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More "Fastidious" Quotes from Famous Books



... the situation it presented was of great interest. We witness the manifold conflicts resulting from a marriage entered into in haste and under superficial emotions, between a war-hero and the more complicated type of modern woman—the woman of brains and nerves, fastidious, intellectually passionate and at the same time swayed by a sensuality, which is neither acknowledged nor understood. Hence this woman's marriage with a man, who, sufficiently a hero to die magnificently (as a matter of truth he does ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... substitute bell-ringing for it. Mr. Ruskin's particular grievance was, that his own nerves were crispe by the incessant ding-dong of the church-bells of Florence summoning the devout to prayer, but he generalized his wrath. Possibly, he would have been less sensitive and fastidious regarding the musical carillons of the Italian city were he wont to dwell within ear-shot of an American factory or railroad-station. Not that Mr. Ruskin fails to appreciate—or, rather, to depreciate—railways in their connection ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... leave behind The green traces Of their sportance in the mind, And thou shalt, ere we well may know it, Turn that daintiness, a poet, - Elfin-ring Where sweet fancies foot and sing. So it may be, so it SHALL be, - Oh, take the prophecy from me! What if the old fastidious sculptor, Time, This crescent marvel of his hands Carveth all too painfully, And I who prophesy shall never see? What if the niche of its predestined rhyme, Its aching niche, too long expectant stands? Yet shall he after ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... quarrel. He was, however, seldom at feud with any one whose enmity could materially injure him: extensive connections he always conciliated, and every popular man was his friend. Nor was he compelled, in order to compass these ends, to descend to any very low arts; for "the people," were not so fastidious in those days, as they seem since to have become; and a straightforward sincerity was then the first element of popularity. The politician was not forced to affect an exemplary "walk and conversation;" nor was an open declaration of principle or ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... were not remarkably fastidious. They knew but one form of celebration, and they had no thought of hunting out new ones. The one thing needful to make a celebration completely successful was—liquor. This they must have in order to ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses that were not far from it, was painted too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too fanciful a fence before it, and had some fruit-trees planted in the front-yard, which to this fastidious young gentleman implied a defective sense of the fitness of things, not promising in people who lived in so large a house, with a mushroom roof, and a triumphal arch for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... storage warehouses, furniture auction rooms, etc. The fact is, a very large proportion of the books, even of the older species, are in fine, clean condition, many being in choice bindings, and equal to the most fastidious requirement. ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... feelings which underlies good manners, he was able to make himself far more unendurable to Annie than a less sympathetic person could have done. Evening after evening she went to her room feeling as if she were covered with pin-pricks, from a score of little offenses to her fastidious taste which he had managed to commit. His thorough acquaintance with her, and knowledge of her aesthetic standards in every respect, enabled him to operate with a perfect precision that did not waste ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... course, disgusted; but he was too self-reliant and capable to show it. All his life he had been immaculate, almost fastidious in his care of himself. Here he was coming, perforce, in contact with a form of life which jarred upon him greatly. Steger, who was beside him, made ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... lover of the old-fashioned sort might possibly never have halted to weigh these doubts; but though he was in the church Cope's affections were fastidious—distinctly tempered with the alloys of the century's decadence. He delayed writing to Frances for some while, simply because he could not tune himself up to enthusiasm when worried by suspicions ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... pyramid of all learning previous to his epoch, in order to get the highest standpoint for his own survey of mankind. Neither was he "a man of parts," precisely; being in himself a distinct whole. His choice of reading was ruled by a fastidious need. He was fond of travels for a rainy day, and knew Mandeville; but at other times he took up books which seem to lie quite aside from his known purposes. [Footnote: See Appendix III.] Voltaire appears to have attracted ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... boots, though he pinched and starved himself with heroic courage and endurance. He did not mean to buy them at a shop; for he knew a place in Whitechapel where boots quite good enough for him were to be had for two or three shillings. He was neither ambitious nor fastidious; old boots patched up would do very well to start with, if he could only manage to get them before aunt Charlotte came up to town again. She had sent word she was coming the last Saturday in January; and early in ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton

... while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... people help each other, or the waiters help them, at table, without a scramble, like hogs, for the best and the most—a custom which all travelled Americans detest and abominate as much as the most fastidious Englishman. ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... are blear: You eye your neighbour's; straightway you see clear, Like hawk or basilisk: your neighbours pry Into your frailties with as keen an eye. A man is passionate, perhaps misplaced In social circles of fastidious taste; His ill-trimmed beard, his dress of uncouth style, His shoes ill-fitting, may provoke a smile: But he's the soul of virtue; but he's kind; But that coarse body hides a mighty mind. Now, having scanned his breast, inspect your own, And see if there ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... list to our own country, and to our own times, it might be curiously augmented, and show the world what men the Critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to soothe irritated genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. "I would beg the critics to remember," the Earl of Roscommon writes, in his preface to Horace's Art of Poetry, "that Horace owed his favour and his fortune to the character given of him by Virgil and Varus; that Fundanius and Pollio are still valued by what Horace says of them; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... provisions were found to feed 5,000 persons for three months, and the victors were able to regale their appetites with luxuries such as butter, crab, or salmon, which were plentiful. Looting, however, was strictly forbidden. For fastidious persons the bath, after many weeks, was again available, and proved, indeed, in view of steady accumulations of mud, a salutary course. Measures, meanwhile, were at once taken to restore the town to its normal ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... with every one round about her. She was in and out of the cottages. She knew all about the old people's ailments and nursed all the children. Eileen complained with a fastidious disgust that Stella did not seem to know whether the children were dirty or clean. She kissed and hugged them all the same. In likewise she loved and petted the animals and so commended ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan

... mouldy steps lead to utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer. Fumbling along the dank wall, he is left to find the door of the shop as best he can. Not a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the Avenue! Yet ladies in furs and silk find this door and the grim old smith within it. Now and then an artist stumbles upon them, and exults exceedingly in his find. Two holiday shoppers are even now haggling ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... who was really a most fastidious child, and who shrank from the sticky-looking sweetmeats proffered to her by Dove. "I like the very best chocolate creams; Primrose brings them to me sometimes, but they are rather expensive. Oh! and ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... persistent itching and irritation of the scalp, particularly at the back of the head, lice or "nits" should be sought for. Sometimes it is more easy to find them on a fine-tooth comb passed through the hair. Lice are very common in dirty households, and are occasionally seen on the most fastidious persons, who accidentally acquire them in public places ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... to be seen to; the tally tables and all the packing and pressing machinery—which on this large estancia was carried almost to perfection—had all to be got into the very best working order imaginable. For, in the matter of sheep-shearing, Moncrieff was fastidious to a degree. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... marriage separated you from her entirely. But now you meet again the scene is altered; three years of absence spent in the cultivation of an understanding naturally of the first order, by encreasing your wisdom, has made you more fastidious; while the same time spent by her in mere idleness and shew, has hurt her disposition, without adding to her knowledge, and robbed her of her natural excellencies, without enriching her with acquired ones. You see her now with impartiality, for you see her almost as a stranger, and all ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... shipboard which attracted my particular attention, was the manner in which the sailors partook of their meals. There was no tedious ceremony or fastidious refinement witnessed on these occasions. At twelve o'clock the orders were promptly given, "Call the watch! Hold the reel! Pump ship! Get your dinners!" With never-failing alacrity the watch was called, the log thrown, and the ship pumped. When these duties were performed, a bustle was ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... mountains changed into volcanoes, when cascades now filled with blood fell into the valleys, and avalanches of human beings rolled down the deepest precipices. Death reaped such a harvest there where human life had never been before, that the vultures, becoming fastidious through the abundance, picked out only the eyes of the corpses to carry to their young—at least so says the tradition of the peasants of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... of Court. It was not in his nature to assume or attempt to bolster up a false position. He would abandon his case first. He did so in the case of Buckmaster for the use of Durham v. Beener & Arthur, in our Supreme Court, in which I happened to be opposed to him. Another gentleman, less fastidious, took Mr. Lincoln's place and gained the case." His power as an advocate seems to have depended on his conviction that the right was on his side. "Tell Harris it's no use to waste money on me; in that case, he'll get beat." In a larceny case he took those who were counsel with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... required to bring this result about. We acted merely as persons of common sense will always act in similar situations. We turned the landlady's ill-humour or stiffness into a joke, spoke bad German, mixed it with French and English, and won her heart by showing that we were neither sensitive nor fastidious. And the landlady's heart being fairly won, all the rest was easy. The husband, as in duty bound, fell into his wife's views, and the servants took their cue from their superiors. In Hayde, however, though we so far gained our end, that a good ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... house even: but her associations abroad had unavoidably imparted greater reserve to her ordinary deportment than the simplicity of cis-Atlantic usages would have rendered indispensable in the most, fastidious circles. With the usual womanly reserves, she was natural and unembarrassed in her intercourse with the world, and she had been allowed to see so many different nations, that she had obtained a self-confidence that did her no injury, under ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... it still, though the tobacco be not always the choicest—for one cannot be fastidious in the army, and sutlers do not keep much of an assortment—and still it brings me sweet dreams, though of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... become quite bearable. Of all that she read in the ashes, in the veiled softness of the lamps, of all her reminiscences, that of their married life was the most vague. She found a few isolated traits of it, some absurd images, a fleeting and fastidious impression. The time had not seemed long and had left nothing behind. Six years had passed, and she did not even remember how she had regained her liberty, so prompt and easy had been her conquest of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... almost every article appertaining to the toilet, as linen, drapery, hosiery, fancy goods, etc., and is on that extensive scale, that their assortment possesses every diversity that can be desired, whilst even the most fastidious cannot fail of meeting that which must suit their taste. This establishment is not like many in the same way of business, who spend a little fortune in advertising their goods, incurring tremendous expenses in obtruding themselves and ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... rude incongruities of the gathering. Men were surprised at the manifestations on every hand of a vulgarity and coarseness which they had been accustomed to think the natural products and exclusive characteristics of a state of society farther north. To the eyes of the fastidious, a new class had suddenly arisen in their midst. Perhaps the lesson was not a new one. Many nations before, when in the midst of revolutions, have been called mournfully to learn that there are grades in every society, that rebellions ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... without being able to draw forth anything but discordant sounds. He seemed annoyed, laid the violin on the window-sill and snatching up the bow he began to push it to and fro with violence, like a mason sawing a block of stone. This effort only succeeded in wearying his fastidious ears, and he took the bow with both hands and snapped it in two on the innocent instrument, source of harmony and delight. It seemed as if I saw before me a schoolboy holding under him a companion lying face downwards, while he pommeled him ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... court favorite who had actually been cashiered for cowardice and misconduct in the field fifteen years before; but his peculiar critical temperament and talent, artistic, satirical, rather histrionic, and his fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit and humanity, were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid people because of their dread of ironic criticism. Long after his death, Thackeray, who had ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw

... up with alacrity from the grass. Lines were hurriedly examined, and the bait tin, when investigated, proved to contain an ample supply of succulent grubs and other dainties calculated to tempt the most fastidious ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce

... historical was wanting in him. "The history of a science," he writes,(25) "is not like the narration of things that have happened. What would it profit us to make a collection of absurd opinions, of decried doctrines which deserved to be decried? It would be at once useless and fastidious to thus exhume them in case we perfectly knew the public economy of social bodies. It can be of little concern to us to learn what our predecessors have dreamed about this subject, and to describe the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... — N. fastidiousness &c. adj.; nicety, hypercriticism, difficulty in being pleased, friandise[Fr], epicurism, omnia suspendens naso[Lat]. epicure, gourmet. [Excess of delicacy] prudery. V. be fastidious &c. adj.; have a sweet tooth. mince the matter; turn up one's nose at &c. (disdain) 930; look a gift horse in the mouth, see spots on the sun. Adj. fastidious, nice, delicate, delicat[obs3], finical, finicky, demanding, meticulous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... these parsimonious Misters will soon recognise that it is not possible for modern up-to-date Art to be florescent under this retrograde and fossilized system, and be warned that such untradesmanlike goings-on will deservedly forfeit the confidence and patronage of their most fastidious customers. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... deprecates the solitude which united souls may enjoy, by a selfish or fastidious seclusion from the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... and holding her thus at arm's length, looked down at her. Her straight young figure, glowing face, and flaming eyes under the ruddy aureole of her hair made a picture of grace, beauty and passion that would have fascinated a more fastidious ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... have dared to make war on him with means so utterly inadequate, she at once retorted: "Sire, I must confess to Your Majesty, the glory of Frederick the Great had misled us as to our real strength"—a retort which justly won the praise of that fastidious connoisseur, Talleyrand, for its reminder of Prussia's former greatness and the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... covered with gray cloth, invite the sportsmen to rest. Large dressing-rooms, fitted up with hot and cold water, invite them to refresh themselves with a bath. Everything has been done to suit the most fastidious taste. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... life he began to take snuff, but it was very sparingly, and always out of a box; and if he bore any resemblance to Frederick the Great, it was not by filling his waistcoat-pockets with snuff, for I must again observe he carried his notions of personal neatness to a fastidious degree. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... jolly!" he said, eagerly, surveying with satisfied eye all the neat appointments of the room, when at last everything had been arranged in accordance with his fastidious taste. ...
— Three People • Pansy

... clerical persons, and went up to receive their blessing, and even kissed the priest's hand every time, but he was not willing to enter into conversation with them. 'Such an extremely strong odour comes from them,' he explained: 'and I, poor sinner, am fastidious beyond reason; they've such long hair, and all oily, and they comb it out on all sides—they think they show me respect by so doing, and they clear their throats so loudly when they talk—from shyness may be, or I dare say ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... detested, Arthur removed his hat, and lifted his brow to receive the breath of heaven. The sun was not yet risen, and save the occasional clatter of a market-cart, as it went jostling by, or the sluggish step of some sleepy servant, on his way to procure the breakfast for his fastidious owners, there was no signs of life or business ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... aristocracy was of doubtful and impure source, cynical in manner, unbridled in habits, over-fastidious in taste, and politically powerful. In this society woman began to be felt as a political force. M. Brunetiere said: "Mme. de Lambert made Academicians; the Marquise de Prie made a queen of France; Mme. de Tencin made cardinals ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... very far from suspecting the gravity of his condition. Not until the third day, when, upon waking in the morning, he saw a slender thread of blood that had flowed from his mouth over his beard and reddened his pillow, did that refined dandy shudder, that fastidious creature who held in horror all forms of human misery, especially disease, and who saw it creeping upon him stealthily with its defilement, its weaknesses and with the self-abandonment which is the first concession to death. Monpavon, entering the room in Jenkins' wake, caught ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... strangers, who have defended me more strongly, than my contemptible pedant could attack me[7]. For the other, he is only like Fungoso in the play, who follows the fashion at a distance, and adores the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford[8]. You can bear me witness, that I have not consideration enough for either of them to be angry. Let Maevius and Bavius admire each other; I wish to be hated by them and their fellows, by the same reason for which I desire to be loved by ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh—no! I believe all of us want the same things—we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... tables, had yet the look of order and method. You would have said at once that there was something good in the family. The child in front of the fire told more for it. Her delicate features, the refined look and manner with which she stood there in her uncovered feet, even a little sort of fastidious grace which one or two movements testified, drew the eyes of mother and sisters, and manifestly stopped their tongues; even called forth ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner

... des Dames Anglaises" at St.-Omer, and all that she had retained from it was a small stock of French idioms, most of which she had forgotten how to use, though she did use them frequently, with a certain timid pretension. Of that habit Fountain, the fastidious, thought that he should break her. But for the rest, her religion, her poverty,—well, she had a hundred a year, so that he and Laura would be no worse off for taking her in, and the child's prospects, of course, should not suffer by a halfpenny. And as to the Catholicism, Fountain ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... on to say, that 'perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless of words, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... plunged in sordid cares, The unfeeling vulgar mocks the boon divine; And harsh Austerity, from whose rebuke 440 Young Love and smiling Wonder shrink away Abash'd and chill of heart, with sager frowns Condemns the fair enchantment. On my strain, Perhaps even now, some cold, fastidious judge Casts a disdainful eye; and calls my toil, And calls the love and beauty which I sing, The dream of folly. Thou, grave censor! say, Is Beauty then a dream, because the glooms Of dulness hang too heavy on thy sense, To let her shine upon thee? So the man 450 Whose eye ne'er open'd ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... too fastidious and worldly-minded. If they love one another it doesn't matter a particle how old they are nor how poor. Women never should marry for money..." Amy caught herself up short as the words escaped her, and looked at her husband, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... suggested by the casual current of conversation. He was, about this time, and for years afterwards, a very frequent visiter at my house; and never was any one, independently of my personal regard for him, more welcome; for his conversation was always that of a ripe and varied scholar and fastidious gentleman. He was ever gay and animated as soon as he had recovered, which he quickly did, from the exhaustion of a long and severe day's work, and his fund of anecdote appeared inexhaustible. Never was any man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... hardy, ready growers, and copious bloomers. The bee balm, one of our handsomest perennials, has bright red whorls; it spreads upon the surface of the ground like mint, and thus may be divided and increased to any extent. It loves rich, moist land, but is not fastidious. Among the evening primroses the Missouri one is the brightest and biggest; speciosa, white, from Texas, of blossoms the most prolific; glauca, riparia, fruticera, and linearis, all yellow; many others, ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... man whom Fate suddenly swings from his fastidious life into the power of the brutal captain of a sealing schooner. A novel of adventure warmed by a beautiful love episode that every reader will ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... the Jesuit system, were among the ablest writings of the age. Philosophy, poetry, science, history, art, were all making great progress, though there was a stateliness and formality in all that was said and done, redolent of the Spanish queen's etiquette and the fastidious refinement ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... regard on him. "The sort of man who rides a motor-bicycle.... You really should, Margery," he went on, "learn to be more fastidious. You mustn't let yourself be either dazzled by fancy waistcoats or sympathetically moved by unclean collars. Neither ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... general may feel upon the subject I know not, but I have discovered, since I so rashly took up my pen, that there are three portions of a novel which are extremely difficult to arrange to the satisfaction of a fastidious public. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... became inseparable, and perhaps the thing that made those days of companionship bright with a singular and golden brightness, was that there was in his friend the same fastidious vein, the same dislike of any coarseness of talk or thought which was strong in Hugh. Looking back on his school life, with all the surprising foulness of the talk of even high-principled boys, it was a deep satisfaction to Hugh to reflect that there had never been in the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... something about my relation to one of your books. I write now from bed, having had some influenzic pneumonia, now going off. For some days my temperature was 105 and I was very restless at night, anxious to read, but in too sensitive and fastidious a state to tolerate almost any book. I found that almost the only book which I could read was your "Malay Archipelago" (of course I had read it before). In spite of my complete ignorance of natural history there ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... scrupulous," said Dick. The Dean protested with a smile. "I mean too fastidious," Dick ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... Prefet; he was a madman, and one of the most dangerous kind, the lucid madman who pursues an idea from which nothing will make him turn aside. He pursued it with superhuman tenacity and with all the resources of his fastidious mind, enslaved ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... Governor was saying in evident surprise—"you too want a military commission? Really, the fifing and drumming must have effected a profound alteration in your convictions. In my character of recruiting sergeant I suppose I ought not to be fastidious, but"—there was a touch of irony in his manner—"well, have you forgotten that an ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... notorious fact. Suppose yourselves in some stately palace, amid marbles and bronzes, statues and pictures, and all that cunning brain and cunning hand, when wedded to the high instinct of beauty, can produce. The furniture is of the very richest, and kept with the most fastidious cleanliness. The floors of precious wood are polished like mirrors. The rooms have every appliance for the ease of the luxurious inmates. Everywhere you see, not mere brute wealth, but taste, purity, and comfort. There is no lack of intellect either:—wise ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... gossiping remarks. "How she has changed!" said Mrs. Ton to Mrs. Style. "She used to be the most fastidious of exclusives; and now she has adopted nobody knows whom, and one of Mr. Goldwin's clerks seems to be on the most familiar footing there. I should have no objection to invite the girl to my parties, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... great favourite with fowl-keepers, especially those who have on eye to profit rather than to amusement. Those varieties known as the "silver spangled" and the "gold spangled" are handsome enough to please the most fastidious; but the common black breed, with the bushy crown of white feathers, is but a plain bird. The chief value of the common Poland lies in the great number of eggs they produce; indeed, in many parts, they are as well known as "everlasting layers" as by their proper name. However, the experienced ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... said Colonel Forrester, "despite of that discomfiture, there was nothing in the conduct of those engaged that should call a blush into the cheek of the most fastidious stickler for national glory. There is not an officer here present," he continued, "who is not prepared to attest with myself, that your column in particular behaved like heroes. By the way, I could wish to know, (but you will ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... allowing them to enter stages and steam-boats. "Yet, you allow the same privilege to vulgar and ignorant white men, without a murmur," I replied; "Pray give a good republican reason why a respectable colored citizen should be less favored." For want of a better argument, he said—(pardon me, fastidious reader)—he implied that the presence of colored persons was less agreeable than Otto of Rose, or Eau de Cologne; and this distinction, he urged was made by God himself. I answered, "Whoever takes his chance in a public vehicle, is liable to meet with uncleanly ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... dressed, with diamonds sparkling in her gray hair, came rustling down the steps, bringing with her faint odours of patchouly and violet-powder. She was followed by a girl of doll-like prettiness, with a snub nose and petulant little mouth, who held up her satin-and-lace skirts with a sort of fastidious disdain, as though she scorned to set foot on earth that was not carpeted with the best velvet pile. As they approached their carriage the inert dark bundle, crouched in the corner, started into life—a woman, with wild hair and wilder eyes, whose pale lips quivered with suppressed weeping as ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... it with characteristic swiftness and decision. She reasoned that Ian had enjoyed a period of great happiness in his marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... that having lived a life of such irreproachable gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, one June morning, while trimming ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... Osborne, too, who had spoken with such languid criticism to Mrs. Gibson about various country belles, and even in his own home was apt to give himself airs—only at home his airs were poetically fastidious, while with Mrs. Gibson they had been socially fastidious—what unspeakably elegant beauty had he chosen for his wife? Who had satisfied him; and yet satisfying him, had to have her marriage kept in concealment from his parents? At length Molly tore herself ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... popularity. But the classical taste is a love for form and delicate beauty of line as such, quite irrespective of any associations which may accompany them, or lamps, be they seven or seventy times seven. And to build his house in this style was the natural thing for a sculptor and fastidious seeker after the ideal in form. He found the man he wanted in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... feelings to their duties; who, in the cause of humanity, liberty, and honour, abandon all the satisfactions of life, and every day incur a fresh risk of life itself. Do me the justice to believe that I never can prefer any fastidious virtue (virtue still) to the unconquered perseverance, to the affectionate patience of those who watch day and night by the bedside of their delirious country, who, for their love to that dear and venerable name, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... silent as the grave, save for the winds that moan through her portholes and corridors, she lies rusting in sun and storm, a gloomy presence that fills the soul with awe. Even the birds of the air shun her barren decks; less fastidious bats have taken up their abode in the heart of her, and spiders great and small are at work on ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... between Scarborough and Llandudno quite easily with my eyes shut. Speaking as an expert, I may say that there is nothing to beat a small Cromer and seltzer; though some prefer a Ventnor and dash. Ilfracombe with a slice of lemon is popular, but hardly appeals to the fastidious." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne

... your money." He turned upon his heel now, for he relished the Inn room little, and its company less, being a fastidious lackey, and made to go, as if ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... was not so white as it should have been, the nails were not so well trimmed as a more fastidious mood might have demanded; but Westray did not notice these things. He took the shaky old hand, and gripped it warmly, not saying anything, because he ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... advances and the facile intimacies of artists, Durtal had been attracted by this man's fastidious reserve. It was perfectly natural that Durtal, surfeited with skin-deep friendships, should feel drawn to Des Hermies, but it was difficult to imagine why Des Hermies, with his taste for strange associations, should take a liking to Durtal, who was the soberest, steadiest, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... you may please.... It is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the book is not among them. There are two poems—The Garden, and another called, I think, On a dried-up Spring, which are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... the pantaloons. He went into that store a blue spider, he came out a reasonable-looking seafaring boy, rather narrow and sloping about the shoulders, it is true, but smart enough and baggy enough—especially about the nether garments—to please even Bax, who, in such matters, was rather fastidious. ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... these voracious creatures are not fastidious. No particular vegetable seems to be chosen by them. The leaves of the bitter tobacco plant appear to be as much to their liking as the sweet and succulent blades of maize! Pieces of linen, cotton, and even flannel, are devoured by ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... his use, and he is driven to coin them. But in the character of Arabian story-teller he is simplicity itself, and whilst avoiding words of length, he introduces just enough of antique phrase as gives a bygone and poetic flavour. The most exacting and the most fastidious will be satisfied at the felicitous handling of immortal themes. A delightful characteristic is the division of the text into Nights. Lane and Payne, for peculiar reasons of their own, have both omitted to mark the breaks in the recital. But now for the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... in accord with her cousin's opinion. Although the robust, if promiscuous, flirtations in which Fanny, before her engagement, had indulged freely had never appealed to the more fastidious Toni, she had always been quite ready to join in any fun which might be going. She had eaten sweets gaily in the cheap seats of theatre or picture-palace, had made one at the many informal and harmless little ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... joyous anticipation in Pollyanna's heart. But with the whistle of the engine there came to her a veritable panic of doubt, shyness, and dismay. She realized suddenly what she, Pollyanna, almost alone and unaided, was about to do. She remembered Mrs. Carew's wealth, position, and fastidious tastes. She recollected, too, that this would be a new, tall, young-man Jamie, quite unlike ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter

... reverberation to keep the brain behind it still. A perfume of violets, and the more dainty scent of primroses, pervaded the garden. It seemed incredible that any man should be allowed to live in such a spot; but then Captain Carey was almost as gentle and fastidious as a woman. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... of Athens suggested itself to Miss Polly Street in far-off Chicago, a prominent citizen strode from the offices in the direction of the boarding-house. He moved with decision, for he was hungry, and Mrs. Van Zandt was fastidious as to hours. The office force ate its supper at six, and the fact that Marc Scott was the assistant superintendent and, in the absence of the superintendent on affairs matrimonial, in charge altogether, was no reason ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... and opened the San Francisco Fair, parading at the head of a procession of a hundred thousand people. The Fair is truly most exquisitely beautiful. There are many buildings that would even, no doubt, please your most fastidious eye. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... young gentleman's head. As to the ball, we do not recollect ever to have seen one in the works of any of the old masters so true to nature. In conclusion, the buttons on the jacket, and the button-holes, companions thereto, would baffle the criticism of the most hyper-fastidious stab-rag; and the shirt collar, with every other detail—never forgetting the chiaro-scuro—are equal to any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various

... the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual snob. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, his literary genius enabled him to write an immortal masterpiece, not about the Cambridge hierarchy, but about illiterate tillers of the soil. The Elegy is the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... undeniable testimony of his disciple Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the addition of myself ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... as he could still feel for woman, he had gradually come to centre upon his fair and graceful cousin, who added to her personal attractions the other indispensable attributes, blood, breeding and fortune. Mr. Landale was as essentially refined and fastidious in his judgment as he was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... apostolical usages, because they had been practised by the catholics, who, instead of allowing Rome to be a church in error, denied that its followers could be saved, and thus raised the dark cloud of schism against the sun of the reformation; their rashness, uncharitableness, and fastidious scruples, in purifying what they owned to be non-essentials, have, I say, imped the dragon's wings, and placed the scarlet abomination, as ye call it, in a tower of strength, which the artillery of your covenant, lighted as it is by the flame of treason and civil commotion, can never ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... you what you are," certainly never suspected the signal confirmation which the entomological world would bestow upon his saying. Our gastrosopher was speaking only of the culinary caprices of man rendered fastidious by the sweets of life; but he might, in a more serious department of thought, have given his formula a wider and more general bearing and applied it to the dishes which vary so greatly according to latitude, climate and customs; he might above all have taken into his reckoning ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... to his genius. He had everything to spoil him,—beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to have been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful, impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... wounded in the battle of Ste. Foye. He was afterwards received with royal favour by King George the Third, being present at the state dinner when His Majesty with the dignity which he knew how to assume when the occasion required, rang for the carriage of his sometime favourite, the fastidious Beau Brummel, who had presumed on his august good ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway

... slowness of the Lilac, many of the fair ones were not so elegantly dressed as they had hoped to be and were quite mortified; but the shower in the night had freshened them and taken away much of their faded appearance, so that none but the most fastidious of their visitors could detect any failing. The Garden walks were quite lively with such of the callers as were obliged to walk, while those that kept their wings, and so could fly, were moving in the air in every direction. The Bee, in his shining yellow coat, was rushing ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder

... that he could not do so until he completely realised it. These silent enthusiasts were indeed fastidious about what was genuine. Most things were not genuine enough for them. That is why they are so prone to intoxicate themselves; they wish to get away, to form a world for ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... first caravan enlightened me also on the subject of honga, or tribute. Tribute had to be packed by itself, all of choice cloth; for the chiefs, besides being avaricious, are also very fastidious. They will not accept the flimsy cloth of the pagazi, but a royal and exceedingly high-priced dabwani, Ismahili, Rehani, or a Sohari, or dotis of crimson broad cloth. The tribute for the first caravan cost $25. Having more than one hundred and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... were interested in seventeenth-century swords. They were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of these weapons brought out and rolled clattering about the counter, until they found two of precisely the same length. Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative trophy. Even then they felt the points, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... were about half the size of those that are ordinarily supplied at private tables and restaurants. Hector managed to eat the apple, but the crust he was obliged to leave. He noticed, however, that his fellow pupils were not so fastidious. ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger

... deliberately laid aside his paddle and raised the fatal rifle. Then several times he brought the piece to his shoulder, and when his companions were expecting its report he as often lowered it to request the Indians would permit their enemies to approach a little nigher. At length his accurate and fastidious eye seemed satisfied, and throwing out his left arm on the barrel, he was slowly elevating the muzzle, when an exclamation from Uncas, who sat in the bow, once more caused him ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... a looker, but it wasn't that. She was fine-drawn, if you get me; clever and fastidious. I think fastidious is the word I want. She belonged to clean, quiet places where everything is right. That's what made my notion I understood her strange. You see, I have had to struggle in ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... prose, with all a Poet's art, Tickles the fancy, while it melts the heart!— Since at apologies I ne'er was handy,— Come, while fastidious Readers run me hard, And screen, sly playful wag! a hapless Bard, Behind one volume of thy ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger

... courtier, Hamlet; or the warrior, Posthumus; he is always the same—a gentle yet impulsive nature, sensuous at once and meditative; half poet, half philosopher, preferring nature and his own reveries to action and the life of courts; a man physically fastidious to disgust, as is a delicate woman, with dirt and smells and common things; an idealist daintily sensitive to all courtesies, chivalries, and distinctions. The portrait is not yet complete—far from it, indeed; but already it is manifest that Shakespeare's nature ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... look to her laurels. Slovenliness is the aptest word to apply to the workmanship of Maria (Hutchinson), the latest heroine of the Baroness Von Hutten. Maria has the air of having been contracted for, while that fastidious overseer who lurks at the elbow of every honest craftsman, condemning this or that phrase, readjusting the other faulty piece of construction, has frankly abandoned the contractor. Maria was the daughter of an artist cadger (name of Drello), friend of the great and seller of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various

... doubled about the knees they put up to the head. That is all the opulence and comfort that their beds can boast of, which are made of a thin mat. These are their Holland and Rouen linens, which serve for their opulence and their fastidious cleanliness. That is their whole wealth of quilts and covers, which protect them from the cold and from the mosquitoes. All is so exactly adapted to necessity, that there is no difference between the chief women and the slaves—as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... certain over-fastidious women have long clamored for some new method of putting on a pillow case, but these people have either lost their teeth, or the new ones do not grasp the situation. They have tried several new methods, such as blowing the pillow case up, and trying to get the pillow in before the wind got ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... please. Give your husband to understand that cleanliness and freshness is not a "sex-limited" attribute, and just as a husband wants his wife to be clean and dainty and well-groomed, so a wife may enjoy the same qualities in her husband. Some women are very fastidious, and while they may say nothing to their husbands for fear of irritating them, they may ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... off about the eighth of an inch or more in width. The second cut should extend from the base of the ear in front, somewhat obliquely, to intersect the other cut within a few lines of the point of the flap. These two cuts will shape the ear in such a style as to please the most fastidious eye, and will require no further trimming. The pieces taken from the first ear will answer as guides in cutting the other. The mother should not be allowed to lick the ears of the puppies, as is generally done, under the supposition that she assists in the healing process, when, in fact, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... growing into the regular tastes of the refined, fastidious Eton boy; wrote of the cut of his first tail-coat that 'this is really an important thing;' and had grown choice in the adorning of his room and the binding of his books, though he never let these tastes ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lighted end. Not a long and steady connection, but one that came in gusts. After two gusts I decided that it was perhaps safer to blow from my end, and for a little while we had in this way as much smoke around us as the most fastidious cigar-smoker could want. Then I accidentally dropped it; something in the middle of it shifted, I suppose—and for the rest of my stay behind it only one ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne

... done, perhaps—he could not have had it better. She was seized with a loathsome disease, which devoured her beauty, like Herod and his glory. I believe that she still lives, but no one can go near her; least of all, the fastidious Montague." ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... speaker laughed, a pleasant, deep laugh of complete enjoyment. "I thought we were in for a swim that would knock the cross-Channel record silly! However, I borrowed a suit from the skipper—and he wasn't what you'd call fastidious in ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... Tralles recommended a number of amulets, some of which I will mention later, but admits that he had no faith in them, but merely ordered them as placebos for rich and fastidious patients who could not be persuaded to adopt a more rational treatment. Baas tells us that "A regular Pagan amulet was found in 1749 on the breast of the prince bishop Anselm Franz of Wurzburg, count of Ingolstadt, after ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... cause by a word—he had given his consent to the young man's addresses with the mien of a major-general—he nevertheless foresaw that wealth as the ally of his daughter's affection would make him one of the most discriminating and fastidious ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... expectant, a worshipful semicircle. In a low voice Peter made the introductions, dwelling at fastidious length upon the tremendous villainy of this slender sorceress, who swept him all the time with a proud and disdainful fire. She ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... French writers describe Pau as "a charming town" alluding, of course, to the society, which is to them the great desideratum everywhere; besides, they are accustomed to ill-paved streets, and are not fastidious about cleanliness. The guide-books of these parts cite the descriptions of early writers in order to compare its present with its former state; two are given, which are certainly as much at variance as those obtained by strangers at the present day. In a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... Leduc, are too fastidious to enjoy life as it should be enjoyed; they are too prone to adhere to the amusements of their class. You have here an opportunity of perceiving how deeply they are mistaken, what relish may lie in setting one's rank on one side, in forgetting at times that by ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... materially injure him: extensive connections he always conciliated, and every popular man was his friend. Nor was he compelled, in order to compass these ends, to descend to any very low arts; for "the people," were not so fastidious in those days, as they seem since to have become; and a straightforward sincerity was then the first element of popularity. The politician was not forced to affect an exemplary "walk and conversation;" nor was an open declaration of principle or ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... Kercadiou, and to explain to her that it was his profound contrition that compelled him to depart without taking formal leave of her, the Marquis rolled away from Sautron in a cloud of gloom. Twenty-four hours with La Binet had been more than enough for a man of his fastidious and discerning taste. He looked back upon the episode with nausea—the inevitable psychological reaction—marvelling at himself that until yesterday he should have found her so desirable, and cursing himself ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... satiny calf-skin boots. As he hurried past Mrs. Striker, he held them up for her inspection, grinning from ear to ear. She gazed in astonishment at the white and silver ornamented tops, such as were affected by only the most fastidious dandies of the day and were so rarely seen in this raw, new land that the beholder could ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... outward seeming, at least, it was all that the most fastidious could have required; a gem of Renaissance architecture in its turrets, its quaint, scrolled windows, and the carving of its stone facade. Age and romance breathed from every inch of it. For not less than four hundred years it had watched the changing ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... hardened, were white-washed, presenting a very strong though not very beautiful appearance, the architecture of which was neither Grecian nor Roman, but evidently from "original designs" by a not very fastidious or accomplished artist. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... is horrible and hideous— It jars upon my sense fastidious, My "noble instincts," to decline To actions that are not divine. So, when I mutilate your pictures, So far from meriting your strictures, Compassion rather is my due For doing what I hate to do. It grieves my super-saintly soul Even to smash a china bowl; To carry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various

... drawing-room, where a purer atmosphere awaited us. All went off quietly and comfortably; no noise, no bustle, no asking will you have this or that; everything was brought round without questioning, and conversation was never for an instant interrupted. My fastidious cousin, Jack Falconbridge; his foolish fine-lady sister; her common-place lord; and her 'talented and travelled friend,' Miss Scribbleton, expressed themselves equally pleased, although there was nothing recherche, nothing expensive, nothing extraordinary. At the rich Mr Goldscamp's, where they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various

... sergeant's wife—who is ever "a friend indeed"—came to our assistance so soon we scarcely missed the Scotch creature. Still, it was most exasperating to have such an unnecessary upheaval, just at the very time we had a guest in the house—a dainty, fastidious little woman, too—and wanted things to move along smoothly. I wonder of what nationality the next trial will be! If one gets a good maid out here the chances are that she will soon marry a soldier or quarrel with one, as was the Case with Hulda. For some unaccountable ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical piece of paper that the mine had been held last ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Care little for the reasons that should guide us. Wishing to shut your eyes, Theseus unseals them; His hatred, stirring a rebellious flame Within you, lends his enemy new charms. And, after all, why should a guiltless passion Alarm you? Dare you not essay its sweetness, But follow rather a fastidious scruple? Fear you to stray where Hercules has wander'd? What heart so stout that Venus has not vanquish'd? Where would you be yourself, so long her foe, Had your own mother, constant in her scorn Of ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine

... spare bread just then to throw upon the waters. So the advertisements for the present were suspended; and the publishers, somehow, did not take kindly to Eusebius, who was making the tour of that fastidious and hard-hearted fraternity. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... the noble one "of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples—the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little; not a doer who is dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... and the French that a true understanding of the beauties of literature was confined to the select few who had been taught what to admire. Fine writing was beyond the rude appreciation of the multitude. Had, therefore, the reading public been much larger than it was, men of fastidious taste, who paid as much deference to polite opinion as Addison did in his youth, could have expected only audience fit but few, and would have been without encouragement to the pursuit of letters unless ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... years—scarcely sixteen summers had developed their power in her slight but beautiful form, and yet it was rounded so nearly to perfection, so slightly and gracefully full, as to captivate the most fastidious eye. Like every child of these Turkish harems, she was beautiful, with feature of faultless regularity, and eyes that were almost ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... ways of schooling the soul to recognize the magnitude and insistence of such obligations than by organizing ultra-select dancing-classes at Sherry's; giving "pink luncheons" to a bevy of simpering female snobs; uncorking eight-dollar bottles of Clos de Vougeot for a fastidious dinner company of men-about-town; squandering three thousand dollars on a Delmonico ball, or purchasing at vast prices the gowns and jewels of a deposed foreign empress. Yes, there are better ways. And for people who are solely pleasure-seekers to call themselves Christian is, from their own points ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... else I could bear; but this must not, cannot, shall not be. Arthur is all I have; I cannot spare him; and to see him shipwrecked on a low-bred designing creature would be too much misery. Impossible—so clear-headed as he is, so fastidious about women! And yet this letter spoke decidedly. People talk of love! and Arthur is so easy, he would let himself be drawn on rather than make a disturbance. He might be ensnared with his eyes open, because he disliked the trouble ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Ideala was fastidious about her dress, and being in one of her moods that evening she teased Claudia unmercifully, on the way to the Palace, about a blue woollen shawl she was wearing. "A delicate and refined nature expresses itself by nothing ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... attention to dress and appearance is fastidiousness.—These things are important; but it is a very petty and empty mind that can find enough in them to occupy any considerable portion of its total attention and energy. The fastidious person must have everything "just so," or the whole happiness of his precious self is utterly ruined. He spends hours upon toilet and wardrobe where sensible people spend minutes. Hence he becomes the slave rather than the ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... a few moments, and his face was hard when he resumed: "I know something about the combine's methods—Masters, who's still with one of the companies Sir James bought up, writes to me. I suppose one mustn't be too fastidious, but there are things the man who takes the post I'm offered will be expected to do; things I haven't done yet and mean to leave alone. You have often to throw your scruples overboard when you pay ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss

... the other side of the boulder, when he cautiously lifted his head to the light, and crept into a grass-clump on the top of the stone. Thence, after a little hesitation, he moved to the edge, as if contemplating a second swim. Fastidious as to his toilet, even in the presence of danger, he rose on his haunches and washed his round, furry face. The action was almost fatal. The brown owl, that had doubtless seen him by the grass-clump and had therefore left her perch in the fir-tree, dropped like a ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... Pshaw, this girl will not mar my projects long. By noon tomorrow she will be in eternity. I thought, the first time I saw her ghostly face, she would trouble me but a short season. What paradoxes men are! What on earth possessed Guy, with his fastidious taste, to bring to his home such an ugly, wasted, sallow little wretch? I verily believe, as a family, we are beset by evil angels." Drawing out her watch, she saw that the hand had passed nine. Raising the glass to her lips, she drank the quantity prescribed ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... shirt, shoes, breeches, and I had my first triumph when the wealed clawmarks on my shoulders—worse, if possible, than those which disfigured my face—were laid bare. The chak screwed up his muzzle in fastidious horror, and Dallisa looked shaken. I could almost read ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... more than the car was the fur coat, and the haughty and fastidious manner in which Miss Ingram accepted it from the chauffeur, and the disdainful, accustomed way in which she wore it—as though it were a cheap rag—when once it was on her back. In her gestures he glimpsed a new world. He had been secretly scorning the affairs of the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... present, a beautiful pair of tall silver candlesticks. Madeline had ransacked New York to find them, and every one but Babe, who clung to her turtle as far superior to any "musty old antiques," thought them just odd and distinctive enough to please Ethel's fastidious taste. And after that there was barely time to catch the train they had arranged to ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... fastidious father was something to be remembered, but she always shrank from having her personal ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade

... of playful cynicism in the tone, which went with the fleeting smile. Mrs. Pole understood Cornelia Woodyard perfectly, and was amused by her. But Conny's coarse and determined handling of life did not fascinate her fastidious nature as it ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... the smash is to-night. Dolly wants to please everybody, thinking to get me votes for Congress, and so she has invited all creation and his wife. There's old Peterkin, the roughest kind of a canal bummer when Arthur went away. Think of my fastidious brother shaking hands with him and Widow Shipley, who kept a low tavern on the tow-path! She'll be there; in her silks and long gold chain, for she has four boys, all voters, who call me Frank and slap me on the shoulder. Ugh! even I hate it all; and in a most perturbed state of ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... writes. "Nothing was a greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech of Francis was a cause of laughter." But Father Bouhours, a century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He preached in the afternoon to the Japanese in their language, but so naturally and with so much ease that he could not be taken ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... compass, or for their future portion. Her sister had enough, was strongly bound to assist Jeanie by any means in her power, and the arrangement was so natural and proper, that it ought not to be declined out of fastidious or romantic delicacy. Jeanie accordingly wrote to her sister, acknowledging her letter, and requesting to hear from her as often as she could. In entering into her own little details of news, chiefly respecting domestic ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... the CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES, the HOTEL DES INVALIDES, with its gilded dome (a little too profusely adorned,) the INSTITUTE, and more particularly the MINT, are the chief ornaments on the south side of the Seine. In these I am not disposed to pick the least hole, by fastidious or hypercritical observations. Only I wish that they would contrive to let the lions, in front of the facade of the Institute, (sometimes called the College Mazarin or des Quatre Nations—upon the whole, a magnificent pile) discharge a good large mouthful ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... soon as he could get through the necessary formalities. Meantime, he attached himself to Tom more and more, every day. In all the wide world, there was nothing that seemed to remind him so much of Eva; and he would insist on keeping him constantly about him, and, fastidious and unapproachable as he was with regard to his deeper feelings, he almost thought aloud to Tom. Nor would any one have wondered at it, who had seen the expression of affection and devotion with which Tom continually followed his ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... such great parts and extensive learning, with such fine thoughts, beautiful sentiments and wise reflections;—such a cool, abstracted philosopher, yet such an over-refined politician;—such a gloomy moralist, yet such an acute, fastidious observer of men and manners, was a cloistered monk or any obscure individual whatever was an idea to be immediately dispelled from the mind, for that the Annals was composed by such a man would have been about as incomprehensible an occurrence, as it would be impossible to conceive ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... here I soon became used to them. The first night I slept on board I smelt something very disgusting as I got into my bunk; and at last I discovered that it arose from a dead rat in the wainscot of the ship. My nose being somewhat fastidious as yet, I moved to the other side of the cabin. But four kegs of strong-smelling butter sent me quickly out of that. I then tried a bunk next to the German Jews, but I found proximity to them was the least endurable of all; and so, after many changes, I at last came back and slept ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... "A fastidious person," said Syme, "might even call it unpleasant. However, I suppose those lights out in the field beyond this street are the Gendarmerie. We shall ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... and tell him that they were not murderers in our sense of the word, and that they depended for a bare subsistence upon public charity. The only thanks I got were a cold stare from the man, a fastidious grimace from the two ladies, and an 'Oh, indeed!' so arrogant in tone that I retired discomfited. My ill-success may be attributable to the fact that I was wearing a 'kufiyeh' and 'acal' and so appeared to them as what is ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall

... Rachel said, almost entreatingly, "as he was so ill. Because think what it would have been to him! Of course he would have known it was not true, but he was so fastidious, so terribly sensitive, the mere thought that you could have been suspected of such a thing even would have preyed upon him ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... appeared for a long time so likely to give equal pleasure to the simplest reader and to the most fastidious critic.'—Academy. ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow

... not wish to paint the situation wholly rose color; the editor will have his moods, when he will not see so clearly or judge so justly as at other times; when he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will want this or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, or sketch, which the author knows to be simply perfect as it stands; but he is worth bearing with, and he will be constant to the new contributor as long as there is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... was no trivial matter—a few days or weeks. There was absolutely no hope ahead. I was there as a criminal, and too well did I realize the character of the Southern people, to believe that they would be fastidious about proof. Life is held too cheap in that country to cause them a long delay in ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger

... Fastidious Florentines were converted to Mirandola's strange taste in sermons, so that the convent garden with its rose-trees became the haunt of an ever-increasing crowd, eager to hear doctrines which were new enough to tickle ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... and the development of good habits. This side of life is one of the most important in the Nursery School, and needs material help. The lavatories and cloakrooms should be constructed so that there is every chance for a child to become self-reliant and fastidious. The cloakrooms should be provided with low pegs, boot holes, clothes brushes and shoe brushes: there should be low basins with hot and cold water, enamel mugs and tooth brushes for each child, nail brushes, plenty of towels, and where the district needs it, baths. The type ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... smartly together, and catching the flame in a little prepared tinder. The fish were baked over the fire thus kindled. Though the outside was smoked, the inside was sweet and palatable, and neither was disposed to be fastidious. The preparation of the meal took considerable time, but they had abundance of that, and occupation prevented their brooding over their ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... has long been regarded as a classic—as a faithful picture of the last days of the moyen age, when kings and princesses, brave gentlemen and haughty ladies laughed openly at stories and jokes which are considered disgraceful by their more fastidious descendants. In England the difficulties of the language employed, and the quaintness and peculiarity of its style, have placed it beyond the reach of all but those thoroughly acquainted with the French ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... loves and the public who are certainly indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to blindfold our fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an excess of unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt. I was here on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed myself, with perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so much ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... food cooked in butter from his hands. But by origin he no doubt belongs to the primitive or non-Aryan tribes, a fact which he shows by his appearance and also by his customs. In diet he is the reverse of fastidious, eating crocodiles, tortoises and crabs, and also pork in the Maratha Districts, though in the north where he is employed by Brahmans as a personal servant he abstains from this food. With all this, however, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... you know already, and despise money that is made of jam. Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity by young women who have not forfeited the right to be fastidious. That is the last thing I wished to say, but you have wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want Society to say that you have embraced the profession of a Religious, and intend henceforth to employ your talents in teaching sniffy-nosed schoolgirls Greek and Algebra and Mathematics, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... bed anywhere, even in a room hitherto untenanted, and to drag thither his greatcoat and other impedimenta, for that room at once to assume an air of having been lived in during the past ten years. Nevertheless, though a fastidious, and even an irritable, man, Chichikov would merely frown when his nose caught this smell amid the freshness of the morning, and exclaim with a toss of his head: "The devil only knows what is up with you! Surely you sweat a good deal, do you not? The best thing you can ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... said, "plunged the village of Pietranera into a state of consternation," a young man with his left arm in a sling, rode out of Bastia, toward the village of Cardo, celebrated for its spring, which in summer supplies the more fastidious inhabitants of the town with delicious water. He was accompanied by a young lady, tall and remarkably handsome, mounted on a small black horse, the strength and shape of which would have attracted the admiration of a connoisseur, although, by some ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee

... sometimes unable to hide the vulgarity of the aims and ideas which it clothes with beauty without concealing their essential nature. Mr. Warner was a patrician; the most democratic of men, he was one of the most fastidious in his intellectual companionships and affiliations. The subjects about which he speaks with his oldtime directness and charm in this volume make us aware of the serious temper of his mind, of his deep interest in the life of his time and people, and of the easy and natural ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... which offended them. They saw around them a world which seemed to be lapped in comfort or swathed in the dead wrappings of the past, and would not listen to reasoned appeals; and it would be futile to deny that, by lifting their voices to a pitch which offends fastidious critics, Carlyle and Ruskin did sometimes obtain a hearing and kindle a passion which Matthew Arnold could never stir by his scholarly exhortations to 'sweetness ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... large slate and a slate pencil. (By the way, the art with which he mastered the material, which was new to him, is remarkable. I have seen some of his productions, and it seems to me that they could satisfy the taste of the most fastidious expert of graphic arts. Personally I am indifferent to the art of painting, preferring live and truthful nature.) Thus, owing to the nature of the material, before commencing a new picture, K. had to destroy the previous one by ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... there is the Chapon fin. When you speak to some elderly gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs reminiscently: "Ah, yes! There is a restaurant there..." He means the Chapon fin. It was famous in '70 when the government came here before, and to-day when ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... would have made of an underground house in the same circumstances. But there was one recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the home by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No woman, however large, could have had a more exquisite boudoir and bedchamber combined. The couch, as she always called it, was a genuine Queen Mab, with club legs; and she varied the bedspreads according to what fruit-blossom ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie

... youngest and favorite son, alarmed by news of his father's failing health, had arrived from the Atlantic States just at the last moment. But it was thought singular that after the division of the property he entirely abandoned the Ranch, and that even pending the division his beautiful but fastidious Eastern bride declined to visit ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... to that," said Birket, looking a little nervous, but evidently in earnest. "I don't think Pledge is the proper man. (Cheers.) I don't like him myself—(loud cheers)—and I don't think I'm very fastidious. (Great applause from the Den.) We want an honest, reliable man—(hear, hear)—who'll keep our scores without fear or favour. (Applause.) You needn't think I'm saying this for a lark. I'm pretty sure to catch it, but I don't care; I'll say what I think. (Cries of 'We'll back you up,' and cheers.) ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... we fancy we hear whispered by the fastidious and scrupulous into whose hand our little work ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... consistent collector. There are reeds everywhere, you fortunate goat-foot, but even in Olympus I was the creature of a fastidious selection. ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... humor and talent for conversation. She now experienced the interesting sensation, as novel to her as it is familiar to most of us, of being nobody, and she disliked it. The manners of the set in which she found herself also grated continually on her fastidious taste. She was first amazed and then indignant at hearing her old Middleshire friends, whose simplicity far surpassed that of her new acquaintance, denounced by the latter—without being acquainted with them ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... that of any person with whom he was acquainted. She was to him a personality—a dear, charming friend, with certain defects of character (as who has not?) which were, however, more than compensated for by her devotion to him. She was fastidious, quick-tempered, utterly unreasonable where her feelings were involved; full of aristocratic prejudice, which only her sex could excuse; and whimsical, proud, and capricious. It was absurd, of course, to contend that these qualities were in themselves ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... said Spilsby, quite out of temper with his fastidious customer; ''ere's a pie as is all made of ram as 'adn't got more fat on it than ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... it, even the most fastidious; they might venture upon liking it, for it was a game with an origin and references. It was an officers' game, on board great naval ships; it had proper and sufficient antecedents. It ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... to be a bar to the satisfaction of your own appetite, if you feel hungry enough to eat raw flesh. I have been told that sailors are so often reduced to desperate straits that they eventually become reconciled to the idea of eating almost anything, and are consequently, as a rule, much less fastidious than such pampered mortals as myself. Moreover, you must not forget that it is of the last importance that your strength should be maintained—for your own sake, and for mine as well—if it is not too presumptuous of me to say such a thing—therefore ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... more chilled than a fastidious wine-fancier might have directed; nevertheless, it flowed over our parched palates with an intensity of zest which I do not believe it is in mortals to be conscious of enjoying till they have toiled a whole day in the sun within half-a-dozen degrees of the equator. Bottle after bottle—each ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... into cups made of green leaves, shaped into form, and holding about half a pint. Cook was the only one who tasted it. The method of preparing the liquor had quenched the thirst of his companions, but the natives were not fastidious, and the vase ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... neither a king, a horse, nor a woman. For the king is fastidious, the horse prone to run away, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... alone that. Ive not forgotten the brutality of my own boyhood. But do try to learn, glorious young beast that you are, that age is squeamish, sentimental, fastidious. If you cant understand my holier feelings, at least you know the bodily infirmities of the old. You know that I darent eat all the rich things you gobble up at every meal; that I cant bear the noise and racket and clatter that affect you no more than they affect a stone. ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw

... ME? No books of mine on stall or counter stand, To tempt Tigellius' or some clammier hand, Nor read I save to friends, and that when pressed, Not to chance auditor or casual guest. Others are less fastidious: some will air Their last production in the public square: Some choose the bathroom, for the walls all round Make the voice sweeter and improve the sound: Weak brains, to whom the question ne'er occurred If what ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... consciences morally pure, here fell upon stone. He who was so much at his ease on the shores of his charming little lake, felt constrained and not at home in the company of pedants. His perpetual self-assertion appeared somewhat fastidious.[1] He was obliged to become controversialist, jurist, exegetist, and theologian. His conversations, generally so full of charm, became a rolling fire of disputes,[2] an interminable train of scholastic battles. His harmonious genius was wasted in insipid argumentations upon the Law and the prophets,[3] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... clear sky. One thing I want to make clear is that it's just as little my fault as it possibly can be. I feel like the devil about it, but I can't for the life of me find one little hook to hang a shred of self-reproach on. My morals aren't what they should be. But I am a fastidious man, and the roof under which my mother lives is to me as the roof of a temple. But you know all this. Now what's to be done? One thing is clear, I can't and won't be amorously waited on. I think the poor child will have to ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius, which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater number—and yet delight the most fastidious of his day—and I think of ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not to feel ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier

... their approval. He who writes, or speaks, or sings for thousands, must write, speak, or sing as those thousands would have him. That to a dainty connoisseur will be false music, which to the general ear shall be accounted as the perfection of harmony. An eloquence altogether suited to the fastidious and hypercritical, would probably fail to carry off the hearts and interest the sympathies of the young and eager. As regards manners, tone, and choice of words I think that the oratory of Mr. Everett places him very high. His skill in his work is perfect. He never falls back upon ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... Leith, the port of Edinburgh, distant but a mile or two from that capital. He resolved to dash at Leith, and lay it under contribution or in ashes. He called the captains of his two remaining consorts on board his own ship to arrange details. Those worthies had much of fastidious remark to make against the plan. After losing much time in trying to bring to a conclusion their sage deliberations, Paul, by addressing their cupidity, achieved that which all appeals to their gallantry could not accomplish. He proclaimed the grand prize of the Leith lottery ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... taken away; he was hurried past hoardings and theatrical posters that engaged his fancy; the public was warned against telling him fairy tales, except those constructed on strictly hygienic principles. His fastidious cleanliness was rebuked, and his best frocks taken away—albeit at a terrible sacrifice of his parents' vanity—to suit the theories of his critics. How long this might have continued is not known—for the theory and practice were ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... "You're very fastidious, then. Here, come this way through the wood: it's a short cut. I confess my experience has been very much more limited than yours, but I never saw ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... thus, instead of paying sixteen dollars a month to a thorough-going tar, who would consume all his rations, buy up my young blade of Bury, at the rate of half a dollar a week; with the cheering prospect, that by the end of the voyage, his fastidious palate would be the means of leaving a. handsome balance of salt beef ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... that the Braboys could not longer live comfortably in Mr. O'Flaherty's house, and they soon vacated the premises, first letting the rent get a couple of weeks in arrears as a punishment to the too fastidious landlord. They moved to a small house on Hackman Street, a favorite ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother—threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary herself—felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs—forgot all, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood until, romping, laughing, and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... the time has past in which the most fastidious believer can object to hearing Abraham called a Bedouin sheik. The type has remained unchanged through all the centuries, and the picture in the Bible of Abraham in his tent, of his hospitality, his self-respect, his courage, and also of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... service of love, one sees at once what a poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business of the god was carried on of old. Today, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... young—quite forty, she decided—not very good-looking. Big and burly, a little clumsy in build, the fastidious might have said, but strong and manly, with a square jaw that spoke of strength and determination, and humorous grey eyes set rather deeply in his brown face. His soft hat was worn ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres

... thoughts and actions of men appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes. You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute to your fellow-actress, it is as futile ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... The man's fastidious soul revolted from the idea of using Paul's money to pay his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... like my fastidious friend, who go through the world "from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"—who have always some fault or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... detracting from his dignity. That slight girl, with her little feet, little hands, little face attractively overweighted by great coils of hair; with a rather large mouth, whose mere parting seemed to breathe upon you the fragrance of frankness and generosity, had the fastidious soul of an experienced woman. She was, before all things and all flatteries, careful of her pride in the object of her choice. But now he was actually not looking at her at all; and his expression was tense and irrational, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... feeling, and judgment, does he, by a few artless words, render most impressive and sublime, what more elaborate description could only have made confused and unsatisfactory. Nothing can be more admirable than this brief and indistinct report of the perspective glass, it cannot offend the most fastidious taste, yet leaves scope for the exercise of the most ardent and aspiring imagination-(Bernard Barton). [234] Such mountains round about this house do stand. As one from thence may see the Holy Land.—(Bunyan's House of God, vol. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... against an enthusiasm which, while it argues an excellent disposition and a feeling heart, requires to be watched and restrained, though not repressed. It is apt, if too much indulged, to engender a fastidious contempt for the ordinary business of the world, and gradually to render us unfit for the exercise of the useful and domestic virtues which depend greatly upon our not exalting our feelings above the temper of well-ordered and well-educated society."[16] He phrased the same matter ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... repeated by different priests and dignitaries of the Church, who had travelled as far as the distant little Cathedral-town embowered among towering pines and elm trees, where the Cardinal had his abiding seat of duty;—and he had been anxious to meet the man who in these days of fastidious feeding and luxurious living, had managed to gain such a holy reputation as to be almost canonized in some folks' estimation before he was dead. Hearing that Bonpre intended to stay a couple of nights in Rouen, he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and weariness which passed over ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... my impetuous friend, that my contention is that you—YOU—poisoned our blameless Eden in the hollow; that YOU were our serpent, and that this Sadie Collinson, over whom you have become so fastidious, whom you knew as my mistress, was obliged to become our confederate. You did not object to her when we formed our gang, and her house became our hiding-place and refuge. You took advantage of her woman's wit and fine address in disposing of our booty; you ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... Greece except one man at Athens; and he, to be sure, had been declared by the oracle of Apollo also to be "the supremely wise man." For those who commonly go by the name of the Seven Sages are not admitted into the category of the wise by fastidious critics. Your wisdom people believe to consist in this, that you look upon yourself as self-sufficing and regard the changes and chances of mortal life as powerless to affect your virtue. Accordingly they are always asking me, and doubtless also our Scaevola here, how you bear ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... tears anticipating his punishment, the smoking remnants are eagerly snatched up by a poor girl. Not educated according to the system of Jean Jacques Rousseau, she feels no qualms of conscience about the original proprietor, and, destitute of that fastidious delicacy which destroys the relish of many a fine lady, eagerly swallows the hot and delicious ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... introduced, to his vast discomfort, "in a most superb library in the midst of a splendid baronial hall." But the library of the Reform Club probably contained all this heterogeneous learning. Does the "Gastronomic Regenerator," out of respect to the fastidious sentiments of its author, occupy a separate apartment in that institution with a ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... well cooked. Sibyl never ate with hearty appetite, and declined everything not of excellent quality; unlike women in general, she was fastidious about wine, yet took of it sparingly; liqueurs, too, she enjoyed, and very strong coffee. To a cigarette in the mouth of a woman she utterly objected; it offended her sense of the becoming, her delicate perception of propriety. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... bacon is being smoked in London," says a news item. We are glad they have found a use for it, but at the risk of appearing fastidious we must say ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various

... and the infelicity of our century, when most human things are so exulcerated that there is no work, however well digested, polished, and filed, but it is badly interpreted and slandered by the malice of fastidious persons. Take, therefore, in good part our hasty labour, and be not too close a censor of another's work until thou hast ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... upon Emily when she made her appearance in public; and Rainscourt felt that his house would be more resorted to, and his company be more courted, if he could have under his immediate protection one who had beauty sufficient to satisfy the most fastidious, and a certainty of ultimate wealth, exceeding the views of the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... writes his own memoirs, we have, at least, the motives which he thinks it creditable to assign to his conduct—he has, generally the candour of vanity, and even when he has not that candour, he is sometimes blinded into discovering truth unawares; but nothing can be more futile and fastidious than the meagre notes of the original actor, fresh woven and discoloured by the hands of an obsequious servant, who conceals all the facts he cannot explain, and all the motives he cannot justify. Such memoirs resemble the real life as the skeleton ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... would have joined his standard. But surely they underrated the public danger. Falkland is commonly selected as the most respectable specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of great talents and of great virtues but, we apprehend, infinitely too fastidious for public life. He did not perceive that, in such times as those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced. The present ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... wants that none knew better how to meet than the nice housewife, whose skill in such matters few could contest. The dainty bit was ever tempting, and the linen was pure and white, and the neat chamber inviting even to the most fastidious taste, so that there would have been nothing wanting to Archie's comfort or joy were it not for the void that but one could fill. "It was foolish to think of her!" that he so often repeated to himself, yet think of her and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... of sixty, having caught cold in a heavy storm while going upon an errand of mercy in 1688. His great work will live as long as the Anglo-Saxon race endures. "That wonderful book," writes Macaulay, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... Every reader knows the strait and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... "is a great favourite of mine. For one thing, he's fastidious, though he's fortunately very far from perfect in some respects. He has a red-hot temper, which now and ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... at the rate of forty miles an hour, over a smooth road, reposing on velvet-cushioned seats, with backs just at the proper angle to rest a tired head,—ice-water,—the last novel or periodical—all that can tempt your fastidious taste, or help to while away the time, offered at your elbow, is indeed pleasant; but wo to the fond imagination that pictures to itself such luxuries on a United States Military Railroad. Be thankful if in the crowd of tobacco-chewing ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... Wright, and the remuneration he received for them was very trifling, at most a few shillings each. It was probably this circumstance which put into his head the idea of illustrating "Pickwick." From what we know of the graphic abilities of Thackeray and the fastidious requirements of Dickens, we may readily understand why the post rendered vacant by Seymour's suicide was given to an ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... whose life-boat our Marianne has been received, has lately taken the mania of house-building into his head. Bob is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of domesticities and individualities; and such a man never can fit himself into a house built by another, and accordingly house-building has always been his favorite mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... opening out to the rear, another kitchen in which there was a great boiler, and a huge oven never now used. The necessary but unsightly doings of kitchen life were here carried on, out of view. He, indeed, would have been fastidious who would have hesitated, on any score of cleanliness or niceness, to sit and eat at the long board on which the miller's dinner was daily served, or would have found it amiss to sit at that fire and listen to the ticking of the great mahogany-cased clock, which stood in the ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... Lub was somewhat fastidious about how he wanted his bed made up. Three separate times did he pull it to pieces again, to ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone

... police still descend first on Duval Street in cases of local murder where the culprit has, as the newspapers say, made good his escape. I do not recommend it as a pleasure-jaunt for ladies or for the funny and fastidious folk of Bayswater. They would suffer terribly, I fear. The talk of the people would lash them like whips; the laughter would sear like hot irons. The noises bursting through the gratings from the underground cellars would be like a chastisement on the naked flesh, and shame ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... and, as they leaned over the railing, she studied them with growing interest. The oldest one was near her own age, she decided after a careful survey, about seventeen; and they were all particular about the little things that count so much with fastidious schoolgirls. She approved of each one of them from their broad silk shoe-laces to the pink tips of their ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston

... old sculptor named Phidias, Whose knowledge of Art was invidious. He carved Aphrodite Without any nightie— Which startled the purely fastidious. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... imagination, that is our strength. And that is our weakness. That makes us moral light-weights. We are flimsy and uncertain people. All intellectuals are flimsy and uncertain people. It's not only that they are critical and fastidious; they are weak-handed. They look about them; their attention wanders. Unless they have got a habit of controlling themselves and forcing ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily's interest. Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... given to the horse there is not much to condemn. He generally gets better water than the hog, or sheep, because he is very fastidious in this matter and will not drink foul water unless driven to do so by dire necessity. But I believe that three times is not often enough to water a horse at work in hot weather, though this is the common and time honored practice. The stomach of the horse is small—very small in proportion to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... Climber (Aspira Socialis) or Push Vine, which blooms in the most inclement weather and in the most Uninviting Places, is often seen during this month. By fastidious gardeners it is considered an undesirable visitor, and though impossible to exclude it altogether, if kept well in check during the winter it will be less troublesome in the summer months. The Push Vine is the toughest of all the Aspiration Vines, ...
— Cupid's Almanac and Guide to Hearticulture for This Year and Next • John Cecil Clay

... of the Statistical Society was rendered remarkable by a letter from Mr. LLOYD GEORGE who, in regretting his inability to be present, impressed upon the Society the need of upholding a vigorous and fastidious accuracy in the use of facts and figures. "To gain a momentary triumph over an antagonist in a public controversy by a misquotation, even though only a fraction is involved, is, in my opinion, an act which permanently disqualifies the offender ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various

... reply. And Soames gave him askance a look of dogged dislike—for in spite of his fastidious air and that supercilious, dandified taciturnity, Soames, with his set lips and squared chin, was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... what is the matter with you, Scott," she said. "You were always such a fastidious boy—even dandified. Doesn't anybody ever cut your hair? Doesn't somebody keep your ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... present to pursue with all zeal and perseverance the great cause we have now in hand. And we feel this to be the more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that light, unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious minds soon tire in any pursuit that requires strength, steadiness, and perseverance. Such persons, who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say, How long is this business to continue? ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... well—like the moral romances in China, which are disposed of by weight and in fragments, in such vast quantities, and which are so entirely a matter of mere pastime that the authors never think it worth while to affix their names to them. Like and Unlike may be safely intrusted by the most fastidious aunt to the most unsophisticated of nieces—and it is not unlikely that the niece would greatly enjoy its perusal. It is by no means devoid of interest, and indicates in many particulars that familiarity with the press which preserves any work ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various









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