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More "Inoffensive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... representation of "Cleomenes" from the lord chamberlain. The exertions of Hyde, Earl of Rochester, who, although a Tory, was possessed necessarily of some influence as maternal uncle to the queen, procured a recall of this award against a play which was in every respect truly inoffensive. But there was still a more insuperable obstacle to its success. The plot is flat and unsatisfactory involving no great event, and in truth being only the question, whether Cleomenes should or should not depart upon an expedition, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... were pure and benevolent, in proof of which, in spite of all exhortations to the contrary, he read his pamphlet through. He was found guilty and sentenced to be imprisoned for I forget how long. He was a plain, unaffected, inoffensive looking creature. He did not seem at all afraid of any punishment, and appeared much more anxious about the success of his plan than about the preservation of his life. After he came out of prison, he pursued the inculcation of his plan, appearing to have ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... is to be hoped rare) instances, it is a crime of the very deepest dye: it is a premeditated contrivance for taking away the life of the most inoffensive and most helpless of all human creatures, in opposition not only to the most universal dictates of humanity, but of that powerful instinctive passion which, for a wise and important purpose, the Author of our nature has ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... Mills, the superintendent of the Royal Victoria, had many a secret conference with Jim Woppit, and it finally leaked out that the cold, discriminating, and vigilant eye of eternal justice was riveted upon Steve Barclay, the stage-driver. Few of us suspected Steve; he was a good-natured, inoffensive fellow; it seemed the idlest folly to surmise that he could have been in collusion with the highwaymen. But Mr. Mills had his own ideas on the subject; he was a man of positive convictions, and, having pretty nearly always demonstrated ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... disturbance of the Queen's peace? The procession enabled many thousands to do that without the least inconvenience or danger to themselves, and with no injury or offence to their neighbours. To prohibit or punish peaceful, inoffensive, orderly, and perfectly innocent processions upon pretence that they are constructively unlawful, is unconstitutional tyranny. Was it done because the ministers discovered that the terror of suspended habeas corpus had not in this matter ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... himself killed. An unknown power seemed to watch over him, carrying him safe and sound through dangers which resulted fatally to others. Sir John had found twelve judges and a death-warrant, where he had seen but a phantom, invulnerable, it is true, but inoffensive. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... because the overseers of the poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss Dix. The fact was that she had understated the case. Dr. Bell of the McLean Asylum, confirmed her report and added details. In an outbuilding at the almshouse, a young man, slightly deranged but entirely inoffensive, was confined by a heavy iron collar to which was attached a chain six feet in length, the limit of his possible movements. His hands were fastened together by heavy clavises secured by iron bolts. There was no window in his dungeon, but for ventilation ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... diluted darkness, in which it was hard to distinguish the skeletons of the trees which winter had stripped. The mountains had disappeared; there was no sky; a veil of chilling moisture and depressing gloom was over every thing. But neither Charlotte nor her mother was at that hour conscious of such inoffensive disagreeables. They were trembling with anger and sorrow. In a moment such a great event had happened, one utterly unconceived of, and unprepared for. Half an hour previous, the unhappy mother had dreaded the breaking away from her old life, and had declined to discuss with Charlotte ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... considerable powers of pathos as well) he is quite first-rate. His chief merit seems to be the earnestness with which he throws himself into the work. The songs (mostly his own writing) were quite inoffensive, and very funny. I am very glad to be able to think that his influence on public taste is towards refinement and purity. I liked best "The Future Mrs. 'Awkins," with its taking tune, and "My Old Dutch," which revealed powers that, I should think, would come out grandly in Robsonian parts, such ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... to confess, that the hospitable reception given to American vessels in the ports of Spain gives his Majesty a double right to expect, that their conduct should at least be inoffensive. In the present case, (as stated in your Excellency's letter) I am fully convinced of the justice of this demand, that I should not hesitate to comply with it, even though made on a similar occasion by the Court of Portugal, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... of the door, while the duke began pacing up and down the room, muttering and growling, and balling his fists, and jingling his shining medals. He kicked over an inoffensive hassock and his favorite hound, and I don't know how many long-winded German oaths he let go. (It's a mighty hard language to swear in, especially when ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... ever been known in these mountains, very much as old Honeycutt's toothless mouth, ever screwed up in rotary chewing and sucking movements, drooled tobacco juice upon his unclean shirt. Brodie at moments when he desired to be utterly inoffensive could not purge his utterance of oaths; he was one of those men who could not remark that it was a fine morning without first damning the thing, qualifying it with an epithet of vileness, and turning it out of his big, loose ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... father for collecting it! How much are our best laid schemes defective? How little does expectation and event coincide? It is no disgrace to a man that he died on the scaffold; the question is—What brought him there? Some of the most inoffensive, and others the most exalted characters of the age in which they lived, have been cut off by the axe, as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, for being the last male heir of the Anjouvin Kings; John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... longer obviously the air of a conquered country. His moustache was less fierce, his stride less proprietary. Indeed he might easily have been mistaken, by those to whom his name and dignities were unknown, for the pear-shaped but inoffensive keeper of a delicatessen shop. Prince Adalbert of Lippe-Schweidnitz was also changed. He no longer roamed afield; he kept within six feet of his protective equerry. He slouched less; and he had ceased to scowl arrogantly on the children who no longer fled at his approach. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... had been a placable and inoffensive man, then, the malignants of the petty burgh (it was scarce bigger than a village) would have fastened on his character simply because he was above them. No man has a keener eye for behaviour than the Scot (especially when spite wings his ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... savage sneer which appears to us as an insult to suffering; the laugh of the savage, trampling his conquered enemy under foot, or that of the child torturing unfortunate animals. This laugh is, in fact, inoffensive in its way, it is cruel in fact but not in intention. What it expresses is not a perverse, satanic joy but a heartlessness, as is so properly said. In the child and the savage sympathy has not been born, that is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... observed in what manner just wars were waged by the children of Israel against the Amorites; for inoffensive transit was denied to them, although by the most equitable laws of human ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... "style"—and so spoils himself, is known to the editor of every magazine. Any editorial office force can insert missing commas and semicolons, and iron out blunders in the English; but it has not the time, if indeed the ability, to instil life into a lifeless manuscript. A living style is rarer than an inoffensive one, and the road of literary ambition is strewn with failures ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... with excitement. There were two usually inoffensive persons "on the dissecting table," as Walky Dexter called it—Nelson and Hopewell Drugg. Much had already been said about the missing coin collection and Nelson Haley's connection with it; so the second topic of conversation rather ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... sake I will not record my sensations as I took my way through the shrubbery towards the stable. Men are ever so prone to revenge their faults and their follies upon such inoffensive agencies as time and place, wind or weather, that I was quite convinced that to any other but Galway ears my expose would have been perfectly clear and intelligible; and that in no other country under heaven would a man be expected to marry a young ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... a not very lucrative public office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service, but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his Washington friends lost power, there ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... admiral's corpse lying in the court-yard, he went to the adjoining house, in which Teligny lived. All the inmates were killed, but he escaped by the roof. Twice he fell into the hands of the enemy, and twice he was spared; he perished at last by the sword of a man who knew not his amiable and inoffensive character. His neighbor La Rochefoucault was perhaps more fortunate in his fate. He had hardly fallen asleep when he was disturbed by the noise in the street. He heard shouts and the sound of many footsteps; and scarcely awake and utterly unsuspicious, he went to his bedroom door at the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... is one of the most inoffensive of all animals for the aquarium, and is valuable from the fact that he does not breathe water, but rises to the surface to breathe. Every few weeks he casts his skin, which he swallows, seeming to relish it, after which he comes forth ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... given to Mr. Abbot, an old-established favorite with the public, a very amiable and worthy man, old enough to have been my father, whose performance, not certainly of the highest order, was nevertheless not below inoffensive mediocrity. But the public, who were bent upon doing more than justice to me, were less than just to him; and the abuse showered upon his Romeo, especially by my more enthusiastic admirers of the male sex, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... though, that Congress can't spare the time from botherin' about interlockin' directors to suppress a few padlockin' aunties. Say, the way that old girl does keep the bars up against an inoffensive party like me is something fierce! I tries to call Vee on the 'phone as soon as I've discovered where she is, and all the satisfaction I get is a message delivered by a French maid that "Miss Hemmingway is otherwise engaged." Wouldn't ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... welfare of the people under them. It would, no doubt, have been a great easement of the present difficulty. Any body who does his duty to his dependents keeps a certain number out of the vortex; and his example is nearly sure to be followed, if he acts in an inoffensive, modest fashion. Dr. Arnott has shown what great things may be done in the way of ventilation by individual employers. See what benefit would arise if only some few builders, taking to heart the present miserable accommodation ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... sardonic intonation. It was with an inexpressible air of insolence that Barlet, when summoning the meeting to dissolve itself, added, "Rightly or Wrongly." They murmured on the benches of the Assembly, "Who is this scoundrel?" The other, compared to him, seemed moderate and inoffensive. Emile Pean exclaimed, "The old man is simply working in his profession, but the young man is working ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... and her father home, well clothed and in good case. The week they had passed on board was sufficient time to gain them the esteem of every one, for they were the most quiet, inoffensive beings I ever met with; and, to their great credit, they never once begged. The man was remarkable for his extraordinary fondness for treacle, sugar, salt, acids, and spruce-beer, which the others of the tribe could ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... half after, when the invariable siesta was over, the main street began to fill with idlers. The natives wore white, with wide soft straw hats, and lounged along with considerable grace. They were a weak, unenergetic, inoffensive race, always ready to get off the sidewalk for other nations provided the other nations swaggered sufficiently. The women, I remember, had wonderful piles of glossy black hair, arranged in bands and puffs, in which they stuck cigars. The streets ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... assumption was not unwarrantable that Staff had never yet done anything that he had subsequently found cause to regret. Pensively punishing an inoffensive wrist, ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... reason why they were not more aggressive; but a whole company of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from the Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militia often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they looked at her. She declared that personally there was nothing against the Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men; it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... degraded from the typical place, to which they have no sort of pretension, and placed where their mean and mischievous character seem to require; the cebidae again being assigned that situation which their comparatively inoffensive dispositions, their arboreal habits, and their extraordinary development of the tail, (which with them is like a fifth hand,) ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... encouraged the satirist to repeat his stroke next year—and must have astounded his retrospection, when he found himself in prison, and under threat of worse than imprisonment, together with his unoffending associates in an admirable and inoffensive comedy. It is impossible to suppose that he would not have come forward to assume the responsibility of his own words—as it is impossible to imagine that Jonson or Chapman would have given up his accomplice to save himself. But the law of the day would ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... wit, in Ireland, who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife. They are somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... mine, O father, that like a stag in the wood, thou hast been shot dead with arrows, by those mean and stupid wretches—the sons of Kartavirya. And O father, virtuous and unswerving from the path of righteousness and inoffensive to all animated beings as thou wert, how came it to be permitted by Fate that thou shouldst die in this way? What an awful sin must have been committed by them, who have killed thee with hundreds of sharpened shafts, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... admitted, is often something of a fool when he is by himself, but when you and he begin to hunt in couples, you are a deadly pair. I once knew a St. Bernard dog—you will perceive the analogy by-and-by—who lived on terms of friendship with a Skye terrier. By himself Rufus was a mild and inoffensive giant. He adored the house-cat, and used to help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... this, of how little my peaceful and inoffensive disposition would avail me, was with an evening club which I joined. For some time I got on very well with the persons who composed this association, and seemed—at least I thought so—to be rather a favourite with them, on account of my quiet and peaceable demeanour; and, under ordinary circumstances, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... southern provinces, and it was my daily fate to sit opposite to him at tables d'hote and in railway trains. He may be known by two infallible signs—his hands are fat and he tucks his napkin into his shirt-collar. In spite of these idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me a reserved and inoffensive person, with singularly little of the demonstrative good-humour that he has been described as possessing. I saw no one who reminded me of Balzac's "illustre Gaudissart;" and indeed in the course of a month's journey through a large part of France ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... nor could they settle the dispute, Jerry claiming that it was all right in a rifle, as a man hunted big game with that, and his life might be in danger; while with the other weapon he usually only shot birds and inoffensive small animals; while Bluff declared that what was black for the pot was also black for ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... one of the inspectors, "the why is the most important thing for us to consider just now. If you really desire to convince us that you committed this dreadful crime of killing a totally inoffensive man, you should give us some reason for an act so opposed to all your instincts and ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... might that peril exist to-morrow, the day after, in a month? It was the frank question that he tried to answer sincerely. It was true that the child stirred his instincts of tenderness, but these instincts in men are so numerous that the dangerous ones should not be confounded with the inoffensive. Thus he adored animals, especially cats, and could not see their silky fur without being seized with an irresistible sensuous desire to caress their soft, undulating backs and kiss ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... the unreflecting persons in daily intercourse with the editor—that grave and learned scribe is in the enjoyment—of all the sense originally vouchsafed to him. We know the stories that are in the most unfeeling manner told to the disadvantage of the learned and inoffensive gentleman; we know them, and shall not shrink from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... melas), a large representative of the dolphin tribe frequenting the coasts of Europe, the Atlantic coast of North America, the Cape and New Zealand. From its nearly uniform black colour it is also called the "black-fish." Its maximum length is about 20 ft. These cetaceans are gregarious and inoffensive in disposition and feed chiefly on cuttle-fish. Their sociable character constantly leads to their destruction, as when attacked they instinctively rush together, and blindly follow the leaders of the herd, whence the names pilot-whale and ca'ing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... but if the nerve matter, which is virulent at first, is exposed to the air and is kept from putrefaction by substances which will absorb the surrounding moisture, it will gradually lose its virulence and become inoffensive in about fifteen days. He has also further shown that the action of a weak virus on an animal will prevent the development of a stronger virus, and from this he has formulated his method of prophylactic treatment. This treatment consists in the successive inoculation ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... disappointing, yet, looked at aright, a gratifying spectacle. Here were men disciplined by good handling and native force out of barbarism—of which there was little to be seen—and plainly on the high road to comfort; men who led inoffensive and honest lives, yet who expressed their sense of freedom and self-support in their speech, and had in their courteous demeanour the unmistakable air and bearing of independence. If provoked by injustice, a very ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... boys were the most dangerous creatures; and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a shower of stones. For my own part, whenever anything was addressed to me, I smiled gently and shook my head as though I were an inoffensive person inadequately acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a troop of ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he called himself, made his appearance at Washington toward the close of the Tyler Administration. He was of middle size, with long hair, and an inoffensive, cadaverous countenance. It was his boast that he was born among the slashes of Hanover County, Virginia, and he was to be seen lounging about the hotels, fashionably, yet shabbily, dressed, generally wearing soiled ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... solicitor, and had a long interview with him. The result was that in about ten days he sent Walter Clifford a letter and the draft of a lease, very favorable to the landlord on the whole, but cannily inserting one unusual clause that looked inoffensive. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... suppose," he laughed. "He came into my office this morning, after being served with a summons from Judge Lindman's court in regard to the title of his land, and tried to kill me. Failing in that, he knocked poor, inoffensive little Braman down—who had interfered in my behalf—and threw him bodily through the front window of the building, glass and all. It's lucky for him that Braman wasn't hurt. After that he tried to incite a riot, which Judge Lindman nipped in the bud by ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... round pretty spry, too. Reckon it took me all of half a second—while them two warriors was giving me the evil eye. I'll tell you how it was." He related the story of the shooting match and the lost bet. "And to this unprovoked design against an inoffensive stranger I fitted the only possible meaning and shape that would make a lick of sense, dovetailin' in with the real ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... huge patch of yellow on one side and a black patch on the other. His tail was yellow with a gray tip. One ear was black and one yellow. A black patch over one eye gave him a fearfully rakish look. In reality he was meek and inoffensive, of a sociable disposition. In one respect, if in no other, Joseph was like a lily of the field. He toiled not neither did he spin or catch mice. Yet Solomon in all his glory slept not on softer cushions, or feasted ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a moment on the motley of dressing-gowns, mackintoshes, uniforms, I inevitably see in the line one face set on a slant, one pair of eyes forsaking the stage and fixed on me in a steady, inoffensive beam. ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... of the return of confidence on the part of the natives: a man and a boy insisted on remaining on board to sleep, probably induced by the anticipation of a present. There never were more harmless, inoffensive, or tractable people: for, when most troublesome, they may be led in any direction you choose, by taking hold of the hand, ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... to these two small, dull, gray eyes, and you have features not easily described. Nevertheless, there are moments when his countenance wears an expression of mildness-one in which the quick eye may read a character more inoffensive than intrusive. A swallow-tail blue coat, of ample skirts, and brass buttons; a bright-colored waistcoat, opening an avalanche of shirt-bosom, blossoming with cheap jewelry; a broad, rolling shirt-collar, tied carelessly with a blue ribbon; a steeple-crowned hat, set on the side ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... notorieties on inbound steamers, and made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive—though one of them did let out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and the other did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result of timidity trying to be ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Just a quiet, inoffensive, respectable-looking man not coarse or low in type; this would have been his comment upon the dead man, if he had known nothing about him. Max shuddered as he withdrew his gaze; and, as he did so, he ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... constant presence there of a young man of leisure; but they got accustomed to him. Hector assumed a melancholy expression of countenance, such as a man ought to have who had undergone unheard-of misfortunes, and whose life had failed of its promise. He appeared inoffensive; people said: ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... deed of justice, Dinsmore in high good humor with himself set out to call on Clint Wadley. He had made an inoffensive human being suffer, and that is always something to a man's credit. If he could not do any better, Pete would bully a horse, but he naturally preferred humans. They were ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... only had the amateur actors at the chateau played two pieces inoffensive enough in themselves, but a report had been spread that they meant next to perform the famous "Tartuffe" of Moliere, a satire which, while purporting to be levelled against falsehood, lust, greed, and ambition, covered with ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... The process is more slow, but none the less sure; and it is clear that in the case of my dirt-heap the foul matters added have thus been destroyed. The practical bearings of this fact are of the utmost importance. Earth is not to be regarded as a vehicle for the inoffensive removal beyond the limits of the town of what has hitherto been its most troublesome product, but as a medium for bringing together the offensive ingredients of this product, and the world's great scavenger, oxygen. My experiment seems to demonstrate the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... duties, or our destinies. Our life has no theory, and we care only for outward forms and symbols. Our taste is shocked by the grossness of vice, but we have no quarrel with the thing itself; and if the people around us will only preserve a polished, or at least inoffensive exterior, that is all we demand. Why should we look below the surface in their case, when we do no such thing in our own? We feel amiable, genteel, and refined; we detest the appearance of low impropriety, and would take a good ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... her eyes and looked at him. He was such a quiet, unobtrusive, inoffensive old gentleman that she wondered more than ever why Barthorpe had refused to admit ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... to the colonnade where the Chinese Quarter began was a distance of half a by-street, and Coryndon slid along, apologetically close to the wall. He avoided the policeman in his blue coat and high khaki turban, and his manner was generally inoffensive and harmless as he sneaked into the low entrance of Leh Shin's lesser curio shop. A large coloured lantern hung outside the inner room, and a couple of candles did honour to the infuriated Joss who capered ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... important to escape the observation of any part of America or Europe. But as it is a movement of great delicacy, it will require all your address to communicate the subject in a manner that shall be inoffensive to his feelings, and consistent with all the respect that is due from me ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... was kicking. Some one was civilly knocking. The door was pushed slightly open, and the inoffensive face of Mr. Joseph Jenkins ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus odor would ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... examination closed, and the argument to the jury commenced. The solicitor very briefly adverted to the leading facts, deprecated any attempt to turn the case into ridicule, admitted that the witness was a man of eccentricity and pedantry, but harmless and inoffensive; a man, evidently, of conscientiousness and respectability; that he had shown himself to be a peaceable man, but when occasion demanded, a brave man; that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him upon no cause except an independence, which was honorable to him, and an attempt ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... miles from Queen Victoria's Spring, although, in a straight line, we were only 180 miles from it. Almost immediately upon the arrival of the caravan, a number of native men and one young boy made their appearance. They were apparently quiet and inoffensive, and some of them may have seen white people before, for one or two spoke a few English words, such as "white fellow," "what name," "boy," etc. They seemed pleased, but astonished to see the camels drink such an enormous quantity of water; they completely emptied ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the beverage in use— Costly whisky, hauled in wagons many a weary, weary day, Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain them on their way. Wicked whisky! King of Evils! Why, O, why did God create Such a curse and thrust it on us in our inoffensive state? ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... of the murdered children were away from home when the awful crime was committed by their farm servant, a young man aged about nineteen, inoffensive, but of somewhat deficient intellect. It is quite clear from the facts which have come down to us that he was insane, for in his confession he stated the devil suggested the deed to his mind, saying, "Kill all, kill all, kill all." The eldest of the family, a daughter, struggled with ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... was "emerging," and "amid the silence of the earth daily adding to its power and pride."(741) Edward Everett, in an oration on the Pilgrim founders of this nation, said: "Did they look for a retired spot, inoffensive for its obscurity, and safe in its remoteness, where the little church of Leyden might enjoy the freedom of conscience? Behold the mighty regions over which, in peaceful conquest, ... they have borne the banners ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical poets,—Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas, Dante, and Dante and Beatrice.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice, A Night in Avignon.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow, Michael Angelo.] and Alison [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... myself," returned Mr Allwick. "I knew his parents. I have been to their village, and he himself is not a stranger to me. He recognised me this morning in the crowd, and that induced him to pay us this visit. The truth is, I have seen much of the Molokani. A more inoffensive, earnest, religious people do not exist. When travelling in the south of Russia with a gentleman, to whom I was attached as secretary, we have had thirty of them dining with us at once, and, though peasants ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... tray. The baby, being unable to help herself as yet, was still imprisoned in her cot in the bedroom until such time as her mother could attend to her, and on the dining-room floor George and the three-year-old, ordered to keep extremely quiet and inoffensive, played with their bricks. Now and again an erection of bricks toppled down accidentally with a shattering noise, when Osborn exclaimed: "Shut up, you kids!" and their mother implored: "Do try to keep ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... (p. 24,25 [p. 20 ed. 1684]), 'Since God has prescribed an inoffensive life, as that which only can give acceptance with him; and on the contrary hath determined never to justify the wicked, &c.—Will not the abomination appear greatest of all, where God shall be found condemning the just, on purpose to justify the wicked; and that he is ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... given none to any other tribe upon the Murray, and that our men were apt to be very saucy with their guns if too much troubled. Experience had taught me the necessity for thus perpetually impressing on the minds, even of the most civil of these savages that, although inoffensive, we were strong; an idea not easily conceived by them. They however came forward and sat down near us until very heavy rain, which fell in the night, obliged them to seek ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... paints the stern courage of the Puritan, but never his gentle or humane qualities. His typical tale presents the Puritan in the most unlovely guise. In "The Maypole of Merrymount," for example, Morton and his men are represented as inoffensive, art-loving people who were terrorized by the "dismal wretches" of a near-by colony of Puritans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Morton's crew were a lawless set and a scandal to New England; but they were tolerated until they put all the settlements ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... joke—he was led to believe that he had been appointed prefect; but when he attempted to take up the duties of the position the clerks in charge of the office refused to recognize his authority, and he was compelled in consequence to retire. A good sort of fellow in other respects, inoffensive and obliging, he had thrown himself zealously into the work of making an organized defence of the town. He had had pits dug in the level country, young forest trees felled, and traps set on all the roads; then at the approach of the enemy, thoroughly ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... common name of the inoffensive and fur-bearing members of the Phocidae family. The word seal is derived, radically, from the German Siegel, so that to say a man has "fought mit SIEGEL," is equivalent to remarking that he has assailed a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... to the ruling part at least of Mankind in general. I indulge the hope and expectation that WAR shall one day be universally and finally extinguish'd. But I will confess also, that appearances would tempt us to apprehend that day is far distant. And while we make War for Sport on useful, generous, inoffensive Animals, it is not easy to imagine that we shall cease to make War ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... was present, then called out with a loud voice, and ordered Androcles to explain to them this unintelligible mystery, and how a savage of the fiercest and most unpitying nature should thus in a moment have forgotten his innate disposition, and be converted into a harmless and inoffensive animal. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... careful and painstaking farmer, a kind neighbor, and an inoffensive, amiable man. His "untimely taking off" was indeed a sad loss to the community at large, but how much more to his wife! She had loved him with a love that amounted to idolatry. When he was returning from his daily toil she would go forth to meet him. When absent from home, if his stay was prolonged, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... associated together by the same spirit of beauty that pervades all the Dale. Half way up, and in some places more, the enclosing hills and even mountains are sylvan indeed, and though there be a few inoffensive aliens, they are all adorned with their native trees. The mountains are not so high as in our Highlands, but they are very majestic; and the Passes over into Langdale, and Wastdalehead, and Buttermere, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... been here describing are inoffensive, differing in this particular from the Dimiya and another of similar size and ferocity, which is called by the Singhalese Kaddiya; and they have a legend illustrative of their alarm for the bites of the latter, to the effect that the cobra de capello invested ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... been very patient with him; we should have made short work with an American who had approached us with the same inquiries. Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic founded on the notion, elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother's keeper, the things he asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile; but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought to have been self-evident to him that when a commonwealth of sixty million Americans based itself upon the great principle of self-seeking, self-seeking was the best thing, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... civilization was impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so that those who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian may not well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet, inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There were Indians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly; but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole is totally incorrect. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... have struck that mark if he had been in top condition, but today, though he put his very soul into the effort, and though the ball for the third time was lobbed with the utmost gentleness through the air, his bullet banged vainly against the sheet of iron and the white, inoffensive ball continued ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... to talk any more about it. If you want the shack pulled down and hauled away, you and your friends continue to tantalize this inoffensive little boy the way you have been. If you want to keep it, be ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... motion he cannot represent; his running, falling, or struggling figures are drawn with childish incapability; but give him for his scene the pavement of heaven, or pastures of Paradise, and for his subject the "inoffensive pace" of glorified souls, or the spiritual speed of Angels, and Michael Angelo alone can contend with him in majesty,—in grace and musical continuousness of motion, no one. The inspiration was in some degree caught by his pupil Benozzo, but thenceforward forever ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is a branch of society, it follows that it can be proper to none who is not in his nature social. Now, society is agreeable to no creatures who are not inoffensive to each other; and we therefore observe in animals who are entirely guided by nature that it is cultivated by such only, while those of more noxious disposition addict themselves to solitude, and, unless when prompted by lust, or that ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... before he was twenty, and was driven to break the entail by the time he was forty, passing to a family of Dyers. The best that could be said of them was, that the old people were comparatively inoffensive and the young were presentable. They were inclined to be friendly with the town—it might be till they could secure a footing with the county people, if that were possible. They dressed well, thanks to their milliners and dressmakers, kept a good table, a good stable, and a good staff ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... her reight an left, all all shoo had to protect hersen wi wor th' rollin' pin. Thinks aw to misen, this sooart o' thing has gooan far enuff, an as awd just been readin' abaat th' "atrocities," aw fancied misen England an him Turkey an her a poor Bulgarian, an aw determined awr wodn't see a poor inoffensive young woman ill-treated bi a brute like that, soa just as he wor gettin' ready to strike her daan into th' eearth, aw stept behund him an planted mi naive at th' back ov his ear, an he rolled ovver like a skittle pin. Just as he fell awd an idea 'at awd ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... be clear. He was no capricious and unlicensed oppressor of a God-fearing and inoffensive peasantry, but a soldier waging war against a turbulent population carrying arms and willing to use them. I have nowhere tried to soften the bitter tale of folly, misrule, and cruelty which drove those unhappy men into rebellion, nor to heighten by a single touch their responsibility for their ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... was without event. They encountered one or two Indians on the way, jogging slowly along on their shaggy ponies; but the creatures were mild and inoffensive. The road was fairly good and they made excellent time, so that long before twilight Spotville was reached and the party had taken possession of the one small and primitive "hotel" the place afforded. It was a two-story, clapboarded building, the lower floor being ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... Howes, and beyond the impish pleasure she derived from taunting Martin, they had no interest for her. The sisters were timid, inoffensive beings enough; but had they been three times as inoffensive they were nevertheless Howes; moreover, Ellen did not care for docile people. She was a fighter herself and loved a fighter. That was the reason she had always cherished a covert admiration ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... guilty of by such a Practice, I believe it would prevent them"; the more, that if the author be "so unfortunate to depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was King.' In the Prologue to this same condemned play, spoken by the actor Quin, and said to have been written after the ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... of these versions imply that the "massacre" was a mere marauding, cruel, and murderous invasion of an inoffensive and peaceful settlement; while the other two versions of Dr. Ramsay and Mr. Hildreth clearly show the provocation and cruel wrongs which the Loyalists, and even Indians, had experienced from the continentals and inhabitants of Wyoming; that the settlement of Wyoming was the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... never once received the slightest disapprobation. Had a fragment of the ignorant mob of London been permitted to rule the theatre he would have been hissed a thousand times, if it were for nothing else but his superior merit. This we can affirm, that Mr. Wood is at least as inoffensive as ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... time, and the election of Taylor in November, 1848, had a sufficiently chilling effect on the little family in Mall Street. Hawthorne entertained the hope that he might be spared in the general out-turning, as a distinguished writer and an inoffensive partisan, and this indicates how loath he was to relinquish his comfortable position. Let us place ourselves in his situation and we shall not wonder at it. He was now forty-five, with a wife and two children, and destitution was staring him in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... shall tell my brother what is going on in his house, and you will be surprised at the Risler whose acquaintance you will make then—a man as violent and ungovernable as he usually is inoffensive. My disclosure will kill him perhaps, but you can be sure that he ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... whole, therefore, the violent jealousy with which Elizabeth continued to regard this feeble and inoffensive young king, in every point so greatly her inferior, must rather be imputed to her narrowness and malignity of temper than to any dictates of sound policy or advisable precaution; and the measures with which it ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Louise, the artisan and the old idiot were, by the orders of Rudolph, conducted to Charenton; they were to have chamber treatment, and receive particular care and attention. Morel left the house without assistance; indifferent, he went where they took him; his madness was inoffensive and sad. The grand mother had hunger; they showed her food; she ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... nowhere perhaps had more beer been drunk than at Clovelly, the borough for which Sir Gregory Grogram sat. When it came to be a matter of individual prosecution against one whom they had all known, and who, as a member, had been inconspicuous and therefore inoffensive, against a heavy, rich, useful man who had been in nobody's way, many thought that it would amount to persecution. The idea of putting old Browborough into prison for conduct which habit had made second ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... among the Indians; and the report of the Cherokee agent, which is among the documents I have referred to, is almost always favorable to the Indians. "The intrusion of whites," he says, "upon the lands of the Cherokees would cause ruin to the poor, helpless, and inoffensive inhabitants." And he farther remarks upon the attempt of the state of Georgia to establish a division line for the purpose of limiting the boundaries of the Cherokees, that the line drawn having been made by the whites, and entirely upon exparte ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... mentioned the criminal slaughter of birds which has been indulged in by individuals who have killed them for the uses of their own lady friends. I know one Brown Pelican colony which was visited by a tourist who shot four hundred of the big, harmless, inoffensive creatures in order to get a small strip of skin on either side of the body. He explained to his boatmen, who did the skinning for him, that he was curious to see if these strips of skin with their feathers would not {154} make an interesting ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... something worth while. So Spanker says; and he was there at the time. Seems she did n't want Dan, and Dan did n't want her, but somehow they were married before they came to an understanding. He's very good to her, in his own inoffensive way; and she leads him a dog's life. One kid. Likely you knew him on Moogoojinna. According to his own account, he came straight through Vic., only stopping once, when he chummied for a few weeks with a squatter that took a fancy to him and treated ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... supercilious condemnation of all manly pastimes and harmless recreations, as well as of the profane custom of promiscuous dancing, that is, of men and women dancing together in the same party (for I believe they admitted that the exercise might be inoffensive if practised by the parties separately)—distinguishing those who professed a more than ordinary share of sanctity, they discouraged, as far as lay in their power, even the ancient wappen-schaws, as they were termed, when the feudal array of the county was called out, and ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... gas that may be condensed easily to a liquid by cooling it down to 46 degrees Fahrenheit. A mixture of three-quarters chlorine with one-quarter phosgene has been found most effective. By itself phosgene has an inoffensive odor somewhat like green corn and so may fail to arouse apprehension until a toxic concentration is reached. But even small doses have such an effect upon the heart action for days afterward that a slight exertion may ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... were the Howes, and beyond the impish pleasure she derived from taunting Martin, they had no interest for her. The sisters were timid, inoffensive beings enough; but had they been three times as inoffensive they were nevertheless Howes; moreover, Ellen did not care for docile people. She was a fighter herself and loved a fighter. That was the reason ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... were only mad on rare occasions. It took something genuinely out of the ordinary to turn an inoffensive pink celluloid doll with one of its legs off into an angry Choolie. But when they were mad the family had discovered by painful experience that the only thing to do was to leave ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... first time in history a wholly independent nation has entered a great and costly war under the influence of ideas rather than immediate interests and without any expectation of gains, except those which can be shared with all liberal and inoffensive nations. ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... sat at table with in her life before, but she had a thorough respect for him, and she felt that the time might come when she could enjoy him—as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossip than her neighbors; and there were no children,—only one grandchild, the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, but everything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell's homesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across the ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... twenty-five or six, well-built, tall and the proud possessor of a carefully trimmed moustache and Vandyke beard, the latter probably cultivated in the endeavour to add to his apparent age. He affected light grey trousers, fancy waistcoats of inoffensive shades, a frock coat, grey gaiters and patent leather shoes. His scarf was always pierced with a small black pearl pin. There's no denying that Mr. Moller knew how to dress or that the effect was pleasing. But Brimfield wasn't educated to such magnificence ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... history of Claybrook, may be amusing to many readers.—The people here are much attached to wakes; and among the farmers and cottagers these annual festivals are celebrated with music, dancing, feasting, and much inoffensive sport; but in the neighbouring villages the return of the wake never fails to produce at least a week of idleness, intoxication, and riot. These and other abuses by which those festivals are grossly perverted, render it highly desirable to all the friends of order and decency ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... moral delinquency, of a revenue statute indicates only a petty offense.[9] The unlawful sale of the unused portion of railway excursion tickets without a license, is at most an infringement of local police regulations; and its moral quality is relatively inoffensive; it may therefore be tried without a jury.[10] But a charge of driving an automobile recklessly, so as to endanger life and property, is a "grave offense" for which a jury trial is requisite.[11] A conspiracy to invade the rights of ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... conversational too, and inclined to quote poetry—this sort of susceptibleness often affects gentlemen after they have had an excellent dinner flavored with the finest Burgundy. Lord Algy was as mild, as tame, and as flabby as a sleeping jelly-fish,—and in this inoffensive, almost tender mood of his, Marcia pounced upon him. She looked ravishingly pretty in the moonlight, with a white wrap thrown carelessly round her head and shoulders, and her bold, bird-like eyes sparkling with excitement (for who that knows the pleasure of sports, is not excited when ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... south, things would have been more hopeful; for the Papuans are friendly, and inoffensive people. These islands here are inhabited by Malays, the most bloodthirsty pirates in the world. However, we must hope that we may not be found, before we have ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... least the good intention is apparent. The Amphitheatre (which seats six or seven thousand auditors) is admirably adapted to its uses; and some of the more recent business buildings, like the Post Office, are inoffensive to the unexacting observer. A wooded peninsula, which is pleasantly laid out as a park, projects into the lake; and, at the point of this, has lately been erected a campanile which is admirable in both color and proportion. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Bob, as much as the inhabitants of the whole group—from Arorai in the south to Makin in the north—do to this day of quiet, spectacled Bob Corrie, of wild Maiana, who can twist them round his little finger without an angry word. Perhaps poor Keyes, being a notoriously inoffensive man, might have died a natural death in due time, but for one fatal mistake he made; and that was in bringing a young wife to ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... be distinguished at the distance of nearly three miles, and astonishes every one when first hearing it. The male is pure white, whilst the female is dusky-green; and white is a very rare colour in terrestrial species of moderate size and inoffensive habits. The male, also, as described by Waterton, has a spiral tube, nearly three inches in length, which rises from the base of the beak. It is jet-black, dotted over with minute downy feathers. This tube can be inflated with air, through a communication ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... And see Miss Martineau in the last Westminster Review:—these things you are old enough to stand? They are even of benefit? Emerson is not without a select public, the root of a select public on this side of the water too.—Popular Sumner is off to Italy, the most popular of men,—inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left. We preferred Coolidge to him in this circle; a square-cut iron man, yet with clear symptoms of a heart in him. Your people will come more and more to their maternal Babylon, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a tiny, inoffensive-looking little organism, of an oval or lance-head shape, which, after masquerading under as many aliases as a confidence man, has finally come to be called the pneumococcus, for short, or "lung germ." Though by those who are more precise it is still known as the Diplococcus ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... schoolboy. He was a stout advocate for the Bourbons and the National Debt, and was duly disliked by Hazlitt, we may feel assured. The Bourbons he affirmed to be the choice of the French people, the Debt necessary to the salvation of these kingdoms. To a little inoffensive man, 'of a saturnine aspect but simple conceptions,' Hazlitt once heard him say grandly, 'I will tell you, sir. I will make my proposition so clear that you will be convinced of the truth of my observation in a moment. Consider, sir, the number of trades that would be thrown out of employ ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... how many good, quiet, inoffensive men, unendowed with any extraordinary abilities, have been enabled, by means of divinity, to enjoy a long life ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... bigotry of the Emperor Aurungzeb, became a serious element of political disturbance. Attempts to suppress forcibly the followers of Nanak Guru, and the execution of one spiritual leader of the Sikhs, turned the Sikhs from inoffensive quietists into fanatical warriors; and by the eighteenth century they were in open revolt against the empire. They were, I think, the most formidable embodiment of militant Hinduism known to Indian history. By that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... when he grew up to man's estate he had nothing to give him, and was forced to let him come over to England to list himself in the Foot Guards. His officers gave him always the character of a quiet, inoffensive lad, who injured nobody, nor was himself addicted to those vices which are common to the men of his profession. On the contrary, he retained yet strong notions of those religious principles in which he had been educated. He addicted himself much to reading, and though his ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... quiet, inoffensive, respectable-looking man not coarse or low in type; this would have been his comment upon the dead man, if he had known nothing about him. Max shuddered as he withdrew his gaze; and, as he did so, he met the eyes ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... now sent Shega and her father home, well clothed and in good case. The week they had passed on board was sufficient time to gain them the esteem of every one, for they were the most quiet, inoffensive beings I ever met with; and, to their great credit, they never once begged. The man was remarkable for his extraordinary fondness for treacle, sugar, salt, acids, and spruce-beer, which the others of the tribe could ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... early, probably about the time when he visited England to receive knighthood, was sent to Lincoln; and friends of the king were consecrated to Winchester, Ely, Bath, Hereford, and Chichester. Prior Richard of Dover, a man "laudably inoffensive who prudently kept within his own sphere," was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Richard de Lucy remained in charge of the whole kingdom as justiciar. The towns and trading classes were steadfast in loyalty, and the baronage was ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... stood before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter. It took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment that was read out in court against inoffensive Richard Baxter. But what was lacking in the charge of the crown was soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge. 'You are a schismatical knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought into court. 'You are ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... could even add and subtract fairly, as was shown by his doing errands at the store for his mother and counting the change which he brought back to her. The bean business was therefore mere nonsense to him. He turned up his nose at the inoffensive kidney-shaped pellets before him, and his reverence for the dignity of the schoolroom and his faith in Miss Stone fell several degrees ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... about in vain for a cover. It never occurred to me, at least never with the force it deserved, that this world is a busy scene, and man, a creature destined for a progressive struggle; and that, however I might possess a warm heart and inoffensive manners (which last, by the by, was rather more than I could well boast); still, more than these passive qualities, there was something to be done. When all my school-fellows and youthful compeers (those ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Jewess slipped off her clothes, in an innocent and inoffensive manner, just as if it was quite the thing,—standing up in plain view of everybody. There went up a great shout of spontaneous astonishment from both banks of the lake where the on-lookers sat. But the shout did not disturb the rather pretty, dark anarchist. Leisurely ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Murray, and that our men were apt to be very saucy with their guns if too much troubled. Experience had taught me the necessity for thus perpetually impressing on the minds, even of the most civil of these savages that, although inoffensive, we were strong; an idea not easily conceived by them. They however came forward and sat down near us until very heavy rain, which fell in the night, obliged them to seek ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... gratification of an innocent curiosity, yet ought not even this to be despised; as being one accession to those few safe and harmless pleasures, which are bestowed on human race. The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind. And though these ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... been claimed that the story simply means that the goddess became intoxicated with beer and that she became genially inoffensive solely as the effect of such inebriation. But the incident in the Egyptian story closely resembles the legends of other countries in which some herb is used specifically as a sedative. In most books on Egyptian mythology the word (d'd') ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... been burned, Bull and five families of his relatives settled what the whites called Bulltown, on the Little Kanawha. This was at a salt spring about a mile and a quarter below the present Bulltown P. O., Braxton county, Va. Capt. Bull and his people were inoffensive, and very friendly to their white neighbors, as ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... relapsing into rebellion, had embraced the alliance of the savages of Aethiopia. The number of the Blemmyes, scattered between the Island of Meroe and the Red Sea, was very inconsiderable, their disposition was unwarlike, their weapons rude and inoffensive. [46] Yet in the public disorders, these barbarians, whom antiquity, shocked with the deformity of their figure, had almost excluded from the human species, presumed to rank themselves among the enemies of Rome. [47] Such had been the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known man and mad-man twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap; a little too fond of the creature—who isn't at times? but Tommy had not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning drunk with last night, and with a superfoetation of drink taken in since he set ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Liberty, when fermented into Licentiousness, hath occasioned many partial Struggles for Power, many Broils and Factions, and much Disturbance to the Community. But very few are the Instances of the Insurrection of any People, who have not been goaded thereto by Severity and Oppression. The inoffensive Stag grows formidable when at Bay. The Worm turneth not, till ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... myself), Mr. Lawrence was gentlemanly and inoffensive to all, and polite to the vicar and the ladies, especially his hostess and her daughter, and Miss Wilson—misguided man; he had not the taste to prefer Eliza Millward. Mr. Lawrence and I were on tolerably intimate terms. ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the Aboriginal Tasmanian was naturally mild and inoffensive in disposition, appears to be beyond doubt. A worm, however, will turn, and the atrocities which were perpetrated against these unoffending creatures may well palliate the indiscriminate, though heart-rending slaughter they entailed. Such was the character of the Tasmanian ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... new motives could urge the Roman princes, who beheld without concern a thousand forms of religion subsisting in peace under their gentle sway, to inflict a severe punishment on any part of their subjects, who had chosen for themselves a singular but an inoffensive mode of faith ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... watched the Russians seemed to tire of shooting holes in an inoffensive hill. They began to try chance shots to the right and to the left. It wasn't many minutes before I realized that, standing near a battery, the execution of which must have been noted on the Russian side, I had a fine chance of experiencing shrapnel bursting ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Zellner and T. C. Dornin. We found ourselves between the picket lines of the two armies. Fortune seemed to favor us. It was just getting dusky twilight, and we saw the relief guard of the Yankees just putting on their picket. They seemed to be very mild, inoffensive fellows. They kept a looking over toward the Rebel lines, and would dodge if a twig cracked under their feet. I walked on as if I was just relieved, and had passed their lines, when I turned back, and says I, "Captain, what guard is this?" He answered, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... Alpine chasms, and shaggy ice-palaces, with tender memory of the Adriatic; courageously steered his way through the inoffensive guttural populations; had got to Berlin, just in this time; been had to dinner daily by the hospitable Barberinas, young Cocceji always his fellow-guest,—'Privately, my poor Signorina's Husband!' whispered old Mamma. Both ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... one of the fifty-nine privileged partakers of the pontifical clemency. He is an advocate; at least he was until the day when he obtained his pardon. He related to me the history of the tolerably inoffensive part he had played in 1848; the hopes he had founded on the amnesty; his despair when he found himself excluded from it; some particulars of his life in exile, such, for instance, as his having had recourse to giving lessons in Italian, like the illustrious ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint, yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums. You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you rest in the state of amateur—amateur housekeeper, amateur artist, amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... intercourse of some standing with the Pierced-nose and Flathead Indians had now convinced Captain Bonneville of their amicable and inoffensive character; he began to take a strong interest in them, and conceived the idea of becoming a pacificator, and healing the deadly feud between them and the Blackfeet, in which they were so deplorably the sufferers. He proposed the matter ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... in Ireland, who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife. They are somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... considering this a most serious charge of unprovoked attack upon an industrious individual, ordered the parties to find bail, in default of fully satisfying the inoffensive dealer in pastry, which ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... People think that dreamers do no harm. They are mistaken: dreamers do a great heal of harm. Even apparently inoffensive utopian ideas really exercise a noxious influence. They tend to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... had heard nothing beforehand he would have taken the man for a fussy, inoffensive little scrivener who would never do more than he was bid—or less. But when they were seated in the private room above the shop, in which Guy kept some of the finest of his gold and silver work, Simon's restless eyes began to glitter, ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... their labours well requited, it would be the means of their keeping up a constant communication with us which probably might be the means of laying the first stone towards their Christianity. They are a poor harmless, inoffensive set of people, and their wandering and ill-provided way of living seems more to ask for pity from us than to fill our heads with thoughts that they ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... behind him, close to the fire. Instinctively he turned round to look at it. A kriss without its sheath lay by the embers; a sinuous dark object, looking like something that had been alive and was now crushed, dead and very inoffensive; a black wavy outline very distinct and still in the dull red glow. Without thinking he moved to pick it up, stooping with the sad and humble movement of a beggar gathering the alms flung into the dust of the roadside. Was this the answer to ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Strassof? And Pierre Slutch? All the comrades who swore with me to revenge my brother? Where are they? On what gallows did you have them hung? What mine have you buried them in? And still you follow your slavish task. And my friends, my other friends, the poor comrades of my artist life, the inoffensive young men who have not committed any other crime than to come to see me too often when I was lively, and who believed they could talk freely in my dressing-room—where are they? Why have they left me, one by one? Why have they disappeared? It is you, wretch, who watched them, who spied on them, ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and inoffensive way." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... great man, as was the case. The prefect of the palace was ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim's moral and political character. He applied to the police commissary, who, within twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was the most inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that ever entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword, worn a dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about his real character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as nowhere ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the epithet of "unfortunate," which one of our most respectable colleagues in the French Academy has pronounced relative to this celebrated phrase, while doing justice at the same time to the sentiments of the author. The poison contained in the few words that I have quoted, was very inoffensive, since more than a year passed without any courtier, though furnished like a microscope with, all the monarchical susceptibilities, beginning to ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... millinery feather hunter there should be mentioned the criminal slaughter of birds which has been indulged in by individuals who have killed them for the uses of their own lady friends. I know one Brown Pelican colony which was visited by a tourist who shot four hundred of the big, harmless, inoffensive creatures in order to get a small strip of skin on either side of the body. He explained to his boatmen, who did the skinning for him, that he was curious to see if these strips of skin with their feathers would not {154} make an interesting coat for his wife. The birds killed were all ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... inoffensive people—these do-no-harm Christians —know nothing of want. When and where have they cut themselves short of any thing to which they were lawfully entitled, for the sake of doing good to others? They have, indeed, performed works of charity ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... seat, and calmly confronted her. Beautiful she certainly was, at that moment; but it was the beauty of an angry serpent. She had a pencil in her hand, with which, a little while before, she had been sketching heads of some of the passengers in her little notebook. She was now handling this inoffensive object in such a way as to justify the fancy that, had it been charged with a deadly poison in its point, instead of with a bit of plumbago of the HH quality, she would have driven it into ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... Londonderry, it is stated, a number of inoffensive neutrals were set upon and beaten by rowdies of both factions. We have constantly maintained that Irish unity can always be secured when there is something really worth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... inhabited by a harmless inoffensive race of people; and here, as also in Andaman, are found the edible bird's-nests so ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Thinks aw to misen, this sooart o' thing has gooan far enuff, an as awd just been readin' abaat th' "atrocities," aw fancied misen England an him Turkey an her a poor Bulgarian, an aw determined awr wodn't see a poor inoffensive young woman ill-treated bi a brute like that, soa just as he wor gettin' ready to strike her daan into th' eearth, aw stept behund him an planted mi naive at th' back ov his ear, an he rolled ovver like a skittle pin. Just as he fell awd an idea 'at awd ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... time believing no more in the stories they are telling, or in the deities themselves, than Tennyson need have believed in King Arthur and Guinevere. The gods are good poetic material and are sure to afford popular, or at least inoffensive, reading. The poets doubtless do something to humanise and beautify the popular conception of a deity, but they seldom deliberately set out with any such purpose. If the educated are not poets, but public men ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... nothing sensational was discovered among the documents which filled his drawers. As to his relations with women, they appeared to have been promiscuous but superficial. He had many acquaintances among them, but few friends, and no one whom he loved. His habits were regular, his conduct inoffensive. His death was an absolute mystery, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... possible a story should be new, clever, short, simple, inoffensive, and appropriate. As such stories are scarce, it is advisable to set them down, when found, in a special note-book for convenient reference. It is said that Chauncey M. Depew, one of the most gifted of after-dinner speakers, was for ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... more than a year after this, that Princess Victoria found a husband in the insignificant-looking and inoffensive Prince Adolph of Schaumburg-Lippe, son of Prince George of that ilk, the prince at that time serving as Captain of Hussars at Bonn. Soon afterwards, Emperor William learning that Prince Waldemar of Lippe was dying, took advantage ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... other restraint than unwillingness to offend, and hears with no other disposition than desire to be pleased.' In The Idler, No. 34, he says 'that companion will be oftenest welcome whose talk flows out with inoffensive copiousness and unenvied insipidity.' He wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'Such tattle as filled your last sweet letter prevents one great inconvenience of absence, that of returning home a stranger and an inquirer. The variations of life consist of little things. Important innovations are soon heard, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... where, and had set himself up in business as a marine-store dealer, in a back street which ran down to the shore of the Tweed. He was a little red-haired, pale-eyed rat of a man, with ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the walls—you might find him at all odd hours either in these public places or in the door of his shop, talking away with any idler like himself. And how I came to get into talk with him on that particular night ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... parsons, all Entirely inoffensive; four True human beings - what I call Human - the deuce a ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cards, and may be imprinted as Mr. Jones instead of Mr. Ebenezer Jones. In his signature, save where the forms of the law demand Ebenezer in full, he may only use an initial and be your obedient servant E. Jones, leaving it to be conjectured that E. stands for Edward or Ernest,—names inoffensive, and not suggestive of a Dissenting Chapel, like Ebenezer. If a man called Edward or Ernest be detected in some youthful indiscretion, there is no indelible stain on his moral character: but if an Ebenezer be so detected he is set down as a hypocrite; it produces that shock ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blood red. He had not meant to provoke a quarrel with Storm, but had simply wished to soften the blow for Hoek Matts, who was an inoffensive man. Just the same, he could not help feeling chagrined over the reply he had got; but before he could think of a retort, one of the men who had come in with Hoek ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... and sketches, not yet famous, and he held a not very lucrative public office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service, but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his Washington friends lost power, there was no one else interested in keeping ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... present, great order and decency was wont to be observed, for he would not endure to hear or see any thing that was rude or unhandsome, but made it the habit of all who kept his company, to entertain themselves with quiet and inoffensive amusements. But in the middle of this entertainment, those who sought occasion to quarrel, fell into dissolute discourse openly, and making as if they were very drunk, committed many insolences on purpose to provoke ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was plainly dissatisfied with himself at the failure of his prediction for fine weather, and perhaps he feared that the ambitious young officer intended to instruct him in regard to the situation, though Scott had conducted himself in the most modest and inoffensive manner. ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... notoriety and admiration. He was wont to refer to himself simply as "The Bravest Man," without reference to time or place—just "The Bravest Man." He was accustomed to demonstrate his bravery by shooting inoffensive people whenever the idea seized him. He never killed anybody save quiet and law-abiding fellow citizens who made no resistance, and the method he selected was to shoot them through the head. He seemed to feel that it was essential to his dignity ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... car, effected a transfer, and in a quarter of an hour after leaving the Sanctuary was huddled, an inoffensive heap, like a tired-out workingman, in a corner seat of a Long Island train. From here, there was only a short run ahead of him, and, twenty minutes later, descending from the train at Forest Hills, he had passed through the more thickly settled portion ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... be banished, even though those things never reached the public. At last the time came for suppressing this journal and punishing its managers. The chief editor was a young Piedmontese poet, who politically was one of the most harmless and inoffensive of men; his literary creed obliged him to choose Italian subjects for his poems, and he thus erred by mentioning Italy; yet Arnaud, in his "Poeti Patriottici", tells us he could find but two lines ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... over the child and remained perfectly still. He did not dare to move, lest any action, however inoffensive, might induce Moosa to change his mind and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... not so entertaining, but she was more interesting than Lady Geraldine: the flashes of her ladyship's wit, though always striking, were sometimes dangerous; Cecilia's wit, though equally brilliant, shone with a more pleasing and inoffensive light. With as much generosity as Lady Geraldine could show in great affairs, she had more forbearance and delicacy of attention on every-day occasions. Lady Geraldine had much pride, and it often gave offence; Cecilia, perhaps, had more pride, but it never appeared, except upon the defensive: without ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... draft in the city of New York, there had been heard on all sides from the newspaper press which sympathized with and aided the rebellion, premonitions of the coming storm; denunciations of the war, the government, the soldiers, of the harmless and inoffensive negroes; angry incitings of the poor man to hatred against the rich, since the rich man could save himself from the necessity of serving in the ranks by the payment of three hundred dollars of commutation money; incendiary appeals to the worst passions of the most ignorant portion of the community; ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... a trifle rough on inoffensive pilgrims," said Graeme. "I'm really sorry to have got ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... temper he was quick of resentment; but by his established and habitual practice, he was gentle, modest, and inoffensive. His tenderness appeared in his attention to children, and to the poor. To the poor, while he lived in the family of his friend, he allowed the third part of his annual revenue, though the whole was not a hundred a year; and for children, ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... lieutenant, had none. How he had got his promotion was surprising to those who knew him, till it was whispered about that he had a very near relative in a high position, who had no difficulty in obtaining it for him. Sims was, however, generally liked; he was very inoffensive, he never talked about himself or his friends, seemed to wish to be let alone, and to let others alone. He was always ready to do a good-natured action, to take a brother officer's watch, or to give up his own leave ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... could tolerate no rival—or it may be that she really loved the King. He had given himself to her in the flush of his triumphant return, while he was still young enough to feel a genuine passion. For her sake he had been a cruel husband, an insolent tyrant to an inoffensive wife; for her sake he had squandered his people's money, and outraged every moral law; and it may be that she remembered these things, and hated him the more fiercely for them when he was inconstant. She was a woman ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of the wreck of the Idaho as to make a sinner of his memory and "credit his own lie." The burden of his latest song was that Loring had been to see him at hospital and had promised him, on condition of being guaranteed against action or prosecution because of the shooting of a wronged and inoffensive man, that he (Loring) would pay him handsomely—would send him ten dollars a week, and gave him twenty-five dollars then and there. "But now, for more than a month," said he, "not a cent had come, and he heard that Mr. Loring was trying to get away East." The man told his story ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... imagine a more inoffensive practice than giving to negro girls the rudiments of an education. Yet a school for this purpose, taught by Miss Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut, was broken up by persistent persecution, a special act of the Legislature ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... rural felicity would afford me few gratifications. I never shot but to miss the mark, and, to confess the truth, was afraid of the fire of my own gun. I could discover no musick in the cry of the dogs, nor could divest myself of pity for the animal whose peaceful and inoffensive life was sacrificed to our sport. I was not, indeed, always at leisure to reflect upon her danger; for my horse, who had been bred to the chase, did not always regard my choice either of speed or way, but leaped hedges and ditches at his own discretion, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... I would rather prove myself a gentleman by being learned and humble, valiant and inoffensive, virtuous and communicable, than by any fond ostentation of riches." —The ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... contradictory crimes, he could not be a betrayer of the rights of the people, and at the same time limit the sovereign power. Cowel retreated to his college, and, like a wise man, abstained from the press; he pursued his private studies, while his inoffensive life was a comment on Coke's inhumanity more honourable to Cowel than any of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... at nothing but sober friendliness; it was perfectly inoffensive—indeed, respectful. Now and then—not too often—he fixed his eyes upon her for an instant. After the introductory phrases, he mentioned that he had had a long drive, alone; his horse was baiting in preparation for the journey back to London. He often took such drives in the summer, ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... imagining that they were little and he was still a giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough coachmen even lashed at the giant with their whips. But was that just? What may not be done by habit? Habit had brought Stepan Trofimovitch almost to the same position, but in a more innocent and inoffensive form, if one may use such expressions, for he was a most ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his movements with jealousy and envy, and who were silently preparing instruments for his destruction, was Joseph Martinengo, a Piedmontese count belonging to the prince's suite, whom G——— himself had formerly promoted, as an inoffensive creature, devoted to his interests, for the purpose of supplying his own place in attending upon the pleasures of the prince—an office which he began to find irksome, and which he willingly exchanged for more ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... were in a state of intimidation. It was plain that their mother was fairly aroused, and each deemed it best to be as quiet and inoffensive as possible. The reappearance of harmony being thus restored, Mrs. Abercrombie, whose head and heart were now both throbbing with pain, retired in a most unhappy state of mind to her chamber, where she threw herself into a large ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... an unpleasant nickname, the more you try to pull it off, the more it sticks the faster. Malapert and Lehideux are still well represented in the Paris Directory. Many objectionable nicknames have, however, disappeared, or have been so modified as to become inoffensive. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... difficult thing to find any pretext for its capture. It was held by the Knights of St. John, the decrepit remnant of an order whose heroism had many times been the shield of Christendom against the Turk, and whose praise had once filled the whole earth. They were now as inoffensive as they were incapable. Their helplessness was their true defence,—and the memory of their good deeds. At last, in 1798, Napoleon, on his way to Egypt, partly by force and partly by treaty, obtained possession of it. So strong were its fortresses, that he himself acknowledged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... clear story of theft and falsehood, Duncan Lisle naturally took the same view of it as had the humble Amy. The master of Kennons had not been ignorant of his wife's systematic persecution of this inoffensive servant. He had more than once spoken to her on the subject—but finding he had but made the matter worse, ceased to interfere. Now, he suspected China to be the victim of a successful plot. His wife ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... these whales, and stuck long, pointed darts into them; and how the sea was discoloured with the blood of these poor whales for many miles distance: and I admired at the courage of the men, but I was sorry for the inoffensive whale. Many other pretty sights he used to shew me, when he was not on watch, or doing some duty for the ship. No one was more attentive to his duty than he; but at such times as he had leisure, he would shew me all pretty sea sights:—the dolphins ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution wherein he has refused admiration and respect for the crimes then committed, which is why posterity now begins to be very severe upon him. His learned style is wholly artificial, coloured without his being a colourist, composed ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... "the end has come, and the old, dark story will be laid with me in the grave. I know I have sinned grievously, but have atoned with a life of repentance and cruel suffering for the murder of an inoffensive wife." ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... him so little, madam," she answered, "that I cannot say of him much; he appears, however, to be inoffensive; but, indeed, were I never to see him again, he is one of those I should forget I had ever seen ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... more inoffensive ghost than that described by Defoe in his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions: "A grave, ancient man, with a full-bottomed wig and a rich brocaded gown, who changed into the most horrible monster that ever was seen, with eyes ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... red-lighters, pass unnoticed through a slum, join casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked about a street corner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were the unconsidered trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face, even in those early days, was heavy and inoffensive. Commonplace seemed to be the word that fitted him. He could always mix with and become one of the crowd. He would have laughed at any such foolish phrase as "protective coloration." Yet seldom, he knew, men turned back to look at him a second time. Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... said the other. "And old people are inoffensive even if they are ignorant. Old age is in itself a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... endeavoured in vain to find an uninhabited cove; and at last were obliged to bivouac not far from a party of natives. They were very inoffensive as long as they were few in numbers, but in the morning (21st) being joined by others they showed symptoms of hostility, and we thought that we should have come to a skirmish. An European labours under great ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... justice, Dinsmore in high good humor with himself set out to call on Clint Wadley. He had made an inoffensive human being suffer, and that is always something to a man's credit. If he could not do any better, Pete would bully a horse, but he naturally preferred humans. They were more ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... droll exaggeration. The inspired person who chose to call a coffin an "eternity box" and whisky "blue ruin" was too innocent to sneer. The slang of Mark Twain's Mr. Scott when he goes to make arrangements for the funeral of the lamented Buck Fanshawe is excruciatingly funny and totally inoffensive. Then the story of Jim Baker and the jays in "A Tramp Abroad" is told almost entirely in frontier slang, yet it is one of the most exquisite, tender, lovable pieces of work ever set down in our tongue. The grace and fun of the story, the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... shall be expressed, Inoffensive, welcome guest! While the rat is on the scout, And the mouse with curious snout, With what vermin else infest Every dish, and spoil the best; Frisking thus before the fire, Thou hast ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... are too obvious and important to escape the observation of any part of America or Europe. But as it is a movement of great delicacy, it will require all your address to communicate the subject in a manner that shall be inoffensive to his feelings, and consistent with all the respect that is due from ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... infested the wooded interior of Norway, and dwelt in a cave—a miserable hole in which a blind bat in a condition of sempiternal torpor would have declined to hibernate, rent-free. Juniper was such a feeble little wretch, so inoffensive in his way of life, so modest in his demeanour, that every one was disposed to love him like a cousin; there was not enough of him to love like a brother. He, too, was inclined to return the affection; he was too weak to love very hard, but he made the best stagger at it he could. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... even most men. Far from it. The barber and the priest, backed by the whole opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the ingenious hidalgo, who, sallying forth from his native place, broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... always totally extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... not be sustained at the time, and still remain entirely unsupported by fact. There is no more disgraceful proceeding to be found in the pages of history than our raid on this small and highly honourable, inoffensive, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... trying to acquire courage to ask what reason she could have for hating any one who looked so gentle and inoffensive, when the woman ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... court, much more than for your sake, will not fail to repeat and even amplify the praise to the party concerned. This is, of all flattery, the most pleasing, and consequently the most effectual. There are other, and many other, inoffensive arts of this kind, which are necessary in the course of the world, and which he who practices the earliest, will please the most, and rise the soonest. The spirits and vivacity of youth are apt to neglect ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... imply that the "massacre" was a mere marauding, cruel, and murderous invasion of an inoffensive and peaceful settlement; while the other two versions of Dr. Ramsay and Mr. Hildreth clearly show the provocation and cruel wrongs which the Loyalists, and even Indians, had experienced from the continentals and inhabitants of Wyoming; ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... to think that bad influence could come of such an inoffensive old man! Truth, I know and feel, is powerfully painful when brought home to the doors of our best people,—it cuts deep when told in broad letters; but they make the matter worse by attempting to enshrine the stains with their chivalry. We are a wondrous people, uncle, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... prophet of Christian truth. Whether the paintings in the catacombs took their origin from these fictions must be uncertain; but driven, as the Roman Christians were, to hide the truth under a symbol that should be inoffensive, and should not reveal its meaning to pagan eyes, it was not strange that they should select this of the ancient poet. As he had drawn beasts and trees and stones to listen to the music of his lyre, so Christ, with persuasive sweetness and compelling force, drew ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... church porch, except for the formidable points of a sham portcullis; but there was no denying that it greatly increased the comfort of the house, with its two sets of heavy doors, and the seats on either side. The great hall door had been closed up, plastered over within, and rendered inoffensive. Towards the west there was another modern addition of drawing and dining rooms, and handsome bedchambers above, in Gothic taste, i.e. with pointed arches filled up with glass over the sash- windows. The drawing-room was very pretty, with a glass door at ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... least right to complain of this exercise of a higher authority. If he had a right—and he has no right except brute strength, if that be a right—to bully, beat, torment, and perhaps injure for life a poor little inoffensive child, and by doing so to render the name of the school infamous, I maintain that the monitors, who have the interest of the school most at heart, who are ranged ex officio on the side of truth, of justice, and of honour, have infinitely more right to thrash him for ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... cowardly, so fiendish a fashion. I was ready to be sorry for them when I was crushing their boat. But this makes me feel as if one ought to lose no opportunity for sweeping the venomous wretches off the face of the earth. They have no excuse, you see. It is our lives or theirs. We are inoffensive enough surely; and they would have gained by our presence if they had been friendly. But ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Mr. Holmes," said White Mason. "If the fellow did not want the hue and cry raised over him, one would imagine that he would have returned and remained at the hotel as an inoffensive tourist. As it is, he must know that he will be reported to the police by the hotel manager and that his disappearance will be connected with ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a death struggle between one of the giant soldiers and an inoffensive-looking worker. The drab, comparatively feeble body of the worker was wriggling right in the center of the great claws which, with a twitch, could have sliced it in two endwise. Yet the jaws did not twitch; ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... in a living cheval-de-frise against the tiger, they rush tumultuously at him, and fairly hunt him from the jungle. The pig, having a short thick neck, and being tremendously muscular, is hard to kill; but the poor inoffensive cow, with her long-neck, is generally killed at the first blow, or so disabled that it requires little further effort to complete the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... might have been partially insane—these are charitable suppositions; but at all events, he had the impertinence to address Mrs. Tubbs in a low tone, audible only to herself. He muttered some compliment to her appearance—talked a little nonsense—inoffensive in itself, but intolerable as coming from a stranger. Mrs. Tubbs made no reply, but she was glad to spring from the conveyance when the driver pulled up at the Norfolk House. To her great joy she espied the faithful Tubbs, attired in a blouse, and wheeling a barrow ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... pretext that it encumbered the street; while, on the one hand, they left an ugly mass called the Luckenbooths, and, on the other, an awkward, long, and low guard-house, which were fifty times more encumbrance than the venerable and inoffensive Cross. ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... of them, deserving well of their kind—he must have talked nearly into a state of syncope before ever he found one to give way, in a moment of weakness, of utter exhaustion and despair, and consent to publish him; and when I reflect what numbers of inoffensive persons, in the quiet walks of life, have been made to suffer the infliction of that Bore's Own Book, I pause, I stand aghast at the inscrutability of ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... sighs for ale, and idleness, and a wife, and the devil knows what besides. I have not been disappointed or disgusted. I have lived with the highest and the lowest. I have been for days in a Pacha's palace, and have passed many a night in a cowhouse, and I find the people inoffensive and kind. I have also passed some time with the principal Greeks in the Morea and Livadia, and, though inferior to the Turks, they are better than the Spaniards, who, in their turn, excel the Portuguese. Of Constantinople you will find many descriptions in different ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... seated in a chair, dejected and making himself as inoffensive as possible. Lady Webling had packed her own bag and was helping the helpless Sir Joseph find the things he was looking for in vain, though they were right before him. Marie Louise saw evidences that a larger packing had already ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... They never heap the ashes of charitable oblivion upon the coals of prejudice and hate, but continue to replenish it with the most exciting and fiery appeals. The Edgefield paper makes light of this dastardly violence done to aged and inoffensive women by ascribing it as the work of "rash boys." Manly pastime for these brave boys! a crime sir, that in any other State, and done to any other class, would have demanded and met with immediate ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all coincided, it was that he was inoffensive but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage and had considerable facility of speech, when any person could be found who thought it worth while to listen to him; but on the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... built after the same principle, nor could they settle the dispute, Jerry claiming that it was all right in a rifle, as a man hunted big game with that, and his life might be in danger; while with the other weapon he usually only shot birds and inoffensive small animals; while Bluff declared that what was black for the pot was ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... the Camanches and other remote nations for their complement of steeds for the warriors, and pack-horses for their transportation to and from the hunting ground. But the instant they are forced to maintain a peaceful and inoffensive demeanor towards the tribes along the Mexican border, and find that every violation of their rights is followed by the avenging arm of our government, the result must be, that, reduced to a wretchedness and want which they can ill brook, and feeling the certainty of punishment ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... they found a very dark-skinned race of natives in possession of the land. The natives were low of stature, with ugly broad faces, flat noses, and frizzly hair. Their habits were repulsive, but they were inoffensive. They lived chiefly on shell-fish and what they could obtain from the sea. Occasionally they hunted the kangaroo, and unfortunately a kangaroo hunt led to ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... his officers laughed among themselves at that inoffensive courage, and as the people in the whole country round showed themselves obliging and compliant towards them, they willingly tolerated their silent patriotism. Only little Baron Wilhelm would have ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... vacant. A sheet of spotless snow served as a back-ground, that would have been sure to betray the presence of any object passing over its surface. Even the conch might be seen suspended from one of the timbers, as mute and inoffensive as the hour, when it had been washed by the waves, on the ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... It is really, however, not an unamiable bird, as was proved by Colonel Montagu in the case of one which he managed to catch by means of a slight wound in the wing, and which lived with him for upwards of a year. It used to follow its feeder about, and displayed a most inoffensive disposition. With other birds it was on terms, of peace, and goodwill, never threatening them with its big, strong bill. An excellent angler, its skill in capture was seen to greatest advantage when it had to encounter an unusually ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... with a little misadventure on account of the sheep—an animal which one is accustomed to regard as of a timid and inoffensive nature. When I set out at a brisk pace to walk to the house I have spoken of, in order to make some inquiries there, a few of the sheep that happened to be near began to bleat loudly, as if alarmed, and by and by they came hurrying after me, apparently in a great state of ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... better have been kept apart. Others had gone away to break into the kitchen, headed by one who had just come into college and vowed he would have some supper; and others, to screw up an unpopular tutor, or to break into the rooms of some inoffensive freshman. The remainder mustered on the grass in the quadrangle, and began playing leap-frog and larking one another. Amongst these last was our hero, who had been at Blake's wine and one of the quieter supper parties; and, though not so far gone as most of ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... father's strong aversion to violence, and the real predilection that Berenger's good mien, respectful manners, and liberal usage had won from him, and she believed he had much rather the youth lived, provided he were inoffensive. No doubt a little force had been necessary to kidnap one so tall, active, and determined, and Veronique had made up her horrible tale after the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
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