek warriors or Parthian princesses, there were really described contemporary beauties and courtiers, who fondly believed that they had attained, through the genius of Calprenede and Scuderi, an enviable immortality. Unhappily for them, the characters of heroic romance have found in that endless desert of phraseology at once their ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... Notwithstanding this enviable situation a clamour is excited, the people are agitated, and discord, with its train of evils, is prevailing. Some of our citizens, in the height of political prosperity, are seeking to destroy an order of things which has prevailed an hundred and ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast

... a dramatic critic is, in many respects, an enviable one. Lately, there has been the growing practice among critics of roasting a play on the morning after production, and then having another go at it in the Sunday edition under the title of "Second Swats" ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... "Stilicho" he had now been engaged for a year, and to-night he is writing the last words of the last scene. Shortly after twelve he has finished it, and, throwing down his pen, he paces about the room with enviable feelings. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... box of royalty, at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they were a radiantly enviable party returning from a ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... purpose of trapping the principal streams of the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Fitzpatrick, a trapper well known and respected by the mountaineers, had charge of the party. He was, at that time, well acquainted by experience with the Rocky Mountains, and has, since then, gained an enviable fame as an Indian Agent. The new party travelled North and commenced operations on the Platte River, which they followed down stream to one of its tributaries, the Sweet Water River. From here they worked on until they reached the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... very little even of present relief, since it is known to the whole world that she is behindhand on every one of her establishments. Since the year 1763, there has been no operation of any consequence on the French finances; and in this enviable condition is France at present with regard to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the nose. Yet no law in England forbids me my cigar, Nero! What is law at half-past eight was not crime at six and a half! Britannia says, 'Man, thou art free, and she lies like a commonplace woman. O Nero, Nero! you enviable dog! you serve but from liking. No thought of the world costs you one wag of the tail. Your big heart and true instinct suffice you for reason and law. You would want nothing to your felicity, if in these moments ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... manner the demand for locomotives was very great, and with Mr. Thomas N. Miller[24] I organized in 1866 the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works, which has been a prosperous and creditable concern—locomotives made there having obtained an enviable reputation throughout the United States. It sounds like a fairy tale to-day to record that in 1906 the one-hundred-dollar shares of this company sold for three thousand dollars—that is, thirty dollars for one. Large annual dividends had been paid regularly and the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... when Sir George and Lady Bennington left on their yearly visit to England, leaving Hal with the enviable holiday ahead of him of playing host at their summer residence in the Thousand Islands. He was privileged to ask what boys he liked; he could have his own canoe and sailboat, any of the servants from the city ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... who enjoy the widest—if not the most enviable—reputation, are the fire companies. They are all volunteer, and their engines are admirable. They are all jealous as Kilkenny cats of one another, and when they come together, they scarcely ever lose an opportunity ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... it,—and the public—the great public which, apart from all 'interested' critical bias, delivers its own verdict, is always ready to hearken and to applaud the writer of its choice. There is no more splendid and enviable life!—if I could only make a hundred pounds a year by it, I would rather be an author than a king! For if one has something in one's soul to say—something that is vital, true, and human as well ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... is not so enviable as it was. Years ago, the farmers of England, had they been as intelligent as other traders, could have purchased the English soil by means of the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... or showily in the street. It attracts attention of no enviable kind, and is looked upon as a want of good breeding. In the carriage a lady may dress as elegantly as she pleases. With respect to ball-room toilette, its fashions are so variable, that statements which are true of it to-day, may be false a month hence. Respecting no institution of ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... scene. But it was the peculiar lot of Theodosia to experience during the first twenty-one years of her life nothing but prosperity and happiness, and during the remainder of her existence nothing but misfortune and sorrow. Never had her father's position seemed so strong and enviable as during his tenure of the office of Vice-President; but never had it been in reality so hollow and precarious. Holding property valued at two hundred thousand dollars, he was so deeply in debt that nothing ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... be spending my time under such enviable circumstances requires some explanation, especially when I state that the exceedingly pretty woman ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... be found built into the older portion of the structure. In 1806 the original house was removed a few feet to the south to make room for a new tavern, and there it is still standing. The new house in which the original proprietor and landlord made his enviable reputation was needed to accommodate the increased public travel soon after the opening of the Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike, as described in an article entitled "From the White Horse to Little Rhody," and published in the first volume of this magazine. No house along the entire line of this ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various

... thankfulness you have, and know not of. Here have I listened to your troubles, as you call them, for more than two hours, and never once told you any of my own. Troubles! you are, in my estimation, a very happy, enviable girl." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... the abruptness of the summons, these two great dignitaries arrived at the imperial gate in no enviable state of mind; but when the sultan had informed them of the tumult then raging in the capital, they resumed their ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... much more painful tax on income than the pecuniary—it is the thought of those who are worsted in the struggle for bare existence. Vae victis! Yet those who achieve the bare existence, who starve not, neither shiver, have surely enviable compensations. Not theirs the distressful, wearying problems of sociology. Far from feeling any responsibility for their fellow-beings, they do not even fulfil their own personal duty to society,—witness the breeding of babies in back streets. They have ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... the governor, on the second day of the session (Sept. 4, 1849), delivered his message. It was a well-timed document, and admirably expressed to attract attention to the new territory. After congratulating the members upon the enviable position they occupied as pioneers of a great prospective civilization, which would carry the American name and American institutions, by the force of superior intelligence, labor and energy, to untold results, ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... election questions, and brought him forward with tenfold powers of mischief, as the champion of the mob: and, even as it was, ministers had brought themselves, by the proceedings against the printers, into no very enviable position. Riots and tumults in the avenues of the house were the order of the day, and the life of Lord North was on one occasion brought into imminent danger. On the day that the lord mayor was committed, indeed, the tumult ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... with whatever principles may have been presented. If this plan be faithfully pursued, rapid progress, on the part of the learner, will be the inevitable result; and that teacher who pursues it, cannot fail of acquiring distinction, and an enviable popularity in his ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... scenes were black with crape. The drawn faces of bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed girl showed piteously everywhere. Gray-haired parents knelt at the grave of the boy whose enviable fortune it was to be brought home in time to die in his mother's room. Towards the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should thank you, with a smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence, is a proof, certainly, of extreme and constant destitution; but (keeping in mind the sweetness) it also attests an enviable ability not to be depressed by circumstances. I know that this may possibly be great nonsense; that half the time we are acclaiming the fine quality of the Italian smile the creature so constituted for physiognomic radiance may be in a sullen ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... money. When that passion would seize him he would leave his business, his hired help, his home and wife and little one, and would lose himself for days at a time seeking to satisfy that passion. An enviable husband, father, citizen, and neighbor but for that evil; but how wretchedly that ruined all! Dr. Holland, of Springfield, Massachusetts, says: "I have all my days had a card-playing community open to my observation, and yet I am unable ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... second Baronet, a child only three and a half years old. His prospects were certainly not enviable, he and his sister Anne having had for a time, for actual want of means, to be "settled in tenants' houses." The rental of Gairloch and Glasletter at his father's death only amounted to 5954 merks, and his other estates in the Low Country were settled on his mother, Sir Kenneth's ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... system were shaken off, they did not doubt their ability to compete for the markets of the world. Even Washington, who had fewer illusions than most of his contemporaries, told his fellow citizens of America that they were "placed in the most enviable condition, as sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life." Independence was the magic word which the common man believed would open ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... beggars, harassed by blackmailers, threatened by kidnappers, frustrated in his attempts to bestow charity by the cry "tainted money"—certainly the lot of the world's richest man was far from being an enviable one. ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... informed that one of the chief objects of Captain Glazier's journey is to make observations and collect material for another book, which will no doubt be a very interesting one to read, and will add still greater honors to one who, though still a young man, has already acquired an enviable reputation as an author. After a very cordial shake of the hand from some comrades and citizens, the captain left the Central Hotel on his fine black horse, 'Paul Revere,' which has brought him safely thus far from Boston since the ninth of May, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... very great and enviable man, Mr. Florance, but I propose to save fifteen years on your twenty-five. I'll equal or better ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... of middle-class girls still sat on by the fire, but Hester Thornton now, not Annie, was the center of attraction. It was the first time in all her young life that Hester had found herself in the enviable position of a favorite; and without at all knowing what mischief she was doing, she could not resist improving the occasion, and making the most of her dislike ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade

... daughter! I must be mistaken in thinking I ever knew any one by that name, though it seems strangely familiar," said the doctor, and as by this time he had heard all he wished to hear, he arose, and bidding Mr. Liston good-morning walked away in no enviable ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes

... blest; and she used to drive through the Avenue Gabriel, the Rue de Marignan and the wide vistas which radiate from the Arch of Triumph and are always changing their names, on purpose to send up wistful glances to the windows—she had learned that all this was the happy quarter—of the enviable but unapproachable colonists. She saw these privileged mortals, as she supposed, in almost every victoria that made a languid lady with a pretty head dash past her, and she had no idea how little honour this theory sometimes did her expatriated countrywomen. Her ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James

... on her the task of making, buying, or assembling from parts purchased a score or more of presents. As one of the chief aims of Hiawatha Institute was to teach wealthy men's daughters how to be economical, it goes without saying that each of these girls had on hand no enviable Winter Task. ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis









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