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More "Fitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but never so forward as to be in front of them. It has been hinted that this arrangement is professional rather than providential; but the present writer, having given his mind to the investigation of the matter, is inclined to think that it arises from the general fitness of things. All public institutions have, or ought to have, their doctor, but in no institution is the doctor so invariably at hand, just when he is wanted, as in the hunting field. A very skilful young surgeon from ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... a true musician abhors discordant sounds, and as a skilled mechanic abhors bad work, and therefore cannot turn it out without doing violence to his finer and more cultivated sensibilities, so the best guide in morals to an enlightened man is his own sense of moral fitness and propriety." ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... lumbering, stock-raising, mining and dairying all flourish on the bountiful natural fitness of the county for these occupations. The climate is attractive. It is a ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... ingenuity, the planning talent, and the minds of others are apt to be used as instruments to accomplish your objects. For instance, if you were a lawyer, you would arrange the testimony and the mode of argument in such a way that the best final result would be achieved. You judge correctly of the fitness and propriety, as well as of the power, of the means you have to be employed. You would plan a thing better than you could use the tools to make it. Your reasoning organs are gaining upon your perceptions. At fifteen your mind was ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... me the true cause of that great and necessary, work; but whatever the cause was, the effect was good; and the Reformation spread itself by its own truth and fitness; was conscientiously received by great numbers in Germany, and other countries; and was soon afterward mixed up with the politics of princes; and, as it always happens in religious disputes, became the specious covering of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... and his young friends, though their pay went on, had little work to do. Whenever a new boat was completed it was the task of the submarine boys to take her out to sea and put her through all manner of tests in order to determine her fitness. But there were days and days when the submarine boys had naught to do but enjoy themselves as ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... mortification and inconvenience by a few,—a very small number of men, endued with an aptitude which places them above the ordinary laws of humanity,—what shall we say to the possibility of its exercise by men with no such fitness for the task,—men of a nation whose very climate is incessantly soliciting the expansion of the sensual faculties,—a nation of whose social organization frequent intercourse in all the affairs of life between the two sexes is one of the most essential ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... 'bus from Grays Inn Road as far as Oxford Circus, and walked along a number of quiet secluded streets—the backwaters of the West End—in order to reach Sherryman Street from the lower end, which, with a true sense of the fitness of things, was called Sherryman Street Approach. If the Approach had not been within a stone's throw of Sherryman Square it might have been called a slum. It had tenement houses with swarms of squalid children playing in the open doorways, its shops offered East End food—mussels ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... then new to command, doubtful as to your own powers, and diffident with those older than yourself. Now for two years you have thought and acted for yourself, and have shown yourself capable of making a mark even among men like the knights of St. John, both in valour and in fitness to command. You saved St. Nicholas, you saved the life of the grand master; and in the order of the day he issued on the morning we left, granting you three months' leave for the recovery of your wounds, he took the opportunity of recording, in the name of the council and himself, their ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... to the examination and trial of her new possessions; and as soon as breakfast was over and the room clear she set about it. She first went through the desk and everything in it, making a running commentary on the excellence, fitness, and beauty of all it contained; then the dressing-box received a share, but a much smaller share, of attention; and lastly, with fingers trembling with eagerness she untied the packthread that was wound round the work-box, and slowly took off cover after cover; she almost ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... "Why should the Kingdom of God be first?" and the other: "How can it be?" The one, "Why should it be so?" God has created us as reasonable beings, so that the more clearly we see that according to the law of nature, according to the fitness of things, something that is set before us is proper, and an absolute necessity, we so much the more willingly accept it, and aim after it. And now, why does Christ say this: "Seek first the Kingdom of God?" If you want to understand the reason, look at God, and look at man. Look ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... the Selection of a Companion.—Judicious Views of the Nature and Responsibilities of the Marriage Institution. Our Forefathers. Reciprocal Affection. Paley. True Love. Adaptation of Character and Position. Fitness of Circumstances, Means, and Age. Religious Equality and Adaptation. Only in the Lord. The Sad Effect of Inequality. Should Persons Marry Outside of their Own Branch of the Church? Sin and Curse of Disobedience to the Law of Religious Equality. Duty of Parents ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... great and good in both man and woman, as he became older and knew them better; for he was full of intellectual righteousness in this as in other things. And in this matter it may with something of special fitness be said that a man finds what he brings with him the faculty for finding. Shakespeare's mind did not stay on the surface of things. Probably there never was a man more alive to the presence of humble, modest worth. And to his keen yet kindly eye the plain-thoughted ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... poetic justice, which was never so needed as in these evil days, ordain that the chartered destroyer who had first seen the light of day in that hall should also be destroyed there? Was this not in accordance with the eternal fitness of things? Whereupon the matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxon mind, unable to withstand the force of this argument and accustomed to give way on secondary matters, assented, and Paris was ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we always agree with him,—not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to the end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it seems to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as applied to manufacture, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the Apothecaries are bound by their Charter to bring their Servants (before they make them Free) to be examined by the Censors of our College, and to have their approbation of their fitness to exercise their Art, and set up their Trade. Now that they have herein neglected their duty, and consequently may be dis-franchised and lose their Freedoms for this omission, 'tis manifest not only by the vapours of some of ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... the orchestra, until only two violinists remained, he quietly observed, "If all go, we may as well go too." Thus Haydn's object was attained—for the time being! The "Farewell" is perfectly complete as a work of art, but its fitness for ordinary occasions is often minimized by the persistent way in which its original purpose is pointed out to ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... maintain'd in its Perfection, as where two Persons have inseparably one and the same Interest; and see themselves united, as it were, in their common Off-spring? All People, it is certain, have not a like fitness for, or relish of this pleasure of Friendship, which therefore, however preferable to others in the real advantages of it, cannot be equally valuable to all. But where there is mutually that predominant Disposition to vertuous Love, which ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... may be defined as a group of characteristic activities dependent upon the transformations in this system under appropriate conditions. According to this definition, life is determined not only by the physical and chemical attributes of the system, but by the fitness of its environment, which Henderson has recently done the important service of emphasizing.[1] Relatively trifling changes in the environment suffice to render it unfit, however, that is, to modify it beyond the limits of an organism's adaptability. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... was in the back of the church. In their black rebozos, the poorest class of poor Mexican women were clad with more fitness than she. For Jane, weighted with the gravity of the occasion, had donned an austere black bonnet such as aged ladies wear, and its effect upon her short locks was incongruous in the extreme. No one, however, thought of her as being more queer ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... were to come across on the wire, I was given a hint to "make myself scarce"; so retired over the bank, and helped Jackeroo with the dinner camp—an arrangement that exactly suited his ideas of the eternal fitness of things. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... carrying the luncheon basket and Anne's coat. He had changed, and appeared in the Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and cap he had worn at Scarby. The pang that struck her at the sight of them was softened by her practical perception of their fitness for the adventure. They became him, too, and she had memory of the charm he had once worn for ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... by tossing feather balls into the air that the great Hercules gained his strength, but by hurling huge bowlders from mountain tops 'that his name became the synonymn of manly strength.' So the harder the struggle the greater the discipline and fitness. If we cannot reach success in one way, let us try another. 'If the mountain will not come to Mahomet let Mahomet ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... of the ordinary reader there is a feeling of rightness or wrongness about the thought sequences. That less intelligent subjects have this sense of fitness to a much less degree is evidenced by their passing over words so mutilated in pronunciation as to deprive them of all meaning. The transposition of letters and words, and the failure to observe marks of punctuation, point to the same thing. In other words, all the reading ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... group of people is worth pinning one's faith upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me men and women are very poor creatures. I suppose I'm too romantic and always was. I've an unfortunate taste for poetic fitness. Life's hard prose, and one must learn to read prose contentedly. I believe I once supposed all the prose to be in America, which was very foolish. What I thought, what I believed, what I expected, when I was an ignorant ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... offered a duty to fulfill or transgress; the terrible gloom of this Puritan horizon, on which no light showed me promise of better things, only to be hoped for through a process of repentance and atonement for the sins of Adam, the fitness and method of which process were far beyond my capacity to comprehend, as beyond that of any child,—all these things made my intellectual life so sombre that I can but regard the long interval of intellectual apathy as a fortunate provision against some form of mental malady consequent ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... beauty on the other. Indeed Eve was distinguished for that important acquisition to a gentlewoman, an intellectual or refined toilette; not intellect and refinement in extravagance and caricature, but as they are displayed in fitness, simplicity, elegance, and the proportions. This much, perhaps, she owed to native taste, as the slight air of fashion, and the high air of a gentlewoman, that were thrown about her person and attire, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the idea of special sacredness in color, the more exclusively do we see this confined to yellow. This was long saved from vulgar uses and associations. It had a significance to the ancients, such as it does not have to us. There was a fitness in their decorating the temples and the statues of the gods with gold, and silver, and ivory, and amber, and gems. These offerings symbolized light, and light stood for the happier destinies of man,—for the milder and gentler influences which lead to good; ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... that all those who swarm in the world below the bar of gentlehood are less blessed, or intended to be less blessed, than the few who float in the higher air. As to real blessedness, does it not come from fitness to the outer life and a sense of duty that shall produce such fitness? Does any one believe that the Countess has a greater share of happiness than the grocer's wife, or is less subject to the miseries which flesh inherits? But such matters cannot be changed by the will. ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... so with a teacher, who explained those terms to him. The teacher himself had got it from his teacher, and he from his. There was no tendency to popularize philosophy, for the idea then prevalent was that only the chosen few who had otherwise shown their fitness, deserved to become fit students (adhikari) of philosophy, under the direction of a teacher. Only those who had the grit and high moral strength to devote their whole life to the true understanding of philosophy ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... generous in worthy ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce; such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty, or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should think it much the reverse of a ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... adjustment of the whole to the power to be applied, offer problems alike interesting to the mechanic, and useful to the cultivator. In your ploughing matches sufficient evidence was afforded of the fitness of the implements employed to turn deep and wide furrows; but should we be content with such result as is obtained by trying different models, and then copying one which is found to ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... somewhat sudden; to a wasp or two that had come foraging on Daisy's window-sill. But Dr. Sandford was at home there; and so explained the wasp's work and manner of life, with his structure and fitness for what he had to do, that Daisy was in utter delight; though her eyes sometimes opened upon Dr. Sandford with a grave wistful wonder in them, that he should know all this so well, and yet never acknowledge ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... controlled by the United Irish League acting through its branches in Convention assembled. Inasmuch as the Party derived whatever strength it possessed in Parliament from the virility and force of the agitation in Ireland, it was in the fitness of things that the country should have the right of ordering the tune. When he founded the United Irish League Mr O'Brien unquestionably intended that this should be the case—that the country should be the master of its own fate and that the constituencies ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... healing; not merely changeable as diseases vary, or as new remedies are introduced, but changeable by the going out of fashion of special remedies, by the decadence of a popular theory from which their fitness was deduced, or other cause not more significant. There is no reason to suppose that the present time is essentially different in this respect from any other. Much, therefore, which is now very commonly considered to be the result of experience, will be recognized in the next, or in some ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the reader has doubtless noticed that these forms of cornice result, from considerations of fitness and necessity, far more neatly and decisively than the forms of the base, which we left only very generally determined. The reason is, that there are many ways of building foundations, and many good ways, dependent upon the peculiar accidents of the ground and nature ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... communicate to others the knowledge that I possess has always been my taste and my delight; and few, who know anything of my progress through life, will be disposed to question my fitness for the task. Talk of rocks and breakers and quagmires and quicksands, who has ever escaped from amidst so many as I have! Thrown (by my own will, indeed) on the wide world at a very early age, not more than eleven or twelve years, without money to support, without friends to ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... "the best I can do is to give you a synopsis of the story, and then you can judge of its fitness. The hero is called Victor Desmond. He is a young man of a sterling though undeveloped character, who has been hampered by an indulgent parent with a large fortune. Desmond is a butterfly, and sips life after the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with which it was to be "flyed," occupied more time, and required more care, than any other portion of their work. Every strand had to be twisted with the greatest exactness; and almost every fibre tested, as to its strength and fitness. Could they have used a rope of stouter build, it would not have been necessary to be so particular; but a thick rope would have been too heavy for the kite to carry—just as it had been too heavy for the ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... handling; the four "Spirits," therefore, having seated themselves in deck-chairs, invited each chief to step forward, in turn, and state briefly, first, the grounds upon which he based his belief in his own fitness for the post of king, and, secondly, the lines upon which he would govern, and the course of conduct which he would observe generally in the event of his nomination. To each man was accorded a certain number of good and also of bad marks corresponding ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... from once cherished national expectations and outward forms, into a purely spiritual knowledge and worship of God. Jesus fathomed the deep meaning of the religion of his people, and its original fitness to become, through higher development, the religion of the world. Jesus devoted himself to the end of forming the human race into one great society (the kingdom of heaven), of which religion should be the soul and life, and, convinced ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... an artistic sense of the fitness of things, and the suggested Soeur de Charite appealed to him as being quite out of the picture. Besides Arithelli had no respect for priests or nuns; Emile remembered her inimitable descriptions of the spying "Children of Mary," and she should not be worried with ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... is not opera bouffe, but serious history. It must have taxed Lincoln's sense of humor and strained his sense of the fitness of things to treat such nonsense with the tactful forbearance which he showed and to relegate it to the pigeonhole without making Seward angry. Yet this he contrived to do; and he also managed, gently but firmly, to make it plain that the President intended to exercise his authority as ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... and "Les Miserables"—Madame Le Vert's Mobile translation—lent round; and where men, when they did steal, stole portable volumes, not currycombs. Ned Ferry had been Major Harper's clerk, but had managed in several instances to display such fitness to lead that General Austin had lately named him for promotion, and the quartermaster's clerk was now Lieutenant Ferry, raised from the ranks for gallantry, and followed ubiquitously by a chosen sixty or so drawn from the whole brigade. Could the like occur again? And ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... President and Secretary of War pondered most anxiously was the capacity and fitness of Rosecrans to conduct the new campaign. Would he rise energetically to the height of the great task, or would he sink into the paralysis of will which so long followed the battle of Stone's River? Dana's dispatches were studied for ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... alive the enterprise thus voluntarily assumed. It is this objective method and motive that chiefly accounts for the numberless inert and the few vital histories. Like any intellectual task assumed without special fitness therefor or motive thereto,—without a comprehensive grasp of mind that impels to historic exploration,—without a patriotic zeal that warms to national heroism,—without, especially, a love of some principle, a conviction of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... infamies. There is no sureness in a man for his purse or his body, or his conscience. The King,—not the head of the state, mark you, expressing the people's will in one authority,—but this man Charles Rex, may use all these as he will. I aim not to overthrow the monarchy. I know its use and fitness in the realm, as well as any. But this can endure no longer. The King is part of the state, but we have a King who has sought to put the state to his private use. The King should have his authority, but it is an authority subject to the laws of ...
— Oliver Cromwell • John Drinkwater
... respect," answered Long Sam: "there is an important scheme about to be carried out; and as soon as you have given proof of your fitness to engage in it, you shall be informed as to the particulars. In the meantime, all I require is simple obedience to my directions, and then all will ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... reappearance of this unhappy woman at your house. She is fully occupied in writing (at my suggestion) to her friends in Canada; and she is under the care of the landlady at her lodgings—an experienced and trustworthy person, who has satisfied the doctor as well as myself of her fitness for the charge ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... de Triomphe. Thoroughly to appease his conceit, it would have been necessary to swing open the gates of honour in the Arc and allow his fiacre to pass through; to be forced to drive round the monument instead of under it hurt the sense of fitness which champagne engenders. Gerald was in all his pride that day. He had been displaying the wonders to Sophia, and he could not escape the cicerone's secret feeling: that he himself was somehow responsible for the wonders. Moreover, he was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... other grasped tremulously at Captain Forrester's, displayed to the latter's eyes the visage of Tom Bruce the younger, pale, sickly, emaciated, his once gigantic proportions wasted away, and his whole appearance indicating anything but fitness ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... a circuitous passage through a thick wood, which covered the distance between entirely. The spot chosen for the meeting was well known to both parties, and we shall not pretend, at this time of day, to limit the knowledge of its sweet fitness for the purposes of love, to them alone. They had tasted of its sweets a thousand times, and could well understand and appreciate that air of romantic and fairy-like seclusion which so much distinguished it, and which served admirably ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... air of going at it in his own way. In their white canvas shearing suits they worked very steadily, almost in silence, as if drowsed by the "click-clip, click-clip" of the shears. And the sheep, but for an occasional wriggle of legs or head, lay quiet enough, having an inborn sense perhaps of the fitness of things, even when, once in a way, they lost more than wool; glad too, mayhap, to be rid of their matted vestments. From time to time the little damsel offered each shearer a jug and glass, but no man drank till he had finished his sheep; then he would get up, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in question at the moment was the fitness of our friend for the stripe when a vacancy occurred; and the Honourable Jimmy, being the Adjutant of the South Devons, and having the headquarter specialists under his eye, was somewhat intimately concerned with the solution of the question. I think I have failed to mention ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... now about to be formally invested with the double power of Grand Sachem and military chief. The clan of the Porcupine in which the military chieftainship was hereditary had willingly yielded it to Timmendiquas, whose surpassing fitness to meet the coming of the white man was so ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... be a sort of moral fitness between the beginning and the end of certain alliances or acquaintances. This sentiment is not very clearly expressed. I am about to illustrate it by an important event in my political life. During my absence Dubois had made rapid steps towards being a great man. He was daily growing into power, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... phonograph, which we illustrate in figure 94, is about the size of an ordinary sewing machine, and is of exquisite workmanship, the performance depending to a great extent on the perfection and fitness of the mechanism. It consists of a horizontal spindle S, carrying at one end the wax cylinder C, on which the sonorous vibrations are to be imprinted. Over the cylinder is supported a diaphragm or tympan T, provided with a conical mouthpiece M for speaking ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... social position, controls others. They follow his example without always inquiring whether it is good or bad. I want you to think for yourselves; to make up your minds, without any assistance from others, in regard to the fitness of the person for whom you vote. I desire each of you to deposit his ballot in the box, without communication with others—without telling them, or letting them know by any means, for whom you vote. Now the box is ready, and you may separate to prepare your votes. The poll shall be kept ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... affiliations or their general standing in the community than for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the higher officers, appointed by the chief executive of territory, state, or nation, more likely to be chosen with a view to their military fitness. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... unison, harmony; concord &c. 714; concordance, concert; understanding, mutual understanding. conformity &c. 82; conformance; uniformity &c. 16; consonance, consentaneousness[obs3], consistency; congruity, congruence; keeping; congeniality; correspondence, parallelism, apposition, union. fitness, aptness &c. adj.; relevancy; pertinence, pertinencey[obs3]; sortance|; case in point; aptitude, coaptation[obs3], propriety, applicability, admissibility, commensurability, compatibility; cognation &c. (relation) 9. adaption[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... necessary for years to come. Knowing the impossibility of modification by act of Congress for any one or a score of lines without involving a long array of schedules, I think we shall go a long ways toward stabilization, if there is recognition of the Tariff Commission's fitness to recommend urgent ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... assembled at noon, as often as the duke thought good. But after the expiration of the third month Alva began to be less frequent in his attendance, and at last resigned his place entirely to his favorite, Vargas, who filled it with such odious fitness that in a short time all the members, with the exception merely of the Spanish doctor, Del Rio, and the secretary, De la Torre, weary of the atrocities of which they were compelled to be both eyewitnesses and accomplices, remained away ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... married at all she would be married with such garments belonging to her as were fitting for an earl's daughter. It was in vain that her mother had explained with many circumlocutional phrases, that the fitness in this respect should be accommodated rather to the plebeian husband than to the noble parent. Alexandrina had been very firm, and had insisted on her rights, giving the countess to understand that if her orders for finery were not complied with, she would return as a spinster ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... audience who paid their dollar or half-dollar each to be amused. No one could gauge better than he the capacity of the crowd to feed on pure fun, and no one could discriminate more clearly than he the fitness, temper, and mental appetite of the constituents of his evening assemblies. The prosiness of an ordinary Mechanics' Institute lecture was to him simply abhorrent; the learned platitudes of a professed lecturer ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... classes and sub-classes, and could tell at a moment's notice how long it would take him to examine them all. His soul panted for the work. Every man should, he thought, be made to pass through some 'go.' The greengrocer's boy should not carry out cabbages unless his fitness for cabbage-carrying had been ascertained, and till it had also been ascertained that no other boy, ambitious of the preferment, would carry them better. Difficulty! There was no difficulty. Could ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... that the rain comes when it listeth, or 'of necessity'; that we have no right to suppose it comes to make the corn grow in spring, any more than to spoil the autumn sheaves: that the teeth grow by the operation of some natural (or physical) law, and that their apparent and undoubted fitness for cutting and grinding is not purposeful but coincident; that the backbone is divided into vertebrae because of the antecedent forces, or flexions, which act upon it in the womb. And Empedocles proceeds to the great evolutionary deduction, the clear prevision of Darwin's philosophy, that fit ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... not see or understand the intolerable disgust and irritation which her ridiculous conduct excited. In a weak mind egotism and selfishness, beyond a certain point, pass into practical insanity. All sense of delicacy, of the fitness of things, is lost; even the power to consider the rights and feelings of others is wanting. Unlike poor Holcroft, Mrs. Mumpson had few misgivings in regard to coming years. As she rocked unceasingly before the parlor fire, she arranged everything in regard to his future ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... political influence of the female was completely shattered. At a certain point in history women became an unfree class, precisely as slaves became an unfree class—because neither class showed a superior fitness on the motor side; and each class is regaining its freedom because the race is substituting other forms of decision ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... I am sure you will not estimate that I now propose to you by the mere name which it bears.' He also made an allusion to the admiralty of which I do not retain the exact form. But I rather interposed and said, 'My objection on the score of fitness would certainly apply with even increased force to anything connected with the military and naval services of the country, for of them I know nothing. Nor have I any other object in view; there is no office to which I could designate myself. I think it my duty ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... lightly of the profession of a clergyman or to urge any one to enter the Church whom I thought unfitted for the sacred office. But in your case, my good sir, there can be no such misgiving. I entertain no doubt whatever of your fitness—your moral fitness, and I will go so far as to say that with competent aid you might, in no very long time, be ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... specific germ or virus, then the offspring of consumptives would have an attenuated form of the disease, which, by reasoning from analogy, ought to secure them exemption from any further danger along that line. Such, however, is not the case. But if we say a special fitness is inherited, then we can understand how the offspring of consumptives are prone to develop it, since they are not only born with hereditary qualifications, but not infrequently they are cradled amid the very agencies which fostered the evil in their parents, if, indeed, they were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... not have the chance," said Dexie, eager to champion the cause of her double. "Some girls are not allowed to have an opinion apart from the maternal idea of the fitness of things, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... the reason why they adopt these colours. Some writers say that their love of glaring colours is derived from the savage side of their natures; but the Metis women have an artistic instinct of their own, and being for the greater part coquettes, it may very safely be said that according to the fitness of things is it that they attire themselves. But they are not able to shake off the superstitions of their race. If the young woman soon to be a mother, sees a hawk while crossing the fields in the morning, she comes home and ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... tale, like every other literary production, must be judged by the fitness of its emotional effects. Fairyland is the stage-world of childhood, a realm of vicarious living, more elemental and more fancy-free than the perfected dramas of sophisticated adults whose ingrained acceptance of binding realities demands sterner stuff. The tales are classics of a particular ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... more of disease, and especially of germ diseases, we are oppressed by the feeling that we are in constant danger, but we must bear in mind that it is the weak and unfit that are attacked, and that fitness, while partly inherited, is almost altogether a matter of proper hygiene. Keeping our bodily defenses in good condition against disease is as much a matter of necessity and good policy as keeping the defenses of a city in fighting condition in ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... profession, they would:—'tis true that the ancients had such things as single combats among the Olympic games, and they were always performed by the populace; but such a fight, alias a tilt, a tournament, a wrestle, could not, according to the rule of right, and the eternal fitness and aptitude of things, be properly denominated a bona fide fight; for, as I before observed, it was ipso facto, a game, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... saved up. That Latin feminine ability to hold an awkward position with impregnable serenity, and, like the yellow Mississippi, to give back no reflection from the overhanging sky, emphasized this superior fitness. That bright, womanly business ability that comes of the same blood added again to their excellence. Not to be home itself, nothing could be more like it than were the apartments let by Madame Cecile, or Madame Sophie, or Madame Athalie, or ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... wings, supported upon a special development of the anterior limbs. One important characteristic of the race at this time was the great size of many of its members: thirty feet is by no means an uncommon length. This marks the fitness of the name given to the ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... selected for this important position. Several other vigorous Radicals were on the same scent. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman said it was quite true the Duke had become Commander-in-Chief. This was because of his fitness; because he was practically the senior officer available, and because he had gained experience in both regimental and staff duties, having filled with great credit the high office of Commander-in-Chief at Bombay. Herculean Mr. Allan, of Gateshead, sought for ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... work, but in his novels and his plays. I refer to those excellences which are the direct result of the acuteness of his observation. These writings gained for him the agnomen of Theophraste moderne, which his sense of fitness and natural dislike of over-praise led him to disclaim in a letter to the Mercure of October, 1717. That same year a Portrait de Climene, ode anacreontique, proves that he had yet to sustain a real defeat in the line of verse before he came to realize that he should confine himself to ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... need not be followed: money played a part in most of them; jealousy and dislike in some. A few there were also whom he won over by urging the beauty and wisdom of Elissa, and her extraordinary fitness for the post, as evinced by her recent inspiration in the temple! He found his most powerful allies, however, among the members of the council of the city. To these grandees he pointed out that Elissa was a woman of great strength of character, who would certainly never ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... strongly resembling their parents in the majority of particulars, always exhibit some slight differences from them; that of these differences such as do not render the offspring less fit will almost of necessity render them more fit for coping with their rivals; and that superior fitness, however acquired, is as likely as any other quality to be transmitted to succeeding generations—all these are indisputable facts, and from these, as premisses, it seems to me not so much to be legitimately deducible that most existing species may have been produced 'by ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... which disgusts him with all kinds of regular industry. The county prison sentences are, moreover, too short to enable the thief to earn such a passport to freedom, but they are of just the requisite length and fitness for turning the casual into the confirmed criminal. In fact, time sentences are not suitable for confirmed thieves. Their sentences ought to be so much money to be earned in a penal workshop, where honesty and economy could be practised as well ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... to the ruder sort then prevalent,—he never thanked Jesus for restoring his senseless hand; but neither red tape nor indignity hindered the divine process. Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities. He said that the kingdom of heaven is here, and is included in Mind; that while ye say, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest, I say, Look up, not down, for your fields are already white for ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... Church, there was no single religious institution which was founded upon liberty and equality. Everything was ordered to this end. The father-superior, the abbot, the bishop, the general of an order, and the pope were then chosen conscientiously for their fitness for the requirements of the Church. They were the expression of its intelligence, of the thinking power of the Church, and blind obedience was therefore their due. I will say nothing of the ways in which society has benefited by that ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... and unborn, and their whole kith, kin, and allies. When this idea, so creditable to the paternal feelings of these worthy gentlemen was intimated to the Colonel, he could not be brought to see the fitness of things in an arrangement which would confer on the next generation, or the next again, the fruits of the labour of the present; and accordingly, though his answer to the proposal was not couched in terms quite so diplomatic as might have been wished, it was brief, soldier-like, and not easily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... he felt the man's greatness—his especial fitness for the career he had adopted. Harlan was the ideal outlaw. He was cool, deep, subtle. He was indomitable; he felt no fear; his will was inflexible, adamant. Haydon felt it. The fear he had experienced at his first meeting with Harlan had endured until ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... day of October was bright, clear, and mild, and we welcomed the true beginning of fall in our latitude most gladly. This month competes with May in its fitness for ideal country life. The children voted it superior to all other months, feeling that a vista of unalloyed delights was opening before them. Already the butternuts were falling from several large trees on the place, and the burrs on the chestnuts were plump with their well-shielded ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... gardeners whom no thaw can ever penetrate: except these, the gardeners' art has contributed to the delight of all men in their time. That there ought to be a Benevolent Provident Institution for gardeners is in the fitness of things, and that such an institution ought to flourish and does flourish ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... was the least efficient of all. This conviction led him very early to believe in the emancipation of the slaves. I do not find that sentiment or abstract ideals moved him to favor emancipation, but his sense of fitness, his aversion to wastefulness and inefficiency made him disapprove of a system which rendered industry on a high plane impossible. Experience only confirmed these convictions of his, and in his will he ordered that many slaves should be freed after the death of ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... boy ran ahead to free his own deer and prepare to continue the journey. "Surely," she thought, "physical fitness is a great thing. The boy has paid us well for fighting his battles ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... Highness is expected in town every day; but I still think it probable that he will go to Scotland.(1155) That country is very clamorous for it. If the King does send him, it should not be with that sword of mercy with which the present family have governed those people. All the world agrees in the fitness of severity to highwaymen, for the sake of the innocent who suffer; then can rigour be ill-placed against banditti. who have so terrified, pillaged, and injured the poor people in Cumberland, Lancashire, Derbyshire, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... ha'e my ain doubts as to your fitness for sic a voyage in your weak state; but I'll e'en jist let ye pass. Are you married ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... enable him at one time to produce calm repose, profound contemplation, and even the self-abandoned indifference of exhaustion, or at another, the most tumultuous emotions, the most violent storm of the passions. With respect to theatrical fitness, however, it must not be forgotten that much must always depend on the capacities and humours of the audience, and, consequently, on the national character in general, and the particular degree of mental culture. Of all kinds of poetry the dramatic is, in a certain sense, the most secular; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... his writings. The familiar portraits of the upstart, of the false politician, of the inventor of new sects, portraits at which many observers of human nature in the time of Shakespeare tried their hand, are to be seen in the gallery Nash painted in his "Pierce Penilesse."[282] Conformably to the fitness of things, Nash described himself under the name of Pierce,[283] as Sidney had given his high moral tone, his melancholy and loving soul to the shepherd Philisides, as Greene had told his own miseries under the name of poor Roberto. Here is Nash's portrait of the upstart who has travelled ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... which he cooked and ate. In time his future wife Nambi happened to spy the stolen cow among her father's herds and she told Kintu, who came to heaven to seek and recover the lost animal. His future father-in-law Gulu, Lord of Heaven, obliged him to submit to many tests designed to prove his fitness for marriage with the daughter of so exalted a being as the Lord of Heaven. All these tests Kintu successfully passed through. At last Gulu was satisfied, gave him his daughter Nambi to wife, and allowed him to return ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... best to satisfy Donna Tullia. The latter, indeed, was not easily pleased, and Gouache found it hard to instil into his representation of her the precise amount of poetry she required, without doing violence to his own artistic sense of fitness. But the other picture progressed rapidly. The Cardinal was a restless man, and after the first two or three sittings, desired nothing so much as to be done with them altogether. Anastase amused him, it is true, and the statesman soon perceived that he had made a conquest ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... material heaven that is described as the reward of the saints, but a heaven raised on the height of spiritual goods. Nevertheless a bodily place, viz. the empyrean heaven, will be appointed to the Blessed, not as a need of Happiness, but by reason of a certain fitness and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and, therefore, he is the only true Catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. To see this will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the Church. And thus, uniting in heart and spirit with all that is holy and good in all Churches, we enter into the true communion of saints, and become real members of the Holy Catholic Church, though we are confined ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... Abel was beginning to share a general confidence in his fitness for the mission, when his wife spoke up, "'Deed and 'deed, I can tell you he ain't agoun' to do no such a thing, not if we stay here all night, murricle or no murricle. I ain't agoun' to have him put his head into the Lion of Judah's mouth, and have it bit off, like as not. I can't ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... of fitness for school life does not arise in so urgent a way. Girls are usually older when they go to school, and girls' schools are perhaps less terrifying and more like home. There is, however, one important point which should be borne in mind. The date of the onset ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... in," I said, with no need to tell them of each other, "is not the real Evening Star. It will not take you to the stars. This has been only a test to credit your fitness to pilot the real interstellar craft of the Star Project. You must return to the Lunar Satellite. This ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... Hon. John Davis, Jacob Bigelow, M.D., and Francis C. Gray, Esq., all men of the highest respectability, and of undoubted fitness and capacity for the work they were to undertake, and the result of their labors was published in a pamphlet of fifty-two pages, the title of which cautiously states that the report is "relative to a large marine animal, supposed to be a serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... things were not equally calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as regulating ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Meanwhile the private accounts, coming out of the convents, had gone from mouth to mouth, to the great alarm of those who heard them. The fact, distorted in countless versions, was accepted as true with more or less readiness, according to its fitness to the passions and ideas of the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... chuckled. "You have a sense of the fitness of things, Miss Rosy. Why wouldn't they ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... and perhaps, even now, the field has not been gleaned to the last ear. It is worthy of remark, for instance, how Milton's pre-occupation with the themes which he had already pondered, and turned this way and that in his mind, to test their fitness for a monumental work, shows itself in his choice of figure and allusion. Attention has often been called to the elaborate comparison, founded on the history of Samson, in The Reason of Church Government urged ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... did Mr. Kramer lose with his stripping. He was ready in almost record time, presenting, bared, a man of about Mr. Spurlock's proportions, weight and general muscular fitness. ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... to you incapable of amendment, or not in need of amendment, say so: but don't object, at starting, to the mere proposition of applying law to things which have not had law applied to them before. You have admitted the fitness of my expression, "paternal government": it only has been, and remains, a question between us, how far such government should extend. Perhaps you would like it only to regulate, among the children, the length of their lessons; and perhaps I should like it also to regulate the hardness of their ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Chamberlain holds office only so long as the political party to which he is attached remains in power. He comes in and goes out with the ministry. Any peculiar fitness for the appointment is not required of him; it is simply a reward for his political services. Of course different Chamberlains have entertained different opinions of the duties to be performed in regard to the theatres; and, in such ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and influential friends in college," returned Mabel. "You know, of course, the attitude of the old students toward freshmen. This Miss Atkins is either laboring under the impression that she is an exception to tradition, or else she has no sense of the fitness of things. At first, I am sorry to say, a few of the seniors looked upon her as a joke, but the reaction has set in, and, like Humpty Dumpty, she is going to take a great fall. When she does, all the king's horses ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... once consummated, the state connected itself with the Confederacy and representatives had to be sent to Montgomery. Small wonder that the men most prominent in the secession conventions should secure their own election, as little regard to fitness as ability being had by ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... inadequately furnished for the first expenses of so high an appointment; and that he was too much addicted to a sedentary and studious life. By this artful enumeration of the deficiencies of Montjoy, he was clearly understood to intimate his own superior fitness for the office. The queen, notwithstanding certain suspicions which had been infused into her of danger in committing to Essex the command of an army, and notwithstanding the unwillingness which she still felt to deprive herself of his presence, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... episodes are any criterion. It is safe to assume that the bank that could advertise, in connection with its attractive quarterly or semi-annual statement, that the president and cashier were properly attested and vouched-for eunuchs would find in the public such a recognition of the fitness of things that the patronage it would receive would soon compel other banks to follow the example. The procedure might, with national benefit, be extended as an ordeal to our legislators at the national capitol, as it would do away with the particular influential lobby so ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the delicate gloves, were too much of a contrast with his own dusty and rough exterior. It was no feeling of inferiority, be it well understood, that moved him to this bit of self-denial; only a self-respecting feeling of fitness. He himself would not have wanted to touch a dusty hand with those gloves on his own. But he ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... impressed with the knowledge which we ourselves gain in studying these gifts and preparing the exercises with them. In concentration of thought; careful, distinct, precise, and expressive language; logical arrangement of ideas; new love of order, beauty, symmetry, fitness, and proportion; added ingenuity in adapting material to various uses, aesthetic and practical,—in all these ways every practical student of Froebel must constantly feel a decided advance ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elected, not because he was experienced in these matters, but because he had won a battle, or was the compromise candidate between two other aspirants. As it was with Presidents, so with the Cabinet officers, Congressmen, and State and city officials. Fitness being ignored as a qualification to office, made it easy for favoritism and selfish motives to determine the appointment of the army of employees required in the bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter, Andrew Jackson, merely put ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Testament—1. God's Providence as seen in the Languages of the Old and New Testaments—Fitness of the Hebrew for its Office in History, Poetry, and Prophecy—2. Adaptation of the Greek to the Wants of the New Testament Writers—3. Providential Preparation for a Change in the Language of the Inspired Writings—Cessation of the Hebrew as the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... visiting women depends upon chance, they are as likely to be indiscreet, and to interfere unwisely as otherwise. If they were selected as men are, or ought to be, for their fitness, their work would be done with good judgment and discretion. Then, again, criminal men separated from their families and from all gentle influences, need the ministry of good women for their reformation. The motherly influence of pure, gentle women will sometimes control and subdue the violent, ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... will be followed up shortly by another book on the "Reconstruction of Belgium." Belgium has been not only the champion of European freedom; she has also been the innocent victim of the old order. It is only in the fitness of things that after the war Belgium shall become the keystone of the new International Order. The whole of Europe is ultimately responsible for the Belgian tragedy. The whole of Europe must therefore ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... No emigrant will be sent out in response to any application from abroad where the emigrant's expenses are defrayed, without references as to character, industry, and fitness. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... ill-fated pair of lovers should go through life, love, wed, and die singing. And why not? Are they not airy nothings, "born of romance, cradled in poetry, thinking other thoughts, and doing other deeds than ours?" As they live in poetry, so may they not with perfect fitness ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... heavily in debt, and, having borrowed money from his tailor, he will disappear from the parental ken, to turn up again, after a week, without his watch, his scarf-pin, or his studs. This freak will be accepted by his relatives as a convincing proof of his fitness for a financial career, and he will shortly be transferred to the City as Clerk to a firm of Stockbrokers. Here his versatile talents will have full scope. He will manage to reconcile a somewhat lax attention ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... a good way of living your own way, if you can stand the gaff. These people can. Every one of them. They've got their marks to prove it. Every last one of them has fought it out face to face with another man, and proved his fitness to take up space in this territory. See—it's a social code. And they'll extend it to cover any stranger who doesn't get killed on his way here. If you can get your mark, you're welcome here for the rest of your life. They keep their clan stock fresh and vigorous that ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... used the current language of his day, we mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally comprehensible,—that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty, the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted this? What was his knowledge ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... extends over many years and travels into many countries. By a peculiar fitness of circumstance the writer began, continued it, and concluded it among distant and diverse scenes. Above all, he was much upon the sea. The character and fortune of the fraternal enemies, the hall and shrubbery of Durrisdeer, the problem of Mackellar's homespun and how to shape it for superior ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the other hand she ate with apparent relish a thick rye-bread sandwich. Occasionally she waved remnants of the sandwich at the gaping crowd. It struck me as a peculiarly unnecessary exhibition of her callous fitness for the ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... of New York, on recovering from a severe illness, issued a card which is a new departure. In admiring its fitness and the need which has existed for just such a card, we wonder that none of us have before invented something so compact and stately, pleasing and proper—that her thought had not been our thought. It reads thus, engraved in elegant script, plain and modest: "Mrs. presents ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Fanny Burney, Jane Porter and Maria Edgeworth were widely acclaimed, this little woman remained almost unknown, following no school of fiction, writing for her own pleasure, and destroying whatever did not satisfy her own sense of fitness. If she had any theory of fiction, it was simply this: to use no incident but such as had occurred before her eyes, to describe no scene that was not familiar, and to portray only such characters as she knew intimately, their speech, dress, manner, and the motives ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Daniel Dalzell, summoned before the Academic Board to determine his fitness and aptitude for continuing in the brigade, the Board has granted Midshipman Dalzell's urgent request that he be continued as ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... motives, to extol the natural capabilities of the immediate neighbourhood of Cape York, it would be very easy to speculate upon, and at once presume its peculiar fitness for the growth of tropical produce. Thus, any swampy land might at once be pronounced peculiarly adapted for paddy fields, and the remainder as admirably suited to the growth of cotton, coffee, indigo, etc. With the exception of a piece of rich ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... exclusive societies—the fitness of social attraction diffused through the whole. The mischiefs of too partial love of our country. Contraction of moral ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... but a flesh and blood regard for every body; and that I as truly respect in the Noble Duke the possession of military science, of a straight-forward sincerity, and a valour of which no circumstances or years can diminish the ready firmness, as I doubt the fitness of a man of his education, habits, and political principles, for the guidance of an ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... angel-faced Mary! perishing alone in the bush! Nature's precious link between a squalid Past and a nobler Future, broken, snatched away from her allotted place in the long chain of the ages! Heiress of infinite hope, and dowered with latent fitness to fulfil her part, now so suddenly fallen by the wayside! That quaint dialect silent so soon! and for ever vanished from this earth that keen, eager perception, that fathomless love and devotion! But such ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... detain her, feeling every moment how his love was growing for this girl who had so recently come into his life, and was crossing his path, as he had felt she would when he first heard of her from his uncle, and had promised to sound her as to her fitness for a teacher. There had been no need for that; his uncle was dead, and she was going from him, perhaps to ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... of her lovely disposition and the rare culture of a mind which those seven years have enriched beyond what is usual even in women of intellect. Her money does not influence me in her favor, nor does it weigh with me in my present opinion of her complete fitness for the position you are so eager to give her. That this will make you happy I know. Let it hasten your return which cannot ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... non-voting citizens, is often a person who is unfit for any public duty or trust. In a town government, having a small area of jurisdiction, where the voice of the majority of qualified voters is conclusive, the fitness of the person who is to exercise that high representative privilege can be determined by his neighbors and acquaintances, and, in the great majority of cases, it will be decided honestly and for the good of the country. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... surgeon could be fetched from Kenminster, while Higg, the blacksmith, who lived close at hand, was better for man and beast than any surgeon he had known, and his son had instantly set out to fetch him. As the mother doubtfully asked of his fitness, instances were quoted of his success. The family had a "gift," inherited and kept up from time immemorial, and the farmer's wife declared that he was as tender as possible; she had seen him operate on a neighbour's child, and should not be afraid to trust him ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a doubt of it," said Linda, measuring his height and apparent strength and fitness. "I haven't a doubt of it. But let me ask you this confidentially: Have you got a friend who would slip in and stab him in the back in case you were in an encounter and he was ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... that she had been waiting endless years for New York. But Mrs. O'Brien, it seemed, wanted some one who would be able to begin French and German and music lessons for little Jane and Cora, and the question of Martie's fitness was settled. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... dominant factors the latter influence our feeling for beauty in an indirect and subordinate way. This is recognized by those (e.g. Home) who insist on a particular kind of aesthetic value under the name of relative beauty, or the pleasing aspect of fitness for a purpose. If a drinking-vessel please in part because of its perfect adaptation to its purpose, the aesthetic value ascribed to it seems to derive something from a feeling of respect for utility itself. In another way beauty reasserts in modern aesthetics that kinship with utility ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... commanded at the massacre, being one; and he was beaten by only five votes. His successful opponent, Colonel William Crawford, was a fairly good officer, a just and upright man, but with no special fitness for such a task as that he had undertaken. Nor were the troops he led of very good stuff [Footnote: A minute and exhaustive account of Crawford's campaign is given by Mr. C. W. Butterfield in his "Expedition against Sandusky." (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1873). Mr. Butterfield ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... circumstances," he said. "It wasn't pride that held me back; but a natural sense of the justice and—fitness of things. You must ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... battle of Wagram, one of the greatest of all time, if the number of combatants be counted, but one of the least decisive in its strictly military results. If we may compare Austerlitz with Blenheim, Wagram may with equal fitness be matched with the vast slaughter of Malplaquet exactly a century before. The French now felt the hardening of the national defence of Austria and the falling off in their own fighting powers. Marmont tells ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... may be, and often are, to the people of another. Demoralized by the hereditary and traditional influence of many generations of misgovernment and of anarchy, none of these populations have as yet shown fitness for supreme rule over the entire peninsula, vast and thickly inhabited as it is. For example, the Brahmans and their system fell before the fury of the early Muslims, as these, again, were subdued by the Moghuls. When the Pathans and Moghuls in ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... hat was set jauntily on the fluffy brown hair when she reappeared. Skinny's heart leaped hungrily. Carolyn June was a picture of perfect physical fitness. The cowboy silently wondered how long he could keep from making "a complete, triple-expansion, darned fool ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... is to me ridiculous.[4] When Wilde was at Portora, I was at home in a house where important musical works, including several typical masterpieces, were being rehearsed from the point of blank amateur ignorance up to fitness for public performance. I could whistle them from the first bar to the last as a butcher's boy whistles music hall songs, before I was twelve. The toleration of popular music—Strauss's waltzes, for instance—was to me positively ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... death before the dissolution, are now beginning to admit that it is by no means improbable that Mr. Gladstone may survive the century. Nor was it quite so fantastic as it appears at first sight, when an ingenious disciple told him the other day that by the fitness of things he ought to live for twenty years yet. 'For,' said this political arithmetician, 'you have been twenty-six years a Tory, twenty-six years a Whig Liberal, and you have been only six years a Radical Home Ruler. To make the balance even ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... him an adept in many things he might otherwise have cared little about. At eighteen he was a graduate from the Sorbonne, and a musical virtuoso as well. He could fence, ride, and carry off the prize in games requiring physical prowess as well as mental fitness. He was, in fact, a prodigy in many ways, and was so considered by his fellow-students. He, however, was not perfect; he lacked social charm, and in so far failed of being the complete gentleman. This he was made to realize ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... for their moral state as for their physical fitness, and labored to exalt their imaginations as well as to harden their bodies. In that camp, and amidst those toils in which he kept them strictly engaged, frequent sacrifices, and scrupulous care ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... at the strangeness of the situation, though not for an instant did he doubt Kiddie's fitness and ability. In Rube's estimation there was nothing great and honourable that Kiddie was incapable ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... now know as the survival of the fittest, the mere's capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse's incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and the dot system, relegated to the ignominy of passing his days washing dishes—dishes which she cooked and served—dishes, it should be added, which she was entirely conscious ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... pleased as he was in the wrong," said Lydia. "Intolerant refusal to listen to an opponent is a species of violence that has no business in such a representative nineteenth-century drawing-room as yours, Mrs. Hoskyn. There was a fitness in rebuking it by skilled physical violence. Consider the prodigious tact of it, too! One gentleman knocks another half-way across a crowded room, and ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Governor as a judge of character reenforced Archie's own opinion of the leader's fitness to command. That he should have been received into the strange brotherhood of the road, which the Governor controlled with so little friction, never ceased to puzzle him. He was amused to find himself feeling very humble ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... required of all the boarding pupils is intended to include a practical knowledge of agriculture, animal husbandry, apiculture, poultry raising, carpentry, cobbling, concrete, gardening, domestic science, sewing and laundry work, as the opportunity is afforded and the pupils discover fitness for ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... assigned to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, covered with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or crested with fire, is set before us for contemplation in an uninhabitable magnificence. And that part which we are enabled to inhabit owes its fitness for human life chiefly to its mountain ranges, which, throwing the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in given directions; so that men can build their cities in the midst of fields which they ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... "The fitness of the kangaroo-skin for upper leathers will no doubt obtain preference over most of the imported leather, as it is in general lighter and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... she would not marry foolishly; the wealth she must soon inherit hardly favoured her chances in this respect; doubtless she would be surrounded by unprincipled money-hunters. On the whole, it seemed rather a pity that Lashmar had not chosen and won her; there would have been a fitness, one felt, in that alliance. At the same time, Lashmar's selection of an undowered mate spoke well for him. For it was to be presumed that Lady Ogram's secretary had no very brilliant prospects. Certainly she did not make much impression ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... which we may rather wish than hope to find in the most famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his work, we may be sure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which he often studied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolute truth and fitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness, for fluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most praiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usually anything but natural or simple. Now the motive ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... as endeared him to all classes, but especially to those whose humble condition in life gave them the strongest claim upon his virtues, both as a man and a pastor. Difficult, indeed, would it be to find a minister of the gospel, whose practice and precept corresponded with such beautiful fitness, nor one who, in the midst of his own domestic circle, threw such calm lustre around him as a husband and a father. A temper grave but sweet, wit playful and innocent, and tenderness that kept his spirit benignant to error without ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so related to others and to the universe generally, that things may be such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit, and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet existent, a supernatural power must have ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... moral attitude towards their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work, moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for receiving a wage, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Lord Bishop had said. After half-past ten, Members trooped down in scores. When Prince ARTHUR rose to continue the debate he was hailed with ringing cheer from embattled host. Pretty to see how gentlemen to right of SPEAKER, mustered for defence of the Church, were careful to contribute to fitness of things by ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... came to him that perhaps Joan was to be tested and proved here, even as he was being tested in Tim Sullivan's balance for his fitness to become a master over sheep. Here were two fair samples of men out of the world's assorted stock—himself and Reid. One of them, deliberate, calm, assured of his way, but with little in his hand; the other a grig that ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... afraid to acknowledge it? I really don't understand you. But, if Sarudine won't marry you, well—that is a thing to be thankful for. You know now, and you must have known before, what a base, common fellow he really is, in spite of his good looks and his fitness for amours. All that he has is beauty, and you have now had your ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... all things were not equally calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the most important tattoo of the Igorot, since it marks its wearer as a taker of at least one human head. It therefore stands for a successful issue in the most crucial test of the fitness of a person to contribute to the strength of the group of which he is a unit. It no doubt gives its wearer a certain advantage in combat — a confidence and conceit in his own ability, and, likely, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. 'Didn't he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier's ideas of fitness.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... proud to ask you to explain, or some little thing in your conduct that irritates her because she does not fully comprehend you. The truth is, Emily would have been more ready to make advances if she had been quite sure of her fitness for Mrs. Barnet's society, who has of course been accustomed to London people of good position, which made ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... reason that underlie the laws of the land, the natural rights and duties which these laws are indeed to enforce to some extent, but which are antecedent and superior to all human laws, being themselves founded on the essential and eternal fitness of things. For things are not right or wrong simply because men have chosen to make them so. You all understand, gentlemen, that, even if we were living in a newly discovered land, where no code of human laws had yet been adopted, nor courts of justice established, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... the unusual presence of this great black woman may be conveyed by the fact that when she said, as she was wont to do in speaking of her own name, "I'm named Moriah—after a Bible mountain," there seemed a sort of fitness in the name and in the juxtaposition neither the sacred eminence or the woman suffered a loss ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... not, however, imagine, that I was, during this state of abandoned libertinism, so fully convinced of the fitness of my own conduct, as to be free from uneasiness. I knew very well, that I might justly be deemed the pest of society, and that such proceedings must terminate in the destruction of my health and fortune; but to admit thoughts ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... offered no opposition; indeed they did not know what else to propose. I must observe that now when we had nothing to do with whaling, in which the others had more experience, Andrew fully showed his superiority and fitness to command, so that we all readily obeyed him whenever he thought fit to issue any orders. However, as he felt that he only held his authority on sufferance, he judged it best, as in the present instance, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... themselves into the House of Commons; they interrupted public meetings, smashed winows, assaulted members of the Cabinet, and, in one case, tried to destroy the ballots at the polls,—in short, they broke the laws in order to convince the country of their fitness to take part in making them. Over six hundred of these offenders were put in prison, not because they asked for "Votes for Women," but because they deliberately, persistently, and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the dwelling is in keeping with the exterior, though in the drawing-rooms, where rich furniture and fine paintings actually lumber the apartments, there is evident the lack of a nice perception of the 'fitness of things,' and over the whole hangs a 'dusty air,' which reminds one that the Milesian Bridget does not 'flourish' in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the shoveller's beak we may proceed (as I have learned from information and specimens sent to me by Mr. Salvin), without any great break, as far as fitness for sifting is concerned, through the beak of the Merganetta armata, and in some respects through that of the Aix sponsa, to the beak of the common duck. In this latter species the lamellae are much coarser than in the shoveller, and are firmly attached ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... great mosaic, from the Fillmore-street hill, at once creates a nerve-soothing impression most uncommon in international expositions, and for that matter, in any architectural aggregate. One is at once struck with the fitness of the location and of the scheme of architecture. Personally, I am greatly impressed with the architectural scheme and the consistency of its application to the whole. I fear that the two men, Mr. Willis Polk and Mr. Edward ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... capital are to be owned by the State, and all business run as the Post-Office is run, or as the Panama Canal was built. The managers of each industry are to be chosen from the ranks, according to their fitness, for proved efficiency and knowledge of the business. Everybody will be upon a salary, and the opportunity of increasing personal profits by lowering wages, cheating the public, neglecting evil conditions of production, or damaging rivals, will be absent. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and justice. One, by his mental power or social position, controls others. They follow his example without always inquiring whether it is good or bad. I want you to think for yourselves; to make up your minds, without any assistance from others, in regard to the fitness of the person for whom you vote. I desire each of you to deposit his ballot in the box, without communication with others—without telling them, or letting them know by any means, for whom you vote. Now the box ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... gentleman's hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman's baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun—still carrying it as if it were a broom—she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself—and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... It knows how to shape itself by means of the crudest tools, in the midst of the greatest difficulties. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift, finds a way to make order, fitness and convenience reign in her house. She puts care and art into everything she undertakes. To do well what one has to do is not in her eyes the privilege of the rich, but the right of all. That is her aim, and she knows how to give her home a dignity and an attractiveness ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with this he was aware of a peculiar gain. His sense of hearing now was most acute, and he could hear the least faint sounds—sounds which, before his taking to the open, he could not have heard. So he was enjoying it all, feeling real comfort, a kind of fitness, as if he belonged here and would better remain here for ever. Then, with a generous supply of alfalfa tossed to him, as to the other horses, he became convinced that he should remain in this little settlement for ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... guilty of art and part in the concealment of that which, had you spoken twenty years ago, would have removed from the kirk of the Marrow an unfaithful minister, and given some one worthier than I to report on the fitness of your son for the ministry. It was you, Gilbert Peden, who made this remit to me, knowing what you know. I shall accept the deposition which you threaten at your hands, but remember that co-ordinately ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Company had a rule that every clergyman who volunteered or was invited to go to a parish in Virginia was to be investigated as to character and fitness, and each one of them was taken by a committee to a church to read the service and preach a sermon as ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... to consider; and to have postponed this question to a question of personalities, even if those personalities had been truly stated, is specifically the error which vitiated all the speculations of our domestic press. We say then, that Shah Soojah had a prima facie fitness for our purposes which the Dost had not; Soojah was the brother, son, and grandson of men who had ruled all Affghanistan; nay, in a tumultuary way, he had ruled all Affghanistan himself. So far he had something to show, and the Dost had nothing; and so far Lord ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... deliberate purpose to avoid a formal revocation, for reasons analogous to those suggested by Jefferson. Throughout he used "rapporter" instead of "revoquer." In the particular connection, the words are nearly synonymous; yet to the latter attaches a natural fitness and emphasis, the avoidance of which betrays the bias, perhaps unconscious, towards seeking escape from self-committal on the matter in hand. His phrases are more definite. July 31 he wrote, "After much reflection upon American affairs, I have decided that to withdraw ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of ugliness and disorder, produced by the violence of the elements around them. Once accustomed to look upon these conditions as inevitable in nature, they may easily transfer the idea of inevitableness and fitness to the same appearances in their own houses. I said that mountains seem to have been created to show us the perfection of beauty; but we saw in the tenth chapter that they also show sometimes the extreme of ugliness: and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... with him this evening that he is able already to take some minor post in a museum. He would very soon make up what he lacks in fitness, if we could put him where he could get hold of the proper books. He must be put under the right influences, for though he seems to have energy, many a boy with an unusual gift gets stranded in a small town like this, and becomes less useful in the end ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... please my own taste as an artist I have made drooping flowers with leaves of the hue of Florentine bronze, such as are found before or after the winter. Would not such a crown on the head of a young woman whose life is a failure have a certain poetical fitness? How many things a woman might express by her head-dress! Are there not flowers for drunken Bacchantes, flowers for gloomy and stern bigots, pensive flowers for women who are bored? Botany, I believe, may be made to express every sensation and thought ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... knife. I had scarce looked at it, on receiving it from the hands of the friendly sailor. Now I examined it carefully—by the touch, of course—I felt it all over; and as well as I was able by such a test, calculated its strength and fitness for the work I ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... shirt of unbleached linen, with an old blanket drawn uncouthly around his waist and shoulders, completed the costume of the man. His wife's was equally scant and rude, but so arranged as to present the idea that even in her breast the sense of fitness, the last feeling of froward womanhood, was not quite extinguished. The squalid rags and matted hair, by a single touch of the hand, a gesture, or a shake of the head, assumed such shape as she fancied would display ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... be the last man to speak lightly of the profession of a clergyman or to urge any one to enter the Church whom I thought unfitted for the sacred office. But in your case, my good sir, there can be no such misgiving. I entertain no doubt whatever of your fitness—your moral fitness, and I will go so far as to say that with competent aid you might, in no very long time, be prepared ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... general weal, not a personal or family aggrandizement. His example might teach others, that offices were created for the public good, not for private emolument. If aspirants for office at the present day, were to regard its perquisites less, and their fitness for the discharge of its duties more, the country would enjoy a greater portion of happiness and prosperity, and a sure foundation for the permanence of these be laid, in the more disinterested character of her counsellors, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... National Capital. I merely say that to the outward eye it is not yet the city it is manifestly destined to become. Its splendid potentialities do some wrong to its eminently spacious and seemly actuality. But to the mind's eye, to the ideal sense, it has the imperishable beauty of absolute fitness. Omniscient Baedeker informs us that when it was founded there was some thought of calling it "Federal City." How much finer, in its heroic and yet human associations, is the name it bears! Since Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon race has produced no ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... other hand, liking and fitness may be discovered by experience. I know a man who, from childhood, took pleasure in construction and invention. At the age of nine he made a real steam engine which "could go" with steam, and which was small enough to be carried in his pocket. He was ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the trees in the avenue formed an adequate and well-fitting frame. It was the picture thus presented that was now interesting Miss Aldclyffe—not artistically or historically, but practically—as regarded its fitness ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... enslavement of the Church, men were appointed to bishoprics without reference to their fitness for this sacred office, and solely with the intention of providing themselves and their relatives with a decent income. Thus for example, James, Duke of Ross, brother of James IV., was appointed to the See of St. Andrew's at the age of twenty-one, and he was succeeded by Alexander Stuart, the illegitimate ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... night-mare—that man is the slave of circumstances (a doctrine which I am inclined to believe, though unwilling to confess); what circumstance can have brought about the sudden awakening of the powers that be to James North's fitness ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Scotland.(1155) That country is very clamorous for it. If the King does send him, it should not be with that sword of mercy with which the present family have governed those people. All the world agrees in the fitness of severity to highwaymen, for the sake of the innocent who suffer; then can rigour be ill-placed against banditti. who have so terrified, pillaged, and injured the poor people in Cumberland, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... these kivas, however, is usually plastered smoothly, but the interior plastering is applied on a base of masonry even in the case of the kivas that are wholly subterranean. It seems to be the Tusayan practice to line all sides of the kivas with stone masonry, regardless of the completeness and fitness of the natural cavity. It is impossible, therefore, to ascertain from the interior of a kiva how much of the work of excavation is artificial and how much has been done by nature. The lining of masonry probably holds the plastering of adobe ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... a popular Piccadilly grill-room provided an intensely thrilling experience. Flamby's acute sensibilities and inherent appreciation of the fitness of things rendered her ill at ease, but the gay music of the orchestra did much to restore her to harmony with herself, and Don's unaffected delight in her company did the rest. So in time she forgot the home-made black dress and became fascinated by her novel surroundings and lost ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of having to part with her for awhile; and, when he finally closed with the offer, she at once resumed her application for a place in the High School, and was soon accepted, for there were not a few in the town capable of doing justice to her fitness for the office; so that now she had the joy not merely of being able to live with her mother as before, and of contributing to her income, but of knowing at the same time that she lived in a like atmosphere with Hector, where ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... hire a stranger, it adds to your confidence and to his chances if he have a testimonial as to character and fitness from his last employer, or from some man ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... persistent Nemesis. Scott is much interested in his hero; one fancies that if it were only possible he would in the end extend his favour to him, and grant him absolution; but his sense of artistic fitness prevails, and he will abate no jot of the painful ordeal to which he feels bound to submit him. Marmion is a knight with a claim to nothing more than the half of the proverbial qualifications. He ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... all that this one woman was to the hundreds of other women who loved her: the gentle demeanor, the thoughtful conversation, the high thinking evidenced not less in her choice of subject than in the fitness of word and phrase which gave a distinctive charm to all her ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... years and had shown sufficient progress in knowledge and strength of character to justify the step. Eager though he was to enrol helpers for the work, Patteson was scrupulously careful to ensure the fitness of his clergy, and to lay hands hastily on no man. In little matters also he was careful and methodical. His scholars in Norfolk Island were expected to be punctual, his helpers to be content with the simple ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... first taken into the cabinet he evidently regarded the finer social amenities as matters of no consequence, or even as effeminacies. He had but little sense of the fitness of things, and was, in consequence, continually making faux pas; but he is observant; he has learned a great deal in the course of his life as a cabinet member, both as to his work in the Department, and as to the niceties ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... smallest, but He at the same time foresaw and foredoomed everything. All that was to happen in this universe did God foresee and foredoom, and lo! it cometh to pass. He appointed me for them and for their sins, that for them I might make prayer and exhortation. Not for my fitness or my strength was I chosen, but only through the grace of His mercy and His long-suffering. For I assure thee, Joshua, not on account of the excellence of this people wilt thou destroy the heathens; all the fastnesses of heaven and the foundations of the universe were created and approved ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... description that he claims the honors of a pioneer or discoverer. Many previous travellers had pursued the same quest, encountered the same hardships and described the same objects. Few of them, however, had enjoyed the same advantages or possessed equal fitness for the task. His previous studies and investigations had familiarized him with the aboriginal history of America and with many of its existing relics; his appointment as commissioner of the United States to Peru for the settlement of some disputed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Lord Lytton: 'It is a thousand pities that J. F. Stephen is a judge; he might have done anything and everything as leader of the future Conservative party.' Lord Beaconsfield was an incomparably better judge than I can pretend to be of a man's fitness for such a position. The opinion, too, which he thus expressed was shared by some of Fitzjames's friends, who thought that his masculine force of mind and downrightness of character would have qualified him to lead a party effectively. I shall only say that ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... even in the nervous infants the specialist in children's diseases is called upon to treat, shows that the nervous system of the better part of mankind is in a state of unstable equilibrium. It may be another example of the curious coincidences that have been called the Fitness of the Environment that the investigation of the endocrines promises to put into our hands the instruments of the control of the future of the nervous system. In general, meanwhile, the eugenist should strive for raising the level of the endocrine potential, and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... did not see. It was rather delicate business to speak, with nothing more tangible than what she had yet seen. That Lottie herself was becoming sincerely attached to a young man of Frank's calling and prospects, could not occur to a lady of Mrs. Marchmont's ideas of propriety and the fitness of things. It was only Lottie's "inveterate disposition to flirt." As to Lottie's "moods and emotions," she smiled at them with cool indifference, as far as she noticed them at all. "Young people pass through such phases as through the measles," ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... men who are to manage the mines, seeing that a man may not become captain or mate of a river steamboat without some certificate on competency, nor drive her engines before he has passed an examination to prove his fitness, surely it is not too much to say that the mine manager or engineer, to whose care are often confided the lives of hundreds of men, and the expenditure of thousands of pounds, should be required to obtain a recognised diploma to prove his qualifications. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... needless to note, belong to those "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... my dear?" exclaimed Cicely. "Why, of course I would. You may not have thought of it, but since you have told me that story, it seems to me that the fitness of things demands that you should wear that gown. As to the fitness of the dress itself, I'll help you about that. I can cut, sew, and do all that sort of thing, and together we will make a lovely ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... and canned oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries. He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new millionaires on insane debauchery. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... consciousness of power should irradiate our spirits as we do His work, like the gleam from gazing on God's glory which shone on the lawgiver's stern face while he talked with men. We have everything to assure us that we cannot fail. The manifest fitness of the Gospel to be the food of all souls; the victories of nineteen centuries, which at least prove that all conditions of society, all classes of civilisation, all varieties of race, all peculiarities of individual temperament, all depths of degradation and distances ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the nicety of dress in this place, as he would for a military appearance on parade. He 52 is Colonel of the New Grenada Horse. I have not yet learned much of his former pursuits or his origin. There is, however, an anecdote of him circulated, which prove the admirable fitness of such a person for such a command. It is said that when he obtained his appointment, he very significantly asked the General, what stocks he should have for his guns, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... intensely with all her heart of woman. If this thing were true, how he must have suffered, how he must still be suffering—not only in his heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his self-respect, his passion for complete independence, his meticulous consciousness of the fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossible—all must by lying in the dust. She could almost have wept ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... been inquiring into the most minute works of the Infinite Artificer; the same care, the same providence is exerted through the whole, and we should learn from it that to true wisdom utility and fitness appear perfection, and whatever is beneficial ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... undertaken, and, after such conscientious examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we always agree with him,—not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,—but, making all due exceptions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of all the uncounted times that I had entered the hospital for now these many years, I crossed the threshold questioning myself in this manner, and doubting of my fitness to be there, or to be what I had been held to be in that place. Life had carried me gaily and swiftly, as it carries successful men. I had found no time, or made none, to cross-question the sources of conduct. My success ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... added, in a further understanding, "it isn't so much what you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause. It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke of—I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they would think they ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Frivolities.—From the standpoint of inherent fitness and beauty, this Athenian costume is the noblest ever seen by the world. Naturally there are ill-advised creatures who do not share the good taste of their fellows, or who try to deceive the world and themselves as to the ravages of that arch-enemy of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... intention of changing his way of life for her. He was known in the district under the elegant sobriquet of Skinny Graham; and when Gladys heard it for the first time, she laughed silently to herself, thinking of its fitness. The simple-hearted child quickly accommodated herself to her surroundings, accepting her meagre lot with a serenity a more experienced mind might have envied. She even managed to make a little atmosphere of brightness about her, which at once communicated ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... This divine call is named a vocation to the priestly or religious life. We can discover it in our constant inclination to such a life from the pure and holy motive of serving God better in it, together with our fitness for it, or, at least, our ability to prepare for it, also in our true piety and mastery over our sinful passions and ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... an attorney, the time and mode of their service under articles; and the oaths to be administered to them; and authorizes the Judges of the courts of the common law, and the Master of the Rolls to appoint examiners to examine the fitness and capacity of all persons applying to be admitted as attorneys or solicitors; and the certificate, either of the common law or equity examiners, will be sufficient to entitle a person so examined to admission in ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... single region or people, perhaps Germany more than any other land was subject to the demonological fever. A fact to be explained as well by its being the great theatre for more than a hundred years of the grand religious struggle between the opposing Catholics and Protestants, as by its natural fitness. The gloomy mountain ranges—the Hartz mountains are especially famous in the national legend—and forests with which it abounds rendered the imaginative minds of its peoples peculiarly susceptible to impressions of supernaturalism.[95] ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Circumstances interesting to Persons in common Life, as well as to those in exalted Stations. The greatest Regard is every where paid in it to Decency, and to every Duty of Life: There is a constant Fitness of the Style to the Persons and Characters described; Pleasure and Instruction here always go hand in hand: Vice and Virtue are set in constant Opposition, and Religion every-where inculcated in its native Beauty and chearful Amiableness; not dressed up in stiff, melancholy, or gloomy Forms, ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... the life vowed to poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis, are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The fourth fresco pictures ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... that thing know enough to vote?" And jest behind them come a lot of furrin laborers, rough and rowdy-lookin', with no more expression in their faces than a mule or any other animal. "Do they know enough to vote?" sez I. "As for the fitness for votin' it is pretty even on both sides. Good intelligent men ortn't to lose the right of suffrage for the vice and ignorance of some of their sect, and that argument is jest as strong for the ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... blurring of the focus of life there is when, everything being concentrated on to one particular purpose, whether it be a bazaar, an election, or the giving of a ball, all the human beings one encounters are considered from the point of view of their fitness to one particular end—in the aspect of a buyer or seller, as a voter, as a partner, as the case may be. There was no doubt that at this moment the whole of mankind were expected to fit somehow into Lady Chaloner's pattern: to be useful for the ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... placed in water has also been given as an indication of its fitness for use as food. Decayed ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... who never lost an opportunity to praise him, together with Judge Pancoast, Major Clayton, the richest aristocrat about Kennedy Square and whose cellar was famous the county over—and last, the Honorable Prim. Not because old Seymour possessed any especial fitness one way or the other for a dinner of this kind, but because his presence would afford an underground communication by which Kate could learn how fine and splendid Harry was—(sly old diplomat St. George!)—and how well he had appeared ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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 in Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was unsurpassed in force and fitness, - seeing the true prophet doubled, as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop, - it appeared best to steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over what is imperishably good, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, when not every man could do it, And your passengers, my Captain, are inspired with gratitude. Therefore, Mr. Punch thus thanks you, and right readily enranks you, As a hero on the record of our briny island brood. Verily the choice of "Paris" in this case proved right; and rare is Fitness between name and nature such as that you illustrate. Captain SHARP! A proper nomen, and it proved a prosperous omen To your passengers, whom Punch must on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... of the Bois and the Arc de Triomphe. Thoroughly to appease his conceit, it would have been necessary to swing open the gates of honour in the Arc and allow his fiacre to pass through; to be forced to drive round the monument instead of under it hurt the sense of fitness which champagne engenders. Gerald was in all his pride that day. He had been displaying the wonders to Sophia, and he could not escape the cicerone's secret feeling: that he himself was somehow responsible for the wonders. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... him, but it was becoming comprehensible, and taking on a more favourable aspect now. It was, he felt, born of the tranquillity of this well-trimmed land, a steadfastness that progressed slowly by system and rule, and he recognised that it would have troubled his sense of fitness if this girl had clattered down across the stones hurriedly ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently Wundt has remarked that, when asleep, we "can experience nearly all the phenomena which meet us in lunatic asylums." The grotesqueness of the combinations, the lack of all judgment as to consistency, fitness, and probability, are common characteristics of the short night-dream of the healthy and the long day-dream of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... will be very extraordinary, if, out of that number, one man should be found, whose principles and talents taken together (for some might have principles, and others might have talents) would render him a person truly fitted to fill any very extraordinary office of National Trust. If then such a fitness of character could not be expected to be found in more than one person out of fifty, it would happen but once in a thousand years to the eldest son of any one family, admitting each, on an average, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... escaped her scrutiny and pretty accurate guess as to value, yet she could not see or understand the intolerable disgust and irritation which her ridiculous conduct excited. In a weak mind egotism and selfishness, beyond a certain point, pass into practical insanity. All sense of delicacy, of the fitness of things, is lost; even the power to consider the rights and feelings of others is wanting. Unlike poor Holcroft, Mrs. Mumpson had few misgivings in regard to coming years. As she rocked unceasingly before the parlor fire, she arranged everything ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... to mutter something about ladies and no dress- coats, but this was silenced, and he made a promise contingent on Lance's fitness. He was puzzled by the relations in which Mr. Staples seemed to stand with the lay-rector; but he found that they were not of business, only that elections and county affairs brought them together, and that Mr. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moss-trooper. The Tudor fireplace was designed for folks to whom coal was unknown, and who left their smoking to their chimneys. A house that looked ridiculous with a motor-car before the door, where the electric bell jarred upon one's sense of fitness every time one heard it, was out of date, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... See note above. There is a peculiar fitness in the reference to the sea in this poem; for the constellation of the Pleiades was named by the Greeks from their word plein, to sail, because the Mediterranean was navigable with safety during the months these ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... world were repeated amidst the solitudes which had been consecrated to devotion. But at length its revival arose out of one of the most obvious abuses connected with it. The patronage of the institution, like that of others, had been distributed without any regard to the fitness of the occupants, even to girls of immature age. In this manner the abbey of Port Royal accidentally fell to the lot of one who was destined by her ardent piety to breathe a new life into it, and by her indomitable and lofty genius to give it an ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... faith in him, more than conqueror over all your spiritual enemies: therefore venture wholly upon Christ, and see if he will cast you out: indeed, he never will. Trust in him, hope in him, believe in him, and you will never be disappointed. All our fitness is in Christ. Believe in him, and he is yours. In him dwells all fullness. Believe in Christ, and all that Christ has is yours: his blood is yours, his wisdom is yours, his righteousness, his sanctification ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the prehistoric past to the present day; a past contemporary, perhaps, with the mastodon, but certainly far back in the mists of antiquity. The importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain enough, and therefore the untimely death of Miss Johnson, who was evidently turning with congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to be regretted. For as Mr. Bernard McEnvoy well says in his preface to her "Vancouver Legends," she "has linked the vivid present with the immemorial past.... In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... brick, and never ask us to imagine a brown-stone value to painted sheet-iron. There is, too, a deeper honesty than mere truth-telling in material; a conscientiousness of purpose, an artistic spiritual sense of the eternal fitness, without which there can be no worthy ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them, reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns impartially ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... per day, and young persons between thirteen and eighteen only twelve hours, and none of these at night. Two whole and eight half holidays were required to be given within the year, and each child must have a surgeon's certificate of fitness for labor. There were also clauses for the education of the children and the cleanliness of the factories. But the most important clause of this statute was the provision of a corps of four inspectors with assistants who were ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... had dismissed his valet in Edinburgh, when he determined to go to Pittenloch, but he watched his father's servant brushing his dinner suit, and preparing his bath and toilet, without one dissenting feeling as to the absolute fitness of the attention. The lofty rooms, the splendor and repose, the unobtrusive but perfect service, were the very antipodes of the life he had just left. He smiled to himself as he lazily made contrasts of them. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... hard sort of punishment at all," laughed Nealie; "because, you see, if he had no eye for beauty or artistic fitness the ugliness would not trouble him, he might even take a great deal of satisfaction in thinking how nicely he had ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... of them, I think," said she. "There we have the typical Greek attitude, the genial, cultivated eclecticism that appreciated the fitness of even the most alien forms of art. There is Anubis standing beside the bier; there are Isis and Nephthys, and there below, Horus and Tahuti. But we can't suppose that Artemidorus worshipped or believed in those gods. They are there because they are splendid decoration ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... office, being aided in his suit by the Earl of Essex and others of his friends in Essex's party. Sir Robert Cecil, while encouraging Sidney and professing friendship, secretly aided Lord Cobham for the post. Sidney's military fitness for so responsible a charge was constantly urged against Cobham's lack of martial experience, but the Queen, after a long delay, during which much heat developed between the contestants and their friends, finally decided in favour of her ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... extent the "offspring of the English Reformation in the sixteenth {111} century," will be a very acceptable book to every parent who belongs to the middle classes of society; and who must feel that an endowed school, of which the masters are bound to produce testimonials of moral and intellectual fitness, presents the best security for the acquirement by his sons of a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... at once the law of God and the law for man. For by the nature of anything was meant, not that which we actually find it to be, but that which in the eternal fitness of things it was obviously intended ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... would have placed it,—and the remark applies equally to Ben Ezra (that is, Emanuel Lacunza)—had he trusted the proof to Scriptures of undisputed catholicity, to the spirit of the whole Bible, to the consonance of the doctrine with the reason, its fitness to the needs and capacities of mankind, and its harmony with the general plan of the divine dealings with the world,—and had left the Apocalypse in the back ground. But alas! instead of this he has ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the back of the church. In their black rebozos, the poorest class of poor Mexican women were clad with more fitness than she. For Jane, weighted with the gravity of the occasion, had donned an austere black bonnet such as aged ladies wear, and its effect upon her short locks was incongruous in the extreme. No one, however, ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... felt hat was set jauntily on the fluffy brown hair when she reappeared. Skinny's heart leaped hungrily. Carolyn June was a picture of perfect physical fitness. The cowboy silently wondered how long he could keep from making "a complete, triple-expansion, ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... conformity to the standards which had been established by the European through the traditions of the ages. The higher place in society occupied by the choicest members of the white race, and that too after long years of arduous preparation, had to be assumed by black men without personal or formal fitness. The stronger and more aggressive natures pushed themselves into these higher callings by sheer force of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... interested in watching the negro work. They wove in a great deal of their peculiar, wild, mournful music, whenever the character of the labor permitted. They seemed to sing the music for the music's sake alone, and were as heedless of the fitness of the accompanying words, as the composer of a modern opera is of his libretto. One middle aged man, with a powerful, mellow baritone, like the round, full notes of a French horn, played by a virtuoso, was the musical leader of the party. He never seemed ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the body is asleep, the mind slumbers with it, and has not the power to think, as it has when the body is awake. Again, I believe that all have discovered that the mind is not always equally fitted for thinking about the same subject, but in proportion to the fitness of the body for this or that image to be excited in it will the mind be better fitted to contemplate this or that object. But my opponents will say, that from the laws of Nature alone, in so far as it is considered to be corporeal merely, it cannot be that the causes ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... native agents with very small salaries, and without any responsible intermediate agent whatever to aid him, and to watch over them. The great man was selected without any reference to his knowledge of, or fitness for, the duties entrusted to him, merely because he happened to be of a certain standing in a certain exclusive service, which entitled him to a certain scale of salary, or because he had been found unfit for judicial or other ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Before long a use was found for his slender medical attainments; it became one of his functions to answer persons who visited the office for information as to the climatic features of this or that new country, and their physical fitness for going out as colonists. Of course, there was demanded of him a radical unscrupulousness, and often enough he proved equal to the occasion; but as time went on, bringing slow development of brain and character, he found these personal interviews anything but agreeable. He had constantly before ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... her technique, in which she is characteristically original. This originality is noticeable especially in her use of words. There is a sense of fitness that often surprises the reader. Words at times in her hands reveal a new power and significance. In the choice of words Charlotte Bronte was scrupulous. She believed that there was just one word fit ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Privy Council which he attended, "to discourse about the fitness of entering of men presently for the manning of the fleet, before one ship is in condition to receive them," the king observed, "'If ever you intend to man the fleet without being cheated by the captains and pursers, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... years, with noble heads and flowing snowy beards, bent forms and tattered garments, sit patiently awaiting a demand upon them. Perhaps they could afford better clothing; but they have an eye for artistic effect, and a true sense of the fitness of things. The children, waiting here for the same purpose, captivate our attention by their large black eyes and gypsy complexions. How graceful and kitten-like they are, in their lazy, lolling motions! The young girls are such as are not seen out of Italy, with ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled? During the recent war whenever the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... at his own request, was relieved from the command of the army, and General McClellan resumed the direction. Whatever might have been the real fitness of General Pope to command, his usefulness with the army just driven back upon the defenses of Washington, had departed. The return of General McClellan was hailed with joy by a large portion of ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... maid. I'm very particular about my belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all over ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... leading. The first is imperative, because all education is a matter of organization. The second is part of the first, as supervision is the genius of organization. The third is fundamental, for all expression—true education—depends on the teacher or leader, whose innate idea of the fitness of things keeps him from doing, on the one hand, that which is just customary, or, on the other hand, that which may appear to be just scientific. The science of yesterday should be the tradition of today; that is, if we are making ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... alone in the bush! Nature's precious link between a squalid Past and a nobler Future, broken, snatched away from her allotted place in the long chain of the ages! Heiress of infinite hope, and dowered with latent fitness to fulfil her part, now so suddenly fallen by the wayside! That quaint dialect silent so soon! and for ever vanished from this earth that keen, eager perception, that fathomless love and devotion! But ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the forty-third degree of latitude. Even the birds appeared to rejoice in the beauties of the time, and sang and fluttered among the oaks, in numbers greater than common. Nature usually observes a stern fitness in her adaptation of means to ends. Birds are to be found in the forests, on the prairies, and in the still untenanted openings of the west—and often in countless numbers; more especially those birds which fly in flocks, and love the security of unoccupied regions—unoccupied ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... were too taken up with this gigantic fact to pay satisfactory attention to her inquiries. The old sense of protecting motherhood came back to Esther when she learned the news. Rachel was only eighteen, but at once Esther felt middle-aged. It seemed of the fitness of things that she should go to America and resume her interrupted maternal duties. Isaac and Sarah were still little more than children, perhaps they had not yet ceased bickering about their birthdays. She knew ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... enlistments be for "three years in service and three years in reserve," limited the appointment of officers to those who "shall have successfully passed such tests as to * * * physical, moral and professional fitness as the President shall prescribe," and authorized the President in certain emergencies to "draft into the military service of the United States to serve therein for the period of the war unless sooner discharged, any and all members of the National Guard and National Guard Reserve," who thereupon ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... clouded Mrs. Sheldon's gentle face, and she sighed; the old heart-ache came back, the same pain which had assailed her on the first of June, her birthday, when doubts came thronging into her mind, doubts as to her own fitness for her position with its heavy responsibility of training five young souls in the path of duty and righteousness. "Hugh must have got into some trouble," she thought, "and something, too, which he has not confided to me. I fear it is ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... after the murder as we do now. But the feelings with which he regarded Mrs. Fairbrother—well, that is another thing—and it was not till last night we heard that the attachment which bound him to her was of the sort which takes no account of youth or age, fitness or unfitness. He was no Adonis, and old enough, we are told, to be her father; but for all that we have already found several persons who can tell strange stories of the persistence with which his eager old eyes would follow her whenever chance ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... man would be more likely to confirm her in doubt, if the phrase be permissible. She wants what some would call homoeopathic treatment. And how should they be able to love one another, if they are not fit to be married to each other? The fitness, seems inherent ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... be more appropriate and in accordance with the fitness of things than to make a GARDNER the new Minister of Agriculture. Of course it has been suggested that a Rural Dean should succeed to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... what life might be in the stock yet! Anyhow, it would be better to leave an heir to take the remnant in charge, and at least carry the name a generation farther, even should it be into yet deeper poverty than hitherto. A Warlock could face his fate. Thereupon, with a sense of the fitness of things not always manifested on such occasions, he had paid his addresses to a woman of five and thirty, the daughter of the last clergyman of the parish, and had by her been accepted with little hesitation. She ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... village rung merrily in the clear morning air of a bright summer's day. It was to call the people together, and they all obeyed its summons—for who among the aged, middle-aged, or the young, did not wish to fitness the marriage ceremonies of their favourite, Ellen Lawton? Ere the tolling of the bell had ceased, the gray-haired man was leaning on the finger-worn ball of his staff, in the corner of his antiquated pew; the hale, healthy ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... live honestly without it—or, at all events, he has a right to choose whether he will employ himself or be employed by another. Hence it may turn out that the refusal to labor, so far as there has been any, only serves to prove the more clearly the fitness of the laborers ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... thought was not always clothed in the best language, and often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened considerably; offered to change horses ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... machinery of the law by which it could have been carried out. Some of the surviving bishops were old and inactive. Others were appointed from the ranks of Royalist adherents on grounds of ardent partisanship rather than of fitness for the position; and it would have been too much to expect that in reaching a haven of prosperity after the storm of persecution they should not have been, at times, unduly attentive to worldly advantage. ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... Individual (LANE), essaying a problem novel, does not disdain the old-fashioned way of the woven plot and the dramatic incident. Her hero, Orde Taverner, surgeon by trade and eugenist by profession, falls in love with Elizma, a Cornish beauty and rare fiddler. His inquiries as to her eugenical fitness having been answered satisfactorily but inaccurately, he marries, to find that Elizma's mother really died insane. His principles conquer his desire for children, and his decision is communicated to the fiery Elizma, who, fierce maternalist that she is and coming of a wild stock that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... the service. The ambition that a young officer entering the army ought to set before him, is to lead his own men in action. This ought to inspire his life, and animate his effort. "Stables" will no longer be dull, when he realises that on the fitness of his horses, his life and honour may one day depend. If he thinks that his men may soon be asked to stand beside him at a pinch, he will no longer be bored by their interests and affairs. But when he realises ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... It is so with that old euphuism of the Elizabethan age—that pride of dainty language and curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which often made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense of fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and still more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the young Shakespeare himself. It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied in ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... at once stepped to the window and, unobserved, took a quick survey of the interior. Following some ingenious idea of his own regarding fitness, the beautiful Filgee had induced Uncle Ben to seat himself on the floor before one of the smallest desks, presumably his brother's, in an attitude which, while it certainly gave him considerable elbow-room for those contortions common to immature penmanship, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... mother had taught her that in marriage external accomplishments and possessions were nothing, unless united with virtuous principles and well-regulated passions. The brilliant attractions of Eaverson strongly tempted her to take his moral fitness for granted; but wiser counsels prevailed in her mind; and with a vigorous hand laid upon her heart to keep down its errant impulses, she exercised, with coolness and a well-balanced mind, the powers of discrimination which God had given ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... no step upon the deck, no sound to mar the present serene fitness of things. But out of his dreamings he was drawn back abruptly to the swaying, swinging deck of a crazy schooner by the odd, vague feeling that he was ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... "Nothing sooner dejects a man than clothes out of fashion," is as true now as it was three hundred years ago. Fashion sways the shape of a collar, and the infinitesimal gradations of a hat-brim; but the sense of fitness, and the power of interpreting life, which ennobled fashion in Burton's day, have disappeared ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... herself immensely, she loves children so much. She and Clyde hired the "Tackler"—so called because he will tackle any kind of a job, whether he knows anything about it or not—to paper the room. He thinks he is a great judge of the fitness of things and of beauty. The paper has a stripe of roses, so Tackler reversed every other strip so that some of my roses are standing on their heads. Roses don't all grow one way, he claims, and so his method "makes ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... lost sight of his relatives in London, and had made for them such modest provision as suited his view of the fitness of things. To leave wealth to young men of the working class would have seemed to him the most inexcusable of follies; if such were to rise at all, it must be by their own efforts and in consequence of their native merits; otherwise, let them toil ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... infant band were bright with innocence and that happy alchemy which turns the merest toy to a costly treasure. There was a tender piety on the features of those children that moved the heart. Devotion lies upon the face of youth with a peculiar fitness. As we see it dwelling in that unsullied abode, we remember how the cheek of the Madonna is pressed against the infant in her arms. Their instructor seemed to have caught a portion of their light-heartedness. Sad ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... spread of industrial education, during the past twenty-five years, we seem not to know that the work has been difficult and prosecuted at great sacrifice on the part of the Tuskegee graduates who have sought to interpret Dr. Washington's theory that economic fitness was the basis of racial ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
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