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More "Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was raised upon one of the breast-works thrown up by them for defence, of which several are to be met with in walking a few miles into the country, and some of them very substantial. Their campaigns in this petty warfare were carried on very deliberately. They made a regular practice of commencing a truce at sunset, when they remained in mutual security, and sometimes agreed that hostilities should take place only between certain hours of the day. The English resident, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... base condition, a high degree of sense. Then, recognising that he could not compass his end without causing a bruit, and not being minded to brave so great a dishonour in order to be avenged upon so petty an offender, he was content by a single word of admonition to shew him that his offence had not escaped notice. Wherefore turning to them all, he said:—"He that did it, let him do it no more, and get you hence in God's peace." Another would have put them to the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... hogsheads of liquor. He captures an entire fleet of warships. A rival race of pygmies endeavors to secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power. The quarrels between these little people seem ridiculous, and so petty as to ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes and intrigues through these Memoirs! By a few strokes of his pen, in words that bite like acid, he etches for us the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, their ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... what he was my old skipper," observed Jack. "And you fine young fellows couldn't do better than join her," exclaimed a petty officer, who was standing near, clapping Jack ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... feared and abhorred, and now, in the wane of her beauty, she was easily content with such crumbs of money profit as could be picked up by an easy code of a plastic surface morality which covered only her petty intrigues. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... they. Indeed, so much did Fritz impress Eric with the value of carefully considering every petty detail of their outfit, so that they might not find something omitted at the last moment which would be of use, that there was danger of their forgetting more important articles— the "little things," apparently, absorbing all ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... system full at once of pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... pipes and the curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether—but one will never forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge of Venice, the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order, an old-time Pope—anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power utterly ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... was cool and decided. He possessed in an eminent degree the egotism that makes possible great crimes and great criminals, and his degenerate brain dealt with this colossal horror as simply as if it had been a petty theft. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... attempts to spur the jaded adrenals with artificial excitements. Consequent melancholia and depression, the "blues," are inevitable. A survey of drug addicts would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The same applies to certain petty criminals and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... wid dem and dey put me behind de door. Dey tole me to set der till dey cum out. And when I see dem cumin' out to follow behind and get into de carrage. I dursent say nothin'. I wuz like a petty dog. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... of missionary lectures has helped to give the men a new world view of Christianity. It has lifted the simple villager, and the man who has never known anything save the narrow ruts of his own denomination, above the petty interests and divisions of his former life to face world problems and the wide extension of the Kingdom of God. Four lecturers have followed each other to present a great world view to the men in these thirty huts: Butcher of New Guinea showed the effect of the impact of the Gospel upon primitive ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... A petty court-martial was called to adjust a question of army discipline. The court was composed of Z. Taylor, Colonel Commanding, Major Thomas F. Smith, a fiery-tempered gay officer of the old army, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, and the new Second Lieutenant ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... flocks of sheep, and lived in opulence compared with many of the other tribes of North America. After the acquisition of this territory by the United States they became disaffected by reason of encroaching civilization, and the petty wars between United States troops and the Navajos were in the main disastrous to our forces, due in part to the courage, skill, and superior numbers of the Navajos and in part to the character of the country, which is easily defended, as the ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... Ages; connection real indeed, but slight, of small importance. Neither from the magician of old, nor the seeress of Celts and Germans, comes forth the true Witch. The harmless "Sabasies" (from Bacchus Sabasius), and the petty rural "Sabbath" of the Middle Ages, have nothing to do with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, with the grand defiance then solemnly given to Jesus. This fearful conception never grew out of a long chain of tradition. It leapt forth from the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... after the fashion of modern days, and Mr. Madison was given to understand that Mr. Gallatin would not be confirmed if nominated as secretary of state. Mr. Madison yielded to this dictation, and from that day forward was, as he deserved to be, perplexed and harassed by a petty oligarchy. Mr. John Quincy Adams, in a note on this affair, says that, "had Mr. Gallatin been appointed secretary of state, it is highly probable war with Great Britain would not have taken place." But it is improbable that any step in foreign intercourse ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... down at sea, when heaven was all tranquillity,' there come also dark and nights of wild tempest when we have to lay to and ride out the gale with a tremendous strain on the cable. Our sorrows, our disappointments, our petty annoyances, and the great irrevocable griefs that sooner or later darken the very earth, are all to be classified under this same purpose, 'that the trial of your faith ... might be found unto praise and honour and glory.' And so, I beseech you, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... "coprolite" digging[208] resulted in the systematic turning over of a considerable area, their number is astounding, proving the existence of a teeming population. Many thousands of coins were turned up, scarcely ever in hordes, but scattered singly all over the land, testifying to the amount of petty traffic which must have gone on generation after generation. For these coins are very rarely of gold or silver, and amongst them are found the issues of every Roman Emperor from Augustus to Valentinian III. And, besides the coins, the soil was found to teem ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... and see. I ... I ... want to do some Empire work or something. I can't explain. But we've just got into such a maze of petty happenings and petty pleasures, and since the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... many centuries it has been famous for its monasteries, some of which are built of timbers taken from imperial palaces. Formerly the missionaries from neighbouring seaports found at Putu refuge from the summer heat, but it is now abandoned, since it afforded no shelter from the petty piracy at all times so rife in ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fine harbor, where ships arrive daily from the different quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them converse; but withal, I took care to make my court regularly to the Maharaja, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They put a thousand questions respecting my country; and I, being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, asked them concerning everything which ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... inflection, or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it; and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has published such petty ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... not a great while before the mothers began to come in with their petty savings, also, and after a long talk with Mr. Barrington, one day, a real banking institution was incorporated, with the stock issued in dollar shares. Mr. Barrington, as president, headed the list of ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... are nothing—or little at best— But duty with greatness the least can invest: One note on the flute or the trumpet may seem A poor petty work for ambition's fond dream,— But what if that note be a need-be to blend And quicken the score from beginning to end? To show forth the mind of the Master, who guides With baton unerring Time's mixture of tides, The good with the evil, the blessing and bane, The Amazon rushing far into the main, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for adding one thing more—that it should be pointed out to Mr. Attorney to consider whether the crime of the Daughter, who, as I apprehend, lived with & was maintained by her Father, may not be Petty Treason. ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... trivial and absurd the whole thing is! Even a man whose career has been ruined by malicious persecution will be avoided like a pest if it is known that he dins the account of his wrongs into everyone's ears. How, then, shall the sufferer by the petty injuries of ordinary sport be listened to with patience? Of all bores, the grievancemonger is the fiercest and worst. Lay this great truth by in your memory, and be mindful of it in more important matters than sport when the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... very good thing to establish some direct communication with the King and Thiers, as well as the truth of all the reasons by which he supported this proposal; but the following day he came down with a whole host of petty objections, 'which seemed to prevail in his perplexed and unserviceable mind.' The Duke of Bedford writes to me that he expects this state of things will lead to a fresh combination of parties, and the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... from whom creation came; There is no word whereby to speak His name But petty men have mouthed it ...
— New Thought Pastels • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that she was in the power of a desperate man, who would sacrifice her in a moment if she thwarted him. Through cowardly fear she remained his reluctant but abject slave, pricking him with the pins and needles of petty annoyances, when she would have pierced him to the heart had she dared. This monstrous state of affairs could not last forever, and, had not death terminated the unnatural relation, some terrible catastrophe would no doubt have occurred. Having contracted a western fever, she soon ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... friend, of whom I had heard so much, to turn up together one Sunday evening. So great was my ignorance of the world, so wild my enthusiasm, that I imagined every socialist as a hero, willing to throw away his life at a moment's notice on behalf of the "Cause." I had had no experience of the petty internal strifes, of the jealousies and human frailties which a closer knowledge of all political parties reveals. I remember how ashamed I felt of the quite unostentatious comfort of our home, how anxious I was to dissemble the presence of servants, how necessary ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... and master of the destinies of his adopted country. A dazzling future opened before him. Within a year he had pacified Europe, crushing the armies of Austria by a succession of brilliant victories, and laying prostrate the petty states of the Italian peninsula. Peace with England was also in sight. Six weeks after his victory at Marengo, Bonaparte sent a special courier to Spain to demand—the word is hardly ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... tumult such as to bring to mind 'the day of judgment," the death-shrieks, songs, yells, and "people beside themselves, for the most part not knowing where they are nor what they want."—Each district is also a petty center, while the Palais-Royal is the main center. Propositions, "accusations, and deputations travel to and fro from one to the other, along with the human torrent which is obstructed or rushes ahead with no other guide than its own inclination and the chances ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are mere petty details; don't bother about the means to an end. You, a little time ago, were trying to control your servants by kindness, but it is necessary to command and compel them, and to do it ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... the petty vices of childhood appears to shock adults so much as lying; and none is more widespread among children—and among adults. As we are speaking of children, however, it is enough to say that all children lie—constantly, persistently, universally. Perhaps you will be less grieved by the lies of ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... less petty than New York; if I should be out of the tug and scramble there. But I mustn't judge New York, viewing it through the Van Dams' eyes. If I did, I should see ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the pre-eminent value of the Jew as a bond of empire, an intermediary between the heterogeneous nations which they brought beneath their sway. Each in turn showed favor to his religion, and accorded him political privileges. The petty tyrants of all ages have persecuted Jews on the plea of securing uniformity among their subjects; but the great conqueror-statesmen who have made history, realizing that progress is brought about by unity in difference, have recognized in Jewish individuality a force making ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... General Gallieni. "The Apaches of Paris have not acquired an undeserved reputation. There is no crime on the calendar they would not commit for a few cents. From petty thievery to murder they have advanced by degrees, until to-day the life of a person who ventures among them is not worth a cent, should they believe he had ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... a matter of a few petty structural details, falling within the finical department of the classifier, we might pass them over without hesitation; but a creature that turns itself upside down in order to walk with its belly ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... exasperated shrug, and began to walk about the room. "She turns to Carter," he burst out again angrily, "a man who could hurt me irreparably by letting it get about that my mother-in-law had to ask him for a petty loan!" ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... went to the Town Hall below Lucetta's house, to attend Petty Sessions, being still a magistrate for the year by virtue of his late position as Mayor. In passing he looked up at her windows, but nothing of her ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the artistic criticism of this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before. It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw morals and religion, language and society, along ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... written a beautiful little tract on this subject—"Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline." God never places us in any position in which we can not grow. We may fancy that He does. We may fear we are so impeded by fretting, petty cares that we are gaining nothing; but when we are not sending any branches upward, we may be sending roots downward. Perhaps in the time of our humiliation, when everything seems a failure, we are making the best kind of progress. God delights to try our ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the hour prefixed, in order to make some promised domestic arrangements for the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at some distance from home—and that either the extreme beauty of the day had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience and solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... torment and petty aggravation that a man could stand for three months, I left and went to work at the White Oak Ranch. The boss there set me to grubbing out oaks, and I can assure you it was a relief after ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... sail-setting with his hands in his pockets, and swore promiscuously at every one, from the mate downwards, in a hearty comprehensive way, which showed a mind that was superior to petty distinctions. Having run over all the oaths that he could think of, he dived below and helped himself from the rum bottle, a process which appeared to aid his memory or his invention, for he reappeared upon deck and evolved a new many-jointed expletive ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Norway, Gascony, and France. At Caerleon he holds a tournament at which all the monarchs of the world are present; there he puts upon his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the sovereign lord of the universe. So incredible is it that a petty king of the sixth century, scarcely remarked by his contemporaries, should have taken in posterity such colossal proportions, that several critics have supposed that the legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who bore that name ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... gun twice or thrice a-week; and by that means lives much cheaper than those who have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: In short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Philippa Chaucer L10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... commotions, commenced holding their meetings in Oxford." Among those who removed to Oxford were, "first, Dr Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr Goddard, whereupon our company divided. Those at London (and we when we had occasion to be there) met as before. Those of us at Oxford, with Dr Ward, Dr Petty, and many others of the most inquisitive persons in Oxford, met weekly for some years at Dr Petty's lodgings, on the like account, to wit, so long as Dr Petty continued in Oxford, and for some while after, because of the conveniences we had there ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... military authority was not wanting, in enforcing these arbitrary distributions of worldly goods; and a petty holder of a commission in the state militia was to be seen giving the sanction of something like legality to acts of the most unlicensed robbery, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in Belfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... is not to be supposed that all these petty causes of complaint were on one side. Arthur often felt grieved and somewhat irritated by Mary's altered manner or moody silence, showing that he had offended in ways unknown to himself; and there were also times when her ridicule of his somewhat uncultivated taste granted ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... dissolution—dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him. Nothing could comfort him now; Hattersley's rough attempts at consolation were utterly in vain. The world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and transient pleasures, were a cruel mockery. To talk of the past was to torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... bona fide into our living faith of man, and man's history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood. Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error. Antediluvian man—antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... chronic grumblers were Carter Weatherbee and Percy Cuthfert. The whole party complained less of its aches and pains than did either of them. Not once did they volunteer for the thousand and one petty duties of the camp. A bucket of water to be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishes to be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfit for some suddenly indispensable article—and these two effete ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... London, where he studied with great zeal, meanwhile supplying his wants by acting as the theatrical critic of the 'Morning Chronicle.' There, seated in an obscure corner of the pit or upper gallery, we may imagine the Chancellor in embryo, jotting down the petty excellences and failings of the players, to pamper the taste of the frivolous on the morrow; while below him, in the decorated boxes and circles, lolled the vain crowd of coroneted simpletons and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... he wanted he took with an iron hand, without ruth and without scruple. But in the unspeakable dissolution in which they were now involved did anything make a difference? The dreadful mill in which they had been ground had crushed from them all petty distinctions of personality, individuality. Humanity—the elements of character common to ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... beside me, saying nothing. I glanced at his face, half shamed of my petulance, and I saw that he was no longer smiling. His lips were closed in that firm straight line which I had already seen once or twice, and which during years of trial became habitual to him. My own petty ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... this immorality, and, although she had learned suddenly to disseminate, although she received the comtesse with outstretched hand and smiling lips, she felt this consciousness of hollowness, this contempt for humanity increasing and enveloping her, and the petty gossip of the district gave her a still greater disgust, a still lower ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... concrete presentment in space of the soul of a people. If that soul be petty and sordid—"stirred like a child by little things"—no great architecture is possible because great architecture can image only greatness. Before any worthy architecture can arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused. The cannons of Europe ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wretched as was their own condition, could not refuse a portion of their pittance to one whom they still regarded as their rightful lord. [154] The native gentleman who had been so fortunate as to keep or to regain some of his land too often lived like the petty prince of a savage tribe, and indemnified himself for the humiliations which the dominant race made him suffer by governing his vassals despotically, by keeping a rude haram, and by maddening or stupefying himself daily with strong drink. [155] Politically he was insignificant. No ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be a disembodied spirit, and no longer subject to the petty annoyances that belong to the flesh?" cried he, fretfully. "My knowledge, too, is a moth,—only vexing me by a sense of the limitations of my condition. If I could grasp Nature,—if I could handle the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... This petty tyrant, of infamous memory, was the chief of the Angevin auxiliaries of William, who received as his reward the hand of Lucy, sister of the Earls Edwin and Morcar; and with her also received all the ancient domains of their family in the neighbourhood ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... excelled all the other untaught men I ever knew. Until my acquaintance with him commenced, I had been accustomed to hear the removal of what was widely known in the north of Scotland as "the travelled stone of Petty," attributed to supernatural agency. An enormous boulder had been carried in the night-time by the fairies, it was said, from its resting place on the sea-beach, into the middle of a little bay—a journey of several hundred feet; but old John, though he had not ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... show me what you can do, and I will show you what you are. I have spoken of love of one's work as the best preventive of merely low and vicious tastes. I will go farther and say that it is the best preservative against petty anxieties and the annoyances that arise out of indulged self-love. Men have thought before now that they could take refuge from trouble and vexation by sheltering themselves, as it wore, in a world of their own. The experiment has often been tried and ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... he first made the personal acquaintance of Mr. Halifax. The manor-house family brought several other "county families" to our notice, or us to theirs. These, when John's fortunes grew rapidly—as many another fortune grew, in the beginning of the thirty years' peace, when unknown, petty manufacturers first rose into merchant princes and cotton lords—these gentry made a perceptible distinction, often amusing enough to us, between John Halifax, the tanner of Norton Bury, and Mr. Halifax, the prosperous owner of Enderley Mills. Some of them, too, were clever enough to ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the country one of the world's poorest. Most formal transactions are conducted in hard currency as indigenous banknotes have lost almost all value, and a barter economy now flourishes in all but the largest cities. Most individuals and families hang on grimly through subsistence farming and petty trade. The government has not been able to meet its financial obligations to the International Momentary Fund or put in place the financial measures advocated by the IMF. Although short-term prospects for improvement are dim, improved political ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... scarcely can trace whence I received it—I was agreeably surprised to perceive such an appearance of comfort in this part of Germany. I had formed a conception of the tyranny of the petty potentates that had thrown a gloomy veil over the face of the whole country in my imagination, that cleared away like the darkness of night before the sun as I saw the reality. I should probably have discovered much ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... services of such an able soldier should have been lost to the army and the country, a few weeks later, through the petty jealousies of small men, who wanted a scape-goat to cover up their own shortcomings. For over twenty years this grand American soldier, the soul of honor, who would at any moment sacrifice his life sooner than be guilty of an act inconsistent with his noble profession, has been ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... our true interests by the measure of mankind. Let no man think himself any longer in the first place as a New England man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Americans,—that was the vision and message of Washington; and that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a German, a ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... confirmation of the reasonless dogmatism preceding, it is not made with fairness, because my opinion of the construction is omitted by the quoter. See Institutes of English Gram., p. 162. In an other late grammar,—a shameful work, because it is in great measure a tissue of petty larcenies from my Institutes, with alterations for the worse,—I find the following absurd "Note," or Rule: "An infinitive or participle is often followed by a substantive explanatory of an indefinite person or thing. The substantive is then in the objective ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... far from being an easy task. The general Government may appoint governors, secretaries, and other public functionaries; and judges, marshals, collectors, etc., may accept offices with salaries of 3000 or 4000 dollars per annum; but how they are to obtain their petty officers, at half these sums, remains to be seen. The pay of a member of Congress will be accepted here by those alone who do not know enough to better themselves. Mechanics can now get 10 to 16 dollars ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... then she added, that if I did not know what was good for me, she, my mother, did, and she would take care my interests did not suffer. It was her duty to look after them as my mother, and she would. Oh! that little word "duty"! It seems to me all sorts of petty cruelties are committed in the name of "duty." And after that Dick Stanton never came to the house, but I, more unwilling than ever, was sent for to entertain him. Even now I don't know whether he really cared, or ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... the first burst of friendship the foolish woman had poured out all her silly, sordid secrets to Chloe Carstairs, and then, possibly, repented having done so. They fell out, you see, and I suppose Mrs. Ogden, being a woman of a small and petty character herself, was only too ready to suspect her former friend. She swore, you know, that no one but Chloe could have known some of the details which were mentioned in the letters. I can't tell you how vile the whole thing was—and it was quite ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... for some palpable wrong, some distinctive time or cause. He was himself too simple-hearted to reflect that it is seldom a great fault which destroys liking for a person. A great fault can be forgiven. It is small personal offences constantly repeated; little acts of meanness, and, above all, the petty plans and provisions of a selfish nature. Besides which, the soul has often marvellous intuitions, unmasking men and things; premonitions, warnings, intelligences, that it cannot doubt and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... was a real personality to Halcyone. She could not bear it when in church she heard the meanest acts of revenge and petty wounded vanity attributed to Him. She argued it was because the curate did not know. Having come from a town, he could not be speaking of the same wonderful God she knew in the woods and fields—the God so loving and tender in the springtime to the budding flowers, so gorgeous in ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... uninteresting—mostly commercial agents or small tradesmen representing the old-established petty commerce with Mexico. The new order of things was suggested, somewhat ominously, only by the presence of two young surgeons on their way to increase the effective force of the military ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Austria, Belgium, there was no central authority to which these questions could be referred for decision when the threads of mutual interest became tangled. Instead, secret and competitive statecraft made the tangle worse. The mass of conflicting jurisdictions and of petty jealousies that have grown up among the two score of independent and sovereign states of Europe made ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... religious motives. It got me into a sad mess, because I did not dare to go direct to life. I used to fret because your uncle seemed so indifferent to these things. He was a wise and good man, and lived by a sort of inner beauty of character that made all mean cruel spiteful petty things impossible to him. Then when he died, I had a terrible time to go through. I felt utterly adrift. My old system did not give me the smallest help. I was trying to find an intellectual solution. It was then that I met Miss Gordon, the great evangelist. She ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it for?" And Patty looked the girl in the eyes, in a real curiosity to know why she should descend to this petty meanness. ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... their crowd at Bellevue were perpetually complaining of the high wages they had to pay. They gave it as an excuse for all sorts of petty meanness. Adelle felt that Major Pound would have the suitable reply to the mason's argument, but ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... than whom an archer knave, or one that had committed more petty wrongs, did not present himself that day at the water-gate, was regularly fortified by every precaution that the long experience of a vagabond could suggest, and he was permitted to pass forthwith. The poor Westphalian student presented an instrument fairly written ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. This theatre of contention between mighty factions, of the struggles of orators, the exaltation and deposition of tyrants, the triumph and punishment of generals, is now become a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry. "The wild foxes, the owls and serpents in the ruins of Babylon,"[202] were surely less degrading than such inhabitants. The Turks ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... fleet until the 13th of March, when, at his own request, he was removed into his Majesty's ship Orion. The whole crew of the Crescent volunteered to follow him, and his application for them was in part complied with; as also for Lieutenants Otter and Rye, and some of the warrant and petty officers, who were consequently turned over to that ship, which was fitting at Portsmouth. As it would be a considerable time before she could be refitted so as to be ready for sea, Captain Saumarez was, at the special ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... thought and passion lay beyond his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity, hunger, misery, and hot punch"—"so ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... decades, there has been no time for a proper tradition to be created by the civil government of Japan; and because there is no such tradition, the island empire of the East has no true foreign policy and is at the mercy of manufactured crises, being too often committed to petty adventures which really range her on the side of those in Europe the Allies have set themselves to destroy. It is for this reason that the Chinese are consistently treated as though they were hewers of wood and drawers of water, helots who are occasionally flattered in the columns of the daily ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... those possessed of means paying in addition an income tax. Ten years ago taxes were levied in furs, but they are now paid in coin of the realm. I was surprised to find that these natives are self-governed to a certain extent; minor crimes, such as theft, petty larceny, &c., being judged by prominent men in the towns and the head-man of each village. Murder and more serious crimes are dealt with by a Russian ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... has never had, even in its palmiest days. The numerous victims required to supply it would convert the whole slave coast into a perfect pandemonium, for which this country would be held responsible in the eyes both of God and man. Its petty tribes would then be constantly engaged in predatory wars against each other for the purpose of seizing slaves to supply the American market. All hopes of African civilization would ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... glorious community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue (to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into an inferior position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about this direful result, is one of the most ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... our tale, if it convinces Small states that 'tis a wiser thing To trust a single powerful king, Than half a dozen petty princes. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... straighten out one's limbs, And leap elastic from the level counter, Leaving the petty grievances of earth, The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears, And all the needles that do wound the spirit, For such a pensive hour of soothing silence. Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress, Lays bare her shady bosom;—I ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Sacred Isle and also the Isle of Destiny, may find a destiny worthy of fulfilment: not to be a petty peasant republic, nor a miniature duplicate in life and aims of great material empires, but that its children out of their faith, which has never failed may realise this imemorial truth of man's inmost divinity, and in expressing it may ray the light over ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... gathered up the shameful inheritance of him whom they have overthrown? And if we turn our eyes towards our own country, how many of these instruments of Napoleon do we not see, who, after having fatigued him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of their wisdom ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... "jeel," and receiving, as a kind of blackmail, another saucerful of "skim," which, I am informed, is really the refuse of the sugar, but, for all that, wonderfully toothsome. Bear with a countryman's petty foolishness, ye mighty people who live in cities, and whose dainties come from huge manufactories. Some man reading these pages will remember that red-letter day of the summer-time long ago, and the faithful hands that plucked the fruit, and the ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... applications. The fact is that faith is always the unknown dimension. A man may know how many children he has, and how much money he has; but no man knows how much faith he has. Everybody who has read Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great remembers the petty squabbles of Voltaire, Maupertius, and the other thinkers who moved about the person of that famous prince. They seemed to have been for ever twitting each other with getting ill, and, notwithstanding their philosophy, sending for a priest to minister beside their supposed deathbeds. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... petty auctions in the States, a person is employed to bid up articles, in order to raise their price. Such a person is called a Peter Funk, probably from that name having frequently been given when things were bought in. In short, it is now ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... small talk and epigrams of the various petty impinging circles under the social dome passed into and out of her small ears—gossip, epigrams, aphorisms, rumours, apropos surmises, asides, and off-stage observations, subtle with ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... could this republic stand if such a man should see fit to change its form? Even now our petty millionaires buy courts and legislatures, and the control of great cities. But the new king would know no limitations to this power. He would make the laws, shape and dictate public opinion, subsidize the church and the schools, direct the courts, control all industries, direct all banks, fix the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... a single year, his father set him up in trade, joining with him in the conduct of a country store his elder brother, William, a youth more indolent, if possible, as well as more disorderly and uncommercial, than Patrick himself. One year of this odd partnership brought the petty concern to its inevitable fate. Just one year after that, having attained the ripe age of eighteen, and being then entirely out of employment, and equally out of money, Patrick rounded out his embarrassments, and gave symmetry to them, as it were, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... prisoner entered, walking with hands manacled, at the side of an imposing garde de Paris. He still wore his smart clothes, and was as coldly self-possessed as at the moment of his arrest. He seemed to regard both handcuffs and guard as petty details unworthy of his attention, and he eyed the judge and Coquenil with ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... one into the other—of the smaller into the greater, or of the town-dwellers into the country stock. The result of this law is, that mixed nations will tend with the progress of time to revert to their original types, and either fall apart into petty groups and provincial distinctions, as in Spain, or will eliminate the weaker or less numerous race, the old or the new, as the one or the other predominates. The political character of our English nation has changed ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that! A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer, better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised him, startled him really, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he could bear. Each little discomfort taken separately would have been altogether negligible. But when petty discomforts accumulate there comes a time when one more, however small it be, has the effect of a sudden infliction. He ground his teeth with fury at those pattering drops of water, but the realization of impotence ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,—these all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do his bidding, to sally forth and fight for the king or to defend his own walls ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... 1789. I believe this to be the last instance in which this old punishment was inflicted, at least in the metropolis. The burning part of the ceremony was abolished by the 30 Geo. III., c. 48., and death by hanging made the penalty for women in cases of high or petty treason. E. S. S. W.'s informants are wrong in supposing that the criminals were burnt whilst living. The law, indeed, prescribed it, but the practice was more humane. They were first strangled; although it sometimes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... question he feared to answer. To drag out into the open his petty, selfish reasons, shorn of the tinsel glamor of so-called "service" and "progress," would be ...
— Irresistible Weapon • Horace Brown Fyfe
... not have you think he was an absolutely perfect man. He was too sensitively organized for that. A touch, a look that was not in harmony with his thoughts, would make him turn pale at times, and I have seen him put to such suffering by petty physical causes, that I have sometimes wondered where his great soul got its strength to carry him through the exigencies of his somewhat trying calling. But whatever his weaknesses—and they were very few,—he was ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... earnestly, no matter on what topic, I am sure of recovering their natural expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of formal sitters by the method just described, would fill ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... elephants in his days, is described by Ptolemy in the map he made of Ceylon sixteen hundred years ago as the elephantum pascua. The trade in elephants from Ceylon, which used to be lucrative, is now completely annihilated, in consequence of all the petty Rajahs, Foligars, and other chiefs in the southern peninsula of India, who used formerly to purchase Ceylon elephants as a part of their state, having lost their sovereignties, and being therefore no longer required to keep up any state of this description. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... precluded the possibility of her asking any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic, demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The room was unconcealably poor: the little faded "relics," the high-stocked ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio, grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the wall-paper, served only to accentuate ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other, of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... to be lifted out of the petty cares of to-day, read one of Locke's novels. You may select any from the following titles and be certain of meeting some new and delightful friends. His characters ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... growing harder and harder. It seemed to her that poverty in itself was bearable enough, but that the ever-increasing load of debt was not bearable. As long as she could remember, it had always been like a mill-stone tied about their necks, and the ceaseless petty economies and privations seemed of little avail; she felt very much as if she were one of the Danaids, doomed forever to pour water into a vessel ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... time had protected his head from the burning sun. Jehovah's concluding remonstrance voices the message of the book. Like the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of Jonah presents in graphic form the unbounded love of the heavenly father and contrasts it sharply with the petty jealousies and hatred of his favored people. It was a call to Israel to go forth and become a missionary to all the world and a protest against the nation's failure ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... a petty world within itself—a wheel within a wheel—in so far as it is entirely occupied with its own concerns, affords its peculiar catalogue of virtues and vices, its own cares, pleasures, regrets, anticipations, and disappointments—in ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... the same, I call it mean, petty, base, contemptible of them, to think so much of the paltry losses they may have suffered through him. They were only ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last. If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare. For the rest, the Italy of Milton's day, its ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... With you we find Robust and hearty friendship, free from all The laws of petty gods men travail for. No wrangle here o'er things of small avail— No knavery, nor charity betrayed— But comrade beings—'Stalwart, steadfast, good. You help the world in the noblest way of all— By living nobly—showing in your lives The utmost beauty, the full power and love That ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... whether the once famed De Walton is become afraid of his enemies more than fits a knight, or makes imaginary doubts the pretext of tyrannizing over his friend. I cannot say it would make much difference to me, but I would rather have it that the man I once loved had turned a petty tyrant than a weak-spirited coward; and I would be content that he should study to vex me, rather than be ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... sordid penury as I then witnessed I had read, but never supposed I should be compelled to witness, much less to share. Notwithstanding the closeness of this hole, it was excessively cold. There was not a soul there to welcome me, the petty officers being all away on dockyard duty. It might have been ten o'clock when I was first ushered into this region of darkness, of chill and evil odours. I remained with my surtout coat on, sitting on my chest with my hands clasped before me, stiff with cold, and melancholy almost to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of late how often he was given to muttering. Previously, petty annoyances had not moved him to these half-audible and solitary comments which he had always found contemptuously amusing in others. He wondered whether this new trick was the result of his business ventures, his sly charities, or his approach toward the suggestive ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... any capacity for organization or leadership; the discussion of town affairs sharpened the wits, and, better still, educated the towns-man in a distinct recognition of his political relations; he learned to think politically, and as the Revolution drew near, the petty interests of the local community widened into larger questions of state when the towns themselves found that they were parts of a larger body corporate. Then the principle of representation was constantly delocalizing the town, and bringing ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... let me guess That into Celia, into me, He and unnumbered dead have come To be our intimates, To make of us their home Commingling earth and heaven.... That by our true and mutual deeds We shall at last be shriven Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds And petty separate fates— That I in every man and he in me, Together making God, are gradually creating whole The single soul. Somebody called Walt Whitman— Dead! He is alive instead, Alive as I am. When I lift my head, ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... already—too much petty jealousy and working at cross-purposes. I have been thinking over the entire problem. You yourself know how many people have escaped through jealous or over-zealous officers making premature arrests. We have six different secret-service ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of a petty clerk in one of the government departments, and merely dowered with a modest portion of three thousand francs, she had married a young man as poor as herself, but intelligent and industrious, whom she loved, and who adored ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... public. Goldoni wrote because he liked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers. Against Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we have to set Goldoni's love of Venice and its petty pleasures. He would willingly have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet all his life on the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing the sierras on his Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... way home she was tormented by the wonder how that wrap could have come in her husband's studio, and what reason he could have for being disturbed by her seeing it there. She was not a woman given to petty or vulgar jealousy, and she had from the first left the artist perfectly free in his professional relations to be governed by the necessities or the conveniences of his profession. She could not ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains, and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite disgust, 'O-h-h you Roo-shan!' accompanying her objurgation by several emphatic demonstrations ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man, anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Rome, which canonized the petty Celestine V., refused this supreme consecration to the glorious Innocent III. With exquisite tact she perceived that he was rather king than priest, rather ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... mother were still more deeply rooted. The Jesuits found Rhodolph a docile pupil; and never on earth have there been found a set of men who, more thoroughly than the Jesuits, have understood the art of educating the mind to subjection. Rhodolph was instructed in all the petty arts of intrigue and dissimulation, and was brought into entire subserviency to the Spanish court. Thus ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... longer shall divide our time By acts or pleasures,—doing petty things Of work or warfare, merchandise or rhyme; But we shall sit beside ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Philip. I am but a petty landowner, while it is already known that you are the owner of a considerable estate; and have gained consideration and credit, and as a knight have right to precedence over many of them. If you had intended to settle in France, ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's self seriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man may ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Peking society has therefore vanished, and in its place are highly suspicious and hostile Legations—Legations petty in their conceptions of men and things—Legations bitterly disliking one another—in fact, Legations richly deserving all they get, some of the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the biggest thieves in the world, and would rob even their own parents, so, not surprisingly, those in our ranks showed little respect for the property of their allies. On the march or in bivouac, they stole anything they saw; but as no one trusted them, petty thieving became more difficult, so they decided to operate on a grand scale. They organised themselves into bands, and at night they would don peasant headgear and slip out of the bivouac to meet at an agreed spot, then they would return to the camp ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... all my might this great hussy of a town," he rolled out in Southern accents; "but since this morning I despise her! The poor little province you think so petty is an honest girl; but Paris is a prostitute, a greedy, lying comedian; and I am very thankful not to be robbed ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... power to charm, can charm no longer; but, en revanche, those which do please, please a thousand times more: thus what we lose on one side, we gain on the other. Perhaps, on the whole, a technical knowledge of the arts is apt to divert the mind from the general effect, to fix it on petty details of execution. Here comes a connaisseur, who has found his way, good man! from Somerset House, to the Tribune at Florence: see him with one hand passed across his brow, to shade the light, while the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... through scented shadow to Graham's homestead and discussed crops and cattle with the rancher. On these occasions, he had long conversations with Helen Savine, who, finding no person of liberal education thereabouts, was pleased to talk to him. There was nothing incongruous in this, for petty class distinctions vanish in the bush, where, when his daily task is done, the hired man meets his ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of years, accompanied him. She had been in service in Paris, an insignificant maid-of-all-work, but withal so devoted to her brother that she had left her situation to follow him, subsisting scantily on her petty savings. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without,—full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,—each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,—is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the portcullis fall!" At home he had been wont to speak of the "oldest families in Cranston," complaining of the invasions of "new people" into the social territory of the McCords and Mellins and Kramers—a pleasant conception which the presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him amazingly ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... stealers), a set of marauders who made use of it" (Lilly's Dramatic Works, ed. Fairholt, II., 272). "Tarrier" must mean "a person that causes delay": cf. a passage from Sir Thomas Overbury's character of "a meene Petty fogger":—"He cannot erre before judgment, and then you see it, only writs of error are the tariers that keepe his client undoing somewhat the longer" (quoted in ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... part of all, you are grateful for receiving your own. They, cooping you in the city, lead you to your pleasures, and make you tame and submissive to their hands. It is impossible, I say, to have a high and noble spirit, while you are engaged in petty and mean employments: whatever be the pursuits of men, their characters must be similar. By Ceres, I should not wonder, if I, for mentioning these things, suffered more from your resentment than the men who have brought them to pass. For even liberty of speech you allow not on ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... nor condition, nor honour, nor wealth which its possessor can refer to any but to him. And he must take example from Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, who by means such as these, from being a petty prince became monarch of all Greece; and of whom it was written that he shifted men from province to province as a shepherd moves his flocks from one pasture ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... any violence of thought or emotion at Upper Farm, even the sulks of Primrose were petty in nature, her jealousies made her voice shrill but did not take her by the throat with that intolerable aching stormier women know too well, while her graceless husband was irritated on the surface of his mind as ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful, and the more embittering ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... successively crumbled to decay. At a time when the kings of Egypt had never ventured beyond their borders, unless it were for a foray in Ethiopia, and when in Asia no monarch had held dominion over more than a few petty tribes, and a few hundred miles of territory, he conceived the magnificent notion of binding into one the manifold nations inhabiting the vast tract which lies between the Zagros mountain-range and the Mediterranean. Lord ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... strong enough to balance this opposition by its support. He began in Scotland that struggle which for some time had been going on in England against the power of the nobles, who were still in the north something like a number of petty kings ruling in their own right, making little account of national laws, and regarding the King with defiance as almost a hostile power. One of the greatest risks of such a struggle is that it raises now and then a fiery spirit stung by the sense of injury and the rage ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... sentiments, and passions, and decisively determining their reciprocal relations and circumstances. The art of the poet accordingly consists in separating from the fable whatever does not essentially belong to it, whatever, in the daily necessities of real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts the progress of important actions, and concentrating within a narrow space a number of events calculated to attract the minds of the hearers and to fill them with attention and expectation. In this manner he gives us a renovated ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... successful execution of so bold a scheme. But the money got him into trouble. He had too much, he spent it too freely, and, as a consequence, he is serving a short term of imprisonment in the Alleghany county jail for some petty offence." ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... the potency of the bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty courts in Germany; and challenged the Scotch Bacchanalians to the alternative of trying his prowess, or else of acknowledging their inferiority. After man overthrows on the part of the Scots, the Dane was encountered by Sir Robert Lawrie, of Maxwelton, ancestor ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... sight of a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a hotel dining-room until the consequential head-waiter (very possibly a coloured gentleman) condescends to point out to him the seat he may occupy. So, too, such petty officials as policemen and railway conductors are generally treated rather as the masters than as the servants of the public. The ordinary American citizen accepts a long delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Very poor? you're a very ass. Lord, how my stomach wambles at the same word very poor! Father, if you love your son William, never name that same word, very poor; for, I'll stand to it, that it's petty larceny to name very poor to a man that's o' the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Criminal Court, the aldermen are called upon to exercise various other magisterial functions, including the inspection and management of prisons. They have likewise to attend at the London Quarter Sessions; the special sessions for hearing appeals; the special sessions for licenses; the petty sessions; the special sessions; the Southwark Quarter Sessions, and the annual meetings and adjournments. Even this enumeration of duties, however, is no equivalent indication of the work to be gone through, the whole of which is done gratuitously and without expectation of reward. ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... France. The difficulties of statesmanship here are enormous. I do not accuse even M. Thiers of want of public virtue. What he has wanted, has been length and breadth of view—purely an intellectual defect—and his petty, puny tracasseries destroyed the Republican Assembly just as it destroyed the throne of Louis Philippe, in spite ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the most exquisite contradiction; in one moment the guilelessness of a child, in another, the worldly-wise woman. Had she been all of the one or all of the other, he would not have been touched so deeply. If she loved a man, there would be no silly doddering; the voice of the petty laws that strove to hedge her in would be in her ears as a summer breeze. For one so young—and twenty-five was young—she possessed a disconcerting directness in her logic. So far he observed that she retained but one illusion, that somewhere in the world ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... sailed for Cornwall, and there was taken to the court of King Alef, a petty British chief, who, on true patriarchal lines, disposed of his children as he would, and had betrothed his fair daughter to a terrible Pictish giant, breaking off, in order to do it, her troth-plight with Prince Sigtryg of Waterford, son of a Danish king in Ireland. Hereward was ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... given to Ella, and the deference shown her by the renegade and his allies—who appeared to treat her with the same respect they would have done the wife of their chief—were in striking contrast with their manners toward Algernon, on whom they seemed disposed to vent their scorn by petty insults. Believing that his doom was sealed, he became apparently resigned to his fate, nor seemed to notice, save with stoical indifference, any thing that took place around him. This quiet, inoffensive ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, one of his lieutenants, was nominated with him. This step gave great offence to Queensberry, who, as Sheriff of the shires of Dumfries and Annandale, by law held all such patronage in his own hand, and marks the beginning of the petty jealousy which from this time forward he seems to have shown to Claverhouse whenever he dared, and which rose afterwards, as we shall see, to a serious height. But Queensberry was no match for Lauderdale; and Claverhouse was duly settled ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... eyes, her swelling bosom, her shapely legs, said something quite different. It seemed to him that she understood how petty were all things he had said, but that she was superior to such considerations. It seemed to him she had long known all he wished and was not able to tell her, but wanted to hear how he would say it. 'And how can she help knowing,' he thought, 'since I only want to tell her all that ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... of it all is the lazy, aimless, aristocratic, insular life that a god must lead; he has no one to go with. If I am not to sit still for all time and eternity, if I let myself down as well as I can and make myself finite, that I may have something in the way of society, still I have, like petty princes, only my own creatures to echo my words. . . . Every being, even the highest Being, wishes something to love and to honor. But the Fichtean doctrine that I am my own body-maker leaves me with nothing whatever—with not so much as the beggar's dog or the prisoner's spider. . . . Truly ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and such men are willing to free women from the ecclesiastical bondage that makes her responsible for all the ills of life, for all the pains of deed and creed, while it allows her no choice in their formation, no property in their fruition. Such men are outgrowing the petty jealousies and musty superstitions of narrow-minded dogmatists sufficiently to look upon the question not as one of personal preference, but as one of human justice. They do not ask, "Would I ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... in the light of a romance, and himself and his friends as so many personages acting in it, all meeting with marvellous adventures at every turn, and all endowed with admirable qualities, to which their petty frailties served only as foils. It is impossible in reading his memoirs to avoid smiling at the importance he attaches to very ordinary occurrences. I am not sure whether it was not this propensity that led him to magnify his own distresses in living with his first ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... in which he can still accommodate passing events and the world's trivialities, begins to receive impressions of the facts of the case. The great river called Sally flows steadily on, on its own account, and makes and meddles not. It despises other folk's petty affairs. Dr. Conrad masters the position, and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... river, the Antelope, it will be remembered, had been close on the Westwood's heels. So Gilmore reminded his wife. So Hugh needlessly reminded Ramsey. From the mate it was further learned that the pursuer had overhauled the pursued between Petit Goufre—which he and the whole company called Petty Gulf—and Grand Gulf; places named before the days of steam for their dangerous eddies. Yet, he went on to tell Ramsey, the swifter boat, with more freight to put ashore and with a larger appetite for ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation; the majority of children are trafficked within Chad for involuntary domestic servitude, forced cattle herding, forced begging, forced labor in petty commerce or the fishing industry, or for commercial sexual exploitation; to a lesser extent, Chadian children are also trafficked to Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria for cattle herding; children may also be ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... replied the Bishop, a grave, earnest-looking man. "Would that His Majesty himself could stand on these walls and see with his own eyes, as you do, this splendid patrimony of the crown of France. He would not dream of bartering it away in exchange for petty ends and corners of Germany and Flanders, as is ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and would that I could reproduce that life, the unforgettable, the unrememberable. The memory, which shows so wise a backwardness in registering pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of extended pleasures; and a long-continued well-being escapes (as it were, by its mass) our petty methods of commemoration. On a part of our life's map there lies a roseate, undecipherable ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the treasures of the nation, the talent of its individual men is the most important. It realizes that its first duty is to waste none of this. It cannot afford to leave its Miltons mute and inglorious nor to let its village Hampdens waste their strength on petty obstacles while it has great tasks for them to accomplish. In a democracy, when work is to be done men rise to do it. No matter what the origin of our Washingtons and Lincolns, our Grants and our ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... picturesque in its mountain basin, with the wild, unfenced land coming down to its very dooryards—was slowly awakening after the last mad night of its celebration. The tents of the tawdry shows that had tempted the crowds with vulgar indecencies, and the booths that had sheltered the petty games of chance where loud-voiced criers had persuaded the multitude with the hope of winning a worthless bauble or a tinsel toy, were being cleared away from the borders of the plaza, the beauty of which their presence had marred. In the plaza itself—which ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... with the aggressive spirit of his section, he voiced a growing sense of humiliation that his country should be buffeted by every British ministry. The people of Kentucky and Tennessee had little patience with half measures in defense of national rights. The petty diplomacy of closet statesmen did not appeal to the soul of the frontiersman who was accustomed to hew his way to his goal. The people of this section, imperial in its dimensions, were prepared for large tasks done in a bold way. Their ideas ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... was engrossing him. When we were together I felt tongue-tied. He had tried to be gentle with me; but I was strange in this world of his, and lonely and sensitive. I had dreamed so much of this world, and now that I was in it, it was false and petty. I longed for the United States, for my Northwest, for my hills and wide, far plains. I wanted to meet somebody from Madison ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... nine equal votes each but only four votes can be given to any one candidate; members serve three-year terms) elections: last held 29 November 2001 (next to be held by December 2004) election results: Judicial branch: Supreme Court; Court of Petty Sessions ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... distinctly remember that it meant to pilfer. Such, at least, is my earliest recollection, and of hearing school boys ask one another in jest, of their acquisitions or gifts, "Where did you loaf that from?" A petty pilferer was a loafer, but in a very short time all of the tribe of loungers in the sun, and disreputable pickers up of unconsidered trifles, now known as bummers, were called loafers. On this point my memory is positive, and I call attention to it, since the word in question ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... liked either of the Kitson girls; they had nothing in common, and everything Lettice and Maude did jarred on her. They seemed to her silly and vulgar, and they did little petty, mean things, and laughed and sneered at people in a way that hurt Kitty's feelings. Yet now, so great was her nervous dread of the school and all the strangers she would have to meet, she felt quite pleased that there would be at least those two familiar faces ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... them every moment, that Monsieur the Viscount remembered the toad, and that he would without doubt be swept away with the rest in the general clearance. At first he thought that he would beg them to leave it, but some knowledge of the petty insults which that class of men heaped upon their prisoners made him feel that this would probably be only an additional reason for their taking the animal away. There was no place to hide it in, for they would go all ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... be dealt with wisely and generously, and the harvest will exceed even the expectations of those who are working most hopefully upon the problem. Withhold the funds on some niggardly and mistaken principle of petty economy, and the present progress will be discouraged and the educational tree become stunted in its growth. From an administrative point of view, nothing, finance apart, would contribute more to the efficiency ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... plant a colony by the mouth of a petty Texan river? The Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and meaningless; a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi must be found. But the demands of the hour were imperative. The ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... of living if you are going to make yourself a slave to all sorts of petty rules?" asked ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... with mid-day heat. And there in strife no burning thoughts to heed, 880 I'd bubble up the water through a reed; So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be Of their petty ocean. Oftener, heavily, When love-lorn hours had left me less a child, I sat contemplating the figures wild Of o'er-head clouds melting the mirror through. Upon a day, while thus I watch'd, by flew A cloudy ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... her down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he wished, and she had cut the curls of Nisias. A great love does not of necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw; it is bankrupt from its very over-trading. A noble passion is very rare; believe me; as rare as any ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... side. Three men, great both in character and in intellect, were concerned in pressing its claims—Young, Fresnel, and Arago—and the relations of these men form a picture unmarred by any of those petty jealousies that so often dim the lustre of great names. Fresnel freely acknowledged Young's priority so soon as his attention was called to it; and Young applauded the work of the Frenchman, and aided ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... held. Then there was the added satisfaction of a minute's chat with some one of the teachers, for they all had praise, and never a word of censure. Enjoyment enough this dear man got from these irregular trips to town to lighten for weeks the, to him, unnatural farm-labor; while petty offenders appearing before his tribunal were dealt with almost gently after one of these ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... wet to the skin, and even on a scorching day in August that is anything but a pleasant sensation. Then, too, the way was rough, and the briers and brambles along the path scratched their hands and tore at their clothing. Ordinarily all these petty annoyances would have tended toward making them irritable and cross, but on this day all such trifles passed over their heads unnoticed. For had they not between them done a marvelous thing? To save one life—to have brought back from eternity one little soul—was ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... gave away 150 beautiful horses, and his kinsman, Bernabo, jewels and golden coins to a large amount, the whole sum disbursed on this occasion would appear so enormous as to make one doubt whether a petty sovereign could really afford such ostentatious prodigality. But when we consider that the flourishing state of the commerce of Italy attracted thither all the wealth of Europe, we are no longer surprised ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... him off with a heavy ransom. Venice inscribed his name in the illustrious record of its nobility. None could tell where his ambition or his resources would end, how his inventive genius would employ the rivalry of the invaders, what uses he would devise for the Emperor and the Turk. The era of petty tyranny was closed by the apparition of one superior national tyrant, who could be no worse than twenty, for though his crimes would be as theirs, they would not be useless to the nation, but were thoughtfully ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... are men of rule and place, Who court it from the mean and base! These cannot bear an equal nigh, But from superior merit fly. They love the cellar's vulgar joke, And lose their hours in ale and smoke. There o'er some petty club preside; So poor, so paltry, is their pride! Nay, even with fools whole nights will sit, In hopes to be supreme in wit. If these can read, to these I write, To set their ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... of custom-house officers go round the port for the purpose of preventing smuggling. In this, however, they only partially succeed; for they detect only petty smugglers, whilst those who carry on contraband trade on a large scale elude their vigilance. The captains of French vessels are notorious for this kind of traffic, and they frequently succeed in landing vast quantities of ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Eyes The Child in the Orchard The Source The Mountain Chapel First known when lost The Word These things that Poets said Home Aspens An Old Song There was a Time Ambition No one cares less than I Roads This is no case of petty Right or Wrong The Chalk-Pit Health Beauty Snow The New Year The Brook The Other House and Man The Gypsy Man and Dog A ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... other respects, the uniform rule of hermits and anchorites, he divided his day into the seven offices, ignoring the petty accidents of light and dark, creations both of Him to whom he prayed so unceasingly. He learned the psalter by heart, and in all the intervals of devotion, not occupied by broken slumbers, he worked hard ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of Pensylvania, told me, that he went with his mother on a visit to Admiral Dean's wife, who lived then in Petty- France; the Admiral was then at sea. She told them, that, the night before, she had a perfect dream of her husband, whom she saw walking on the deck, and giving directions, and that a cannon bullet struck his arm into his side. This ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... others. There were the petty tradesmen who in former years had prospered through George Henry's patronage, whose large bills had been paid with unquestioning promptness until came the slip of his cog in the money-distributing ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... diplomatists, Irish Counts, Irish Barons, Irish Knights of Saint Lewis and of Saint Leopold, of the White Eagle and of the Golden Fleece, who, if they had remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations. These men, the natural chiefs of their race, having been withdrawn, what remained was utterly helpless and passive. A rising of the Irishry against the Englishry was no more to be apprehended than a rising of the women and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... projected for their own safety. Instead of hazarding a general engagement against regular troops, in which they could have no prospect of success, they resolved to weary them out by maintaining a kind of petty war in separate parties, to alarm and harass the English with hard duty in a sultry climate, where they were but indifferently supplied with provisions and refreshments. Nor were their hopes in this particular disappointed. Both the army and the navy were invaded with fevers, and other ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... all; when Vaudemont had been at the house somewhat more than two weeks, Lilburne, petulant and impatient, whether at his refusals to join the card-table, or at the moderation with which, when he did, he confined his ill-luck to petty losses, one day limped up to him, as he stood at the embrasure of the window, gazing on the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a walk through the town with Sheikh Hadj Farakh. There are eight or nine hundred houses, which daily increase, by fugitives from the oppressions of the Pashas of Damascus and of the neighbouring petty tyrants. Twenty-five years ago there were only two hundred houses at Zahle: it is now one of the principal towns in the territory of the Emir Beshir. It has its markets, which are supplied from Damascus and Beirout, and are visited by the neighbouring ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... danger, for nothing breaks down a woman's health like idleness and its resulting ennui. More people, I am sure, are broken down nervously because they are bored, than because they are overworked; and more still go to pieces through fussiness, unwholesome living, worry over petty details, and the daily disappointments which result from small and superficial training. And then, besides the danger to health, there is the danger to character. I need not dwell on the undermining influence which men also feel when occupation is ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... other. The dinner, as it progresses, assumes the air of a big family party of good bohemians. The French do not bring their misery with them to the table. To dine is to enjoy oneself to the utmost; in fact the French people cover their disappointment, sadness, annoyances, great or petty troubles, under a masque of "blague," and have such an innate dislike of sympathy or ridicule that they avoid it by turning everything ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... by that means lives much cheaper than those who have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges: In short, he is a very sensible man; shoots flying; and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... and receiving Custom for outlandish ware, that I wond'red to see, Yet durst not complain of: the reason was, They were countenanced with men of great wealth, Richer than I a great deal, but not honester. Then I went into the markets, where I saw petty knavery In false-measuring corn, and in scales, That wanted no less than two ounces in the pound. But all this was nothing, scant worth the talking of; But when I came to the Exchange, I espied in a corner of an aisle An ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... when it is our lot to share in doing large tasks, the children help us. What of the days which bring with them only a "petty round of irritating concerns and duties?" Do they not help ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... transcripts of his own experience and meditations, and teem with facts and observations such as might be expected from the clear insight of a man who has mingled with his fellow-men, and who is curiously critical of the non-romantic phenomena of their daily life. The essays on the Art of Putting Things, on Petty Malignity and Petty Trickery, on Tidiness, on Nervous Fears, on Hurry and Leisure, on Work and Play, on Dulness, and on Growing Old, are full of fresh and delicate perceptions of the ordinary facts of human experience. His best and brightest remarks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... walked slowly along she appreciated what Ann had said of the town's being walled in by nothingness—the people walled in by nothingness. Her two blocks on "Main Street" showed her Centralia as a place of petty righteousness and petty vice. There was nothing so large and flexible as the real joys ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... inferior, writers it is most fortunate that our design has taken so wide a scope. These can go on with their perennial wrangle over the petty question of penal and educational flagellation, while we grapple with the higher problem, and unfold the broader philosophy of an universal walloping. Reflections upon the Beneficent Influence of ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... razed my roof, I loved thee; but the vengeance of my verse, The hate of injuries which every year Makes greater, and accumulates my curse, Shall live, outliving all thou holdest dear— Thy pride, thy wealth, thy freedom, and even that, The most infernal of all evils here, The sway of petty tyrants in a state; For such sway is not limited to Kings, And Demagogues yield to them but in date, 120 As swept off sooner; in all deadly things, Which make men hate themselves, and one another, In discord, cowardice, cruelty, all that springs From Death the Sin-born's incest with his mother,[326] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... you stand like that?' I heard her say in a tone of great irritation. 'And why do you stare into that bowl? Do you think I mean to leave that child to walk these halls after I am carried out of them forever? Do you measure my hate by such a petty yard-stick as that? I tell you that I would rot above ground rather than enter ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... company with rabbits. The petty orthodoxy can by no means keep pace with the elephantine stride of Zen. No wonder that Bodhidharma left not only the palace of the Emperor Wu, but also the State of Liang, and went to the State of Northern Wei.[FN25] There he spent ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... the United States navy, nominally second in command to the Chinese captain of the "Chen-yuen," but practically acting as her commander. On some of the other ships there were a few British-born engineer or gunnery officers, and some of the latter had been petty officers in the English navy. By the advice of these non-Chinese officers Ting had done something to remedy ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... could do what I liked with him;" and then she added, that if I did not know what was good for me, she, my mother, did, and she would take care my interests did not suffer. It was her duty to look after them as my mother, and she would. Oh! that little word "duty"! It seems to me all sorts of petty cruelties are committed in the name of "duty." And after that Dick Stanton never came to the house, but I, more unwilling than ever, was sent for to entertain him. Even now I don't know whether he really cared, or whether it was simply that he wanted ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... Yankee skulls, scalps and bones, for ornaments, betrayed innocent men to death, engaged in intrigues and schemes of all kinds to obtain information of the movements of Union troops, to convey it to the enemy, and in every manifestation of malice, petty spite and diabolical hatred against the flag under which they had been reared, and its defenders, they attained a bad pre-eminence over the evil spirits of their sex since the world began. It is true that these were not the characteristics of all Southern, disloyal women, but they were sufficiently ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... ostensibly his relations were of the most affectionate description—"Wilberforce is really a low fellow. Again and again the committee of the Athenaeum Club have been obliged to reprove him for his vulgar selfishness." This is dreadful! No wonder that petty cynics snarl and rejoice; they say, "Look at your great men, and see what mean backbiters ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... regrets—my doubts—whether I did not dismiss that man's pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort—of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion,—is ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... process of at least six thousand years into its present form. Milton's Satan is a debased intellect who in his boundless ambition is still a supernatural being. Mephistopheles is the incarnation of our complicated modern social evils, full of petty tricks and learned quotations; he piously turns up his eyes, he lies, doubts, calumniates, seduces, philosophizes, sneers, but all in a polite and highly educated way; he is a scholar, a divine, a politician, a diplomatist. Satan is capable of wild enthusiasm, he sometimes remembers ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to prove the illustrious descent of his prospective son-in-law. Napoleon refused to have the account published, remarking, "I had rather be the descendant of an honest man than of any petty tyrant of Italy. I wish my nobility to commence with myself and derive all my titles from the French people. I am the Rudolph of Hapsburg of my family. My patent of nobility dates ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Petty Officer fell flat upon the deck; They bore him to the Sick Bay just a weak and worthless wreck; But an A.B. who was standing by had caught the wicked word And told the Duty Officer exactly what occurred:— "Boy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... "corporal," meaning a petty officer, is not derived from corpus: it comes from the French caporal, of which it ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... servants.[145] Petri then broke out into a tirade against his opponent's view. What right, he asked, had Galle to set up Gregory against Christ and Paul? "What authority has he to expound the Word of God according to the deeds of petty men? Rather, I conceive, are the deeds of men to be judged according to the Word of God."[146] To an assertion by Galle that the Church had held temporal power for the last twelve centuries, Petri ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... outward sign. No mystical rites consecrated them; no organ-music burst forth in solemn rapture to welcome them; no habit of their order proclaimed to themselves and the world that they were the elect of Christ, the brides of another life: but small eating cares, daily prosaic duties, the petty friction of all the littleness and all the inglorious annoyances of every day, were as dust that hid the beauty and grandeur of their calling even from themselves; they walked unknown even to their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... 1613, Ralegh had to endure this man's petty spite and disciplinary pedantry. Then Waad retired, to the great contentment of his prisoners, though, as it happened, from a cause which did him honour. Lady Arabella Stuart's chief pleasure during her iniquitous imprisonment ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... human life; where we find that it is not the heavy blow of sudden misfortune tripping the ladder of our ambition and laying us prostrate, which constitutes life's intermittent "fitful fever," but the thousand petty vexations of hourly occurrence.——We return to Mrs Beazely, who continued—"Why, it's nine o'clock, Mr Forster, and a nice fresh morning it is too, after last night's tempest. And pray what did you hear and see, sir?" continued the old woman, opening the shutters and admitting a blaze of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... which were invariably successful, she then had by her side to stimulate her ambition and her love, a friend of her own sex, more eager, more ambitious, than herself—a friend who had loved her, a rare circumstance at court, and whom some petty considerations had removed from her forever. But for many years past—except Madame de Motteville, and except La Molena, her Spanish nurse, a confidante in her character of countrywoman and woman too—who could boast of having given good ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... close in his den. Hawks and owls and weasels and martens hunt him continually; yet he more than holds his own in the big woods, which would lose some of their charm if their vast silences were not sometimes broken by his petty scoldings. ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... riding-habit brushed Isabelle's as she passed her. She was furiously angry, and sorely tempted to address some cutting words to the "Bohemienne" she had once so cruelly insulted; but Isabelle, who had a soul above such petty malice, and had long ago forgiven Yolande for her unprovoked insolence, felt how much her own triumph must wound the other's proud spirit, and with perfect dignity and grace bowed to Mlle. de Foix, who could ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... nowadays considered the rightful symbol of every Christian Monarch however limited the area over which his power is felt, should also be borne in mind; though not of much value as evidence, as even petty rulers have been known to boast that they held the ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... the Administration will attend to that. The Cabinet is adjourned. Will it please Your Highness to lay aside his official attire and return to private life, with its petty diversions. The Chamberlain is ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... own recollections during my journey I may note that I found great pleasure in my companion's conversation, as well as in her mode of managing all her little concerns on the road. I am apt to judge of character by good-humour and alacrity in these petty concerns. I think the inconveniences of a journey seem greater to me than formerly; while, on the other hand, the pleasures it affords are rather less. The ascent of Stainmore seemed duller and longer than usual, and Bowes, which used to strike me as a distinguished feature, seemed an ill-formed ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... severely analysed. But let it be understood that with it all, besides having very great charm of look and manner, wit and high spirits, in certain ways he was quite a good fellow: he had no sneers for the more fortunate, no envy, nothing petty: he was warm-hearted, generous even—when it did not cross some desire of his; lavish with money, both on himself and on anyone who aided his pleasure, and quite kind and tender-hearted in that he couldn't bear to see anyone suffer—even Mary, with whom, ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... paths,—thy fields, Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction, thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray, And howling to his gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth; there ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... with which the artist materialises the private conceptions of his mind. It would hardly be possible to find a more sympathetic series of illustrations than those which Frank Reynolds drew for Keble Howard's idyll of Suburbia, entitled "The Smiths of Surbiton." The author constructed out of the petty doings and humdrum habits of suburban life a charming little story of simple people, and with equal cleverness the artist built up, out of these slight materials, a series of exquisitely natural pictures, which revealed the almost incredible fact that semi-detached ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... by sets of petty chieftains belonging to different tribes, which are generally at enmity with each other, can be populous; it is therefore with considerable surprise that I find it stated that the number of houses in the north and eastern sides of the valley ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Charles in this negotiation is the same who collected antiquities in Greece for the Earl of Arundel. He was Vicar of Thorley, in the Isle of Wight, and is believed to have been the uncle of the celebrated Sir William Petty, ancestor of the Marquis of Lansdowne. It would be curious to learn the particulars of the "bargayne" made by him, and how the pictures were disposed of after their arrival in England. Were the Warrant and Privy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... Squire was in the habit of settling petty disputes, administering affidavits at a quarter of a dollar each, and arranging other small civic matters. But oftener was his magisterial function employed in sentencing the mutinous "darkie" to his due the sheriff— ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... as Dutocq and Cerizet," he said to himself; "enough of the nauseating atmosphere of the Minards and Phellions and Collevilles and Barniols and all the rest of them. I'll shake off this province 'intra muros,' a thousand times more absurd and petty than the true provinces; they at least, side by side with their pettiness, have habits and customs that are characteristic, a 'sui generis' dignity; they are frankly what they are, the antipodes ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... back. He promptly dismounted and helped the man unload the water-barrel where it was, and sent him bumping swiftly over the burned sod to where the Little Doctor waited. So Fate was kinder to the Little Doctor than were those who would wring anew the mother heart of her that their own petty schemes might succeed. She went away with the sick woman laughing crazily because all the little black shacks were burned and now everything was black so everything matched nicely—nicely, thank you. She was terribly worried over the woman's condition, ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... he, very gravely. "To do anything really brilliant, the adventurer must have been a gentleman at one time or other: the common fellow stops short at petty larcenies; the man of good blood always goes in for ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... which we were a part. He has made himself dictator, and, because our authorities have protested against the change, they have been driven from office by a military force. I tell you, sir, the petty outrages everywhere perpetrated by petty officials have filled the cup of endurance. It is boiling over. Now, doctor, what are you going to do? Are you ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... varied. We have been several times into the town and spent an hour in the Petty Sessions Court with Mr. Colquhoun, who sits on the bench. Each time we have come home laden with stories 'as good as any in the books,' so says Francesca. Have we not with our own eyes seen the settlement of an assault and battery case between two of the most notorious ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... lioness in his defense later on, when he had given way to that first irresistible impulse to dip his fingers in the till and get away with what he thought would be unnoticed petty cash. It had been her fault that the thing had happened, of course. She could have given him a decent amount of spending money, instead of doling it out to him from his own wages as if she were giving money for candy to a schoolboy. She could have treated him more like the ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... not contented with such a petty triumph as that of sweeping the island of Tortuga free from the obnoxious strangers; down upon Hispaniola they came, flushed with their easy victory, and determined to root out every Frenchman, until not one single buccaneer remained. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... co-ordinator of the whole project and Lieutenant Governor Vidac is my immediate executive officer. We all have to work together. Let's see if we can't do it a little more smoothly, eh?" Hardy smiled and turned back to his chair. "But one thing more, Sykes. If there are any more petty disagreements, please settle them with Vidac. Don't come up here again, unless I ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... is drawn upward, in rain to descend, Your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend. You cannot escape them; or petty, or great, Or evil, or noble, ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... rapid, and the Englishman made many strides in a few months. Jealousy was so rife among the Spanish leaders, Christinos distrusted so thoroughly the reformed Carlists, that one who was outside these petty considerations received from both sides many honours on the sole ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... become tedious to her. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" and there is much vexation of spirit, as well as weariness of the flesh, in the making of many books. She had made enemies who were spiteful, and friends who were exacting; she, who felt equally the irksomeness of petty enmities and of small friendships, which, like gnats buzzing monotonously about her, were now and then ready to sting. The sting itself might be trivial, but ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... have had the product of eight times the period of his writing life that was; and an added quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes, more leisure for deliberate composition. We should have heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape and gaunt hunger stalk rampant ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... resting-place. Uncles and aunts always found a welcome there; cousins wintered and summered with us. Thus hospitality was an element in our education. It elicited our faculties of doing and suffering. It smothered the love and habit of minor comforts and petty physical indulgences that belong to a higher state of civilization and generate selfishness, and it made regard for others, and small sacrifices ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... not finish the thought. With a sluggish movement the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit. The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous preparation for a—rabbit! In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the tone-poem was petty. And the churning of the orchestra, foaming hysteria of the strings, bellowing of the brass—would they never cease! Such an insane chase after a rabbit! Yes, she said the word to herself and found her lips carved into a hard smile, which she saw reflected as in a trick ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan's manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He held his open note-book upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with his father's wishes, only because a different course would make his father grieve, or give his mother a headache, or because his parents have reasoned with him and shown him that compliance is for his good, or who has been wheedled into compliance by petty bribes and promises, has not learned that doctrine of obedience which lies at the foundation of all government, human and divine. God has given to the parent the right to the obedience of his children, and the power to ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... discoveries were to be made, that the country was to be conquered. The government alone was competent to provide the requisite means, and was likely to take a much broader and more liberal view of the matter than a petty colonial officer. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... they lie dormant and unexpressed, and might just as well not exist at all as far as their use to man, in his unawakened state, is concerned. When, however, man becomes awakened to the great truth that he is a spiritual being: when he learns that the little petty self and finite personality are not his real self at all, but merely a mask to the real man: when he realizes that the Spiritual Ego, a true Divine Spark of, or branch or twig of the Eternal Logos, [13] is his real Self: when he understands that his body is not himself, ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... and declared to him she should die in a {070} very short time. This was in 999, and she died on the 16th of December the same year. Massacres and plunders were so common in that age, by the right which every petty lord pretended of revenging his own injuries and quarrels by private wars, that the treaty called the truce of God was set on foot. By this, among other articles, it was agreed, that churches should be sanctuaries to all sorts ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... population. Rome never was a republic. It was simply a faction of land and slave holders, who blinded and befooled the ignorant populace, by parading before them some of the forms of liberty, but kept the power in their own hands. They were a community of petty kings, which was better in their mind than only one king, as in the time of the Tarquins. It was a republic of kingdoms and of kings, if you will. Now and then, indeed, the people bustled about and shook their chains, as in the times of the institution of the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... parchment register was provided, and every two years it appears to have been shown up to the magistrates at the Petty Sessions, and signed ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as she had that night faced with him, any other girl Orme had ever met would have shown moments of weakness, impatience, or fear. But to her belonged a calm which came from a clear perception of the comparative unimportance of petty incident. She was strong, not as a man is strong, but in the way ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... air of the great out-of-doors of absolute nature; his standards are not found inside of any four walls; he contemplates life, and would quicken it in its fundamentals; his survey is from a plane whence our arts and refinements and petty distinctions disappear. He sees the evil of the world no less necessary than the good; he sees death as a part of life itself; he sees the body and the soul as one; he sees the spiritual always issuing ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... very gravely. "To do anything really brilliant, the adventurer must have been a gentleman at one time or other: the common fellow stops short at petty larcenies; the man of good blood always goes ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted: and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil; as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments, that it is no evil, as if the dispute was about a word, and not about the thing itself. Why do you impose upon me, Zeno? for when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil; I am deceived, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... as a public force. Almost from the first the universities availed themselves of their privileges and proclaimed a bold independence. The freedom from arrest and trial by the civil authorities for petty offenses, or even for murder, and the right to go on a strike if in any way interfered with, were but beginnings in independence in an age when such independence seemed important. These rights were in time given up, [26] and in their place the much more important rights of liberty ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... family, and his home was their resort and resting-place. Uncles and aunts always found a welcome there; cousins wintered and summered with us. Thus hospitality was an element in our education. It elicited our faculties of doing and suffering. It smothered the love and habit of minor comforts and petty physical indulgences that belong to a higher state of civilization and generate selfishness, and it made regard for others, and small sacrifices for ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... flashed out the thought: "Thank heaven for a pretty girl after these three abominable years!" Possibly his pleasure would have been salted with pique had he guessed that her thought was the twin of his own. He was the first man of any world more considerable than the petty court of the viceroy of Mexico that had visited California in her time, and excellent as she found his tall military figure and pale cold face, the novelty of ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... the purpose of the founder of this Intercollegiate Peace Association? Not, I take it, to give men a chance to win petty oratorical triumphs; not, I suppose, to bring together speakers to entertain such audiences as this—or to weary them. But their object must have been to set the men of our colleges to thinking on the great question of peace. In such ways are peace societies using the platform and the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... to me as well as those from me; but those which go by the regular mail are always opened, except when there is no time for it, as the gentleman who will read this could probably testify. But all that, for better, for worse, forms part of the petty ills of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... and the words were lost. Flora looked after her. For the moment she felt only scorn for the creatures who had clapped that interpretation upon her great responsibility. These people around her seemed poor indeed, absorbed only in petty considerations, and seeing everything down the narrow vista of the "correct." Her eyes followed the young girl's course through the room, easy to trace by her shining blond head, and the unusual deliciousness of her muslin gown. She stopped beside ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... further submit to the two Houses of Assembly, whether the safety of the citizens of this Commonwealth, in their persons, their property, their laws and government, does not require that the capacity to act in the important office of Juror, Grand or Petty, civil or criminal, should not be restrained in future to native citizens, or such as were citizens at the date of the Treaty of Peace which closed our revolutionary war; and whether ignorance of our laws, and natural partiality to the countries ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... real as far as it goes, but it does not go very deep, so that it does not long outlive the removal of the object of regard, either through death or any other cause. Nor will Indian affection bear much strain. Petty complications in family life, trivial misunderstandings between friends of long standing, or amongst Christians some little hitch with the authorities of a mission, will sometimes result in life-long separations or bitter ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... toleration was diffusing itself, bigotry was imperceptibly getting old-fashioned, the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last. If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous: never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare. For the rest, the Italy of Milton's day, its superstition and its scepticism, and the sophistry ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... satiety, or detecting the yawn of a weariness that cannot be concealed, is a great triumph for a woman. The affection which is equal to such a test certainly ought to be eternal. It is to be wondered at that women do not oftener employ it to judge of their lovers; a fool, an egoist, or a petty nature could never stand it. Philip the Second himself, the Alexander of dissimulation, would have told his secrets if condemned to a month's tete-a-tete in the country. Perhaps this is why kings seek to live in ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... would be easy for the Christian powers to do now if they would but make common cause against these marauders—nay, Italy alone should be able at any rate to sweep the Mediterranean free of their pirate galleys; but Venice and Genoa and Pisa are consumed by their own petty jealousies and quarrels, while all our sea-coasts are ravaged by ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... with this order of men that the commission of the peace is filled. And here a very ample field is opened for a gentleman to exert his talents, by maintaining good order in his neighbourhood; by punishing the dissolute and idle; by protecting the peaceable and industrious; and, above all, by healing petty differences and preventing vexatious prosecutions. But, in order to attain these desirable ends, it is necessary that the magistrate should understand his business; and have not only the will, but ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... were other girls with a Spanish strain in them—girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... considerable area, their number is astounding, proving the existence of a teeming population. Many thousands of coins were turned up, scarcely ever in hordes, but scattered singly all over the land, testifying to the amount of petty traffic which must have gone on generation after generation. For these coins are very rarely of gold or silver, and amongst them are found the issues of every Roman Emperor from Augustus to Valentinian III. And, ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... and look myself," she said to Mrs. Ballinger and Guadalupe Hathaway. "She's a royal creature and she has moved in the great world. No wonder she resents the petty gossip of ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... days) had given orders to set aside a table and trestles for her twice a week, close inside the entrance of the market square, on the side where the bettermost French prisoners lived in a building they called the Petty Caution. ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... England, the vast intricacy and complex interweaving of property, of commerce, of commercial interests, of details infinite in number, and infinite in littleness, break down and fritter away into fractions and petty minutiae, the whole huge labyrinth of our public affairs. It is scarcely necessary to explain my meaning. In Athens, the question before the public assembly was, peace or war—before our House of Commons, perhaps the Exchequer Bills' Bill; at Athens, a ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... must every one that has had the Honour to be admitted to this Great Man, review the Doctor's charging him with being morose" (p. 15). He counters Swift's insulting reduction of the Great Man to a petty little man with an egregiously fulsome panegyric that magnifies the virtues of Sir Robert's public and private character, and concludes with abuse of Swift's character as an Irish dean disaffected from the government—hence ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... The signal failure of the attempts made to kill the Gaelic movement with ridicule, on the part of those who saw in it an evil-disposed attempt to stop the Anglicising of the country, was as conspicuous as has been the ill success of the petty tyranny of the Inland Revenue authorities, who took out summonses against those who had their names engraved on their dogs' collars in Gaelic. Trinity College has had for half a century two scholarships and a prize in Gaelic ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... her, and the naval officer was one upon whom the stamp of birth and polish was very visible. This man, he surmised, would understand the thoughts and fancies which were incomprehensible to him, and was acquainted with all the petty trifles which are of vast importance to a woman in ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... reveal a swarm of petty annoyances, which may have tried his strength and patience as much as more serious cares. The soldiers complained that they were left without clothing, shoes, or rum; and when he implored the Committee of War to send them, Osborne, the chairman, replied with explanations ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... the unforgettable, the unrememberable. The memory, which shows so wise a backwardness in registering pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of extended pleasures; and a long-continued well-being escapes (as it were, by its mass) our petty methods of commemoration. On a part of our life's map there lies a roseate, undecipherable haze, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unnatural vanity, the reward which their labours are certain hereafter to obtain. To those who can anticipate the vast dominions of immortality among men, what boots the sterility of the cabined and petty present? But the mere man of languages and learning—the machine of a memory heavily but unprofitably employed—the Columbus wasting at the galley oar the energies which should have discovered a world—for him there is no day-dream of the future, no grasp at the immortality of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to one of the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the lower orders of humanity—that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus is to observe the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... and forest, they visited in turn the villages of five petty chiefs, whom they called kings, feasted everywhere on hominy, beans, and game, and loaded with gifts. One of these chiefs, named Audusta, invited them to the grand religious festival of his tribe. Thither, accordingly, they went. The village was alive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his grains, For that none perfect are, sin yet remains, And human frailties do attend the best; To bear and forbear here, will tend to rest. Vain jangling, jars, and strifes will there abound, Where moles are mountains made, or fault is found, With every little, trivial, petty thing; This spirit snib, or 'twill much mischief bring Into this house, and 'tis for want of love, 'Tis entertain'd: it is ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... influence upon me, as my Copenhagen friends acknowledged. The impressions of the journey were immediately written down, and I gave them forth under the title of "Shadow Pictures." Whether I were actually improved or not, there still prevailed at home the same petty pleasure in dragging out my faults, the same perpetual schooling of me; and I was weak enough to endure it from those who were officious meddlers. I seldom made a joke of it; but if I did so, it was called arrogance and vanity, and it was asserted that I never would ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... night has done While he, the solar orb, has been abed— Sees here a yawl wrecked on the slushy sea, Or there a chestnut from its roost blown down, Or last year's birds' nests scattered on the lea, Or some stale scandal rampant in the town— Sees everywhere the petty work of night, Of sneaking winds and cunning, coward rats, Of hooting owls, of bugaboo and sprite, Of roaches, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... which they seek distinction. Thus, we see, that school alone has the custom of representing candle-light, not as it really appears to us by night, but red, as it would illuminate objects to a spectator by day. Such tricks, however pardonable in the little style, where petty effects are the sole end, are inexcusable in the greater, where the attention should never be drawn aside by trifles, but should be entirely occupied ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... remedied as soon as possible. I have no need to speak in favour of infant school masters, as many of them have been the greatest enemies I ever had, whilst on the contrary, the mistresses have generally been very friendly to me, and not been subject to those petty jealousies which the masters have too frequently evinced; nevertheless, the subject treated of in this place involves a principle which cannot be conceded without doing great injury to the infant system, and on those grounds I advocate the necessity ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... in St. James's Park with one that told us that the Duke of York would be in town to-morrow, and so Turner parted and went home, and I also did stop my intentions of going to the Court, also this day, about securing Mr. Turner's place of Petty-purveyor to Mr. Hater. So I to my Lord Brouncker's, thinking to have gone and spoke to him about it, but he is gone out to town till night, and so, meeting a gentleman of my Lord Middleton's looking for me about the payment ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... equal confusion. A grand quarrel between the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal, the latter engrossing all the Abbey, and the other all the Hall, and not allowing the smallest interference or even suggestion from each other. The King perfectly absorbed in all these petty arrangements of dress, seats, &c. A private box prepared in the Hall for the Great Chamberlain, in which Lady Conyngham is accommodated. Lord Conyngham said to-day, at White's, that he and family were ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... novel with which I could sympathise deeply, based upon the theme of England's regeneration by means of the right type of Tory squire, but it would be a novel with a more credible hero and conceived in a less petty spirit of party bias than Mr. H. N. DICKINSON has given us in The Business of a Gentleman (HEINEMANN). For, in the first place, Sir Robert Wilton, who figured of course in Keddy and Sir Guy and Lady Rannard—he has, in fact, by this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... uniform who spent his time assuming the poses of a general for the benefit of the ladies; of his admiration for whom and his intentions toward whom he made no secret. By all means one of the most disagreeable petty bullies whom I ever beheld. This arrest of a planton was, so long as I inhabited La Ferte, the only case in which abuse of the weaker sex was punished. That attempts at abuse were frequent I know from allusions ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... had been expected, he knows his master will be displeased. If the beaters prove intractable, the birds go wrong, but the burden of the host's disappointment falls on the keeper's shoulders. His are all the petty worries, the little failures of the day. The keeper is, therefore, not given to conversation. How should he be, with all these responsibilities weighing upon him? Few of those who shoot realise what the keeper has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... striking and the most interesting. The Hohenzollern are as unique in the history of royalty as the Rothschilds are unique in the history of finance. The history of other dynasties has been largely a history of Court scandal and intrigue, providing inexhaustible material to the petty gossip of Court chroniclers. We are all familiar with the amorous episodes of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., with the mysteries of the Grand and Petit Trianon and of the Parc aux Cerfs, with Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan, with Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, that ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... as indigenous banknotes have lost almost all value, and a barter economy now flourishes in all but the largest cities. Most individuals and families hang on grimly through subsistence farming and petty trade. The government has not been able to meet its financial obligations to the International Momentary Fund or put in place the financial measures advocated by the IMF. Although short-term prospects for improvement are dim, improved political stability would boost Zaire's ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Edwin, Arthur, Alfred, Ethel, Maud, Edith, Theresa, and many others of the Saxon names are pleasant sounding and strong, and a desirable contrast to the Fannies, Mamies, Minnies, Lizzies, Sadies, and other petty diminutives which have taken the place of better sounding ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... finding it. Under fire means so much, it is filled up with so many experiences, you march through a lifetime in a few seconds, you get new views of the past years from another angle of vision. Shadow and darkness and doubt are lifted, the soldier is frank and honest, he is not hide-bound by petty superstitions, he is willing fairly to consider and weigh all sensations, visions and inner illuminations. He is not blinded with the dogma of either agnosticism or sectarianism, while his sense of humour saves him from many ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Anatomy of the body to me, but so sillily as to the making of me understand any thing that I was weary of him, and so I toward the 'Change and met with Mr. Grant, and he and I to the Coffee-house, where I understand by him that Sir W. Petty and his vessel are coming, and the King intends to go to Portsmouth to meet it. Thence home and after dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson's conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue: where the men and boys in ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... is capable of an infinity of applications. The fact is that faith is always the unknown dimension. A man may know how many children he has, and how much money he has; but no man knows how much faith he has. Everybody who has read Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great remembers the petty squabbles of Voltaire, Maupertius, and the other thinkers who moved about the person of that famous prince. They seemed to have been for ever twitting each other with getting ill, and, notwithstanding their philosophy, sending for a priest to minister beside their supposed deathbeds. I have ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... sobs became less convulsive and then ceased; by an odd but not quite unnatural conjunction, the captain's soothing current of talk died away at the same time and by proportional steps, and the pair remained sunk in silence. The lagoon broke at their feet in petty wavelets, and with a sound as delicate as a whisper; stars of all degrees looked down on their own images in that vast mirror; and the more angry colour of the Farallone's riding lamp burned in the middle distance. For long they continued to gaze on the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... who doth no wrong, but he Who will not when he may; not he who, lured By some poor petty prize, abstains, but he Who with some mighty treasure in his grasp May sin securely, yet abhors the sin. Not he who closely skirts the pale of law, But he whose generous nature, void of guile— Would be, Not seem to be, The ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... private affairs of ducal and princely houses is often a most unthankful business. I have ever found it more satisfactory and less nerve racking to undertake a mission into some foreign country than to become involved with some petty local affair of royalty. For some such affair I judged to be the dilemma ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... our country for an indefinite series of ages. It was a declaration of that Congress to their constituents and to posterity that it was the destiny and the duty of these confederated States to become in regular process of time and by no petty advances a great naval power. That which they proposed to accomplish in eight years is rather to be considered as the measure of their means that the limitation of their design. They looked forward for a term of years sufficient for the accomplishment of a definite portion of their ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in one of his letters, complains that in spite of your nearness you have not yet been to see them. I know very well there is some reason for sulking; but what matter? Give it up: forget everything; do your best to put an end to all these petty and ugly estrangements. You will do so, won't you? I count on it, for ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... work of this kind; and again, it must be said that existing legislatures would perform these more restricted functions even worse than they have performed a completer legislative duty. Their members are experts in nothing but petty local politics. They are usually wholly incapable of drawing a bill, or of passing intelligently on matters either of technical or financial detail. If they represent anything, it is the interest of their district rather ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... intrigues through these Memoirs! By a few strokes of his pen, in words that bite like acid, he etches for us the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Czar ceased not to press the claims of the House of Savoy, yet no more tempting offer came from Paris, except a hint that some part of European Turkey might be found for him; and the young ruler nobly refused to barter for the petty Siennese, or for some Turkish pachalic, his birthright to the lands which, under a happier Victor Emmanuel, were to form the nucleus of a United Italy.[219] A month after the absorption of Piedmont came the annexation of Parma. The heir to that duchy, who was son-in-law ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... so treated have been unearthed in shops and kitchens. Such grains of information as the wearing of hoods and the preserving of figs may appear trifling enough at first sight, yet it is from a number of petty details such as these that we are assisted to an intimate understanding of a state of society extinct nearly ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... should, moreover, have a practical means to condition and fix even perpetual annuities, in such a way, that they would always afford the same economic and purchasing power to the person receiving them. No wonder, therefore, that political economists since Petty's time have zealously labored to find a constant measure of prices.(772) If by this we understand a species of goods such that it should always maintain equal exchange-power, as compared with all other commodities, the idea of a "constant" measure ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... shop in Regent Street, of which I have been speaking, we submitted to several petty annoyances of this description without complaint, the last and pettiest of which was when Mrs. Jimmie, being captivated by an exquisite hundred-guinea gown of pale gray, embroidered in pink silk roses, and veiled with black Chantilly ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... suffer me thus to be led into captivity? The barge was too deep to approach sufficiently near to the landing-place at the Tower to enable her to step upon the causeway without wetting her feet; it was raining too, and the petty inconveniences, fretting against the dreadful associations of the Traitors' Gate, shook her self-command. She refused to land; then sharply rejecting an offer of assistance, she sprang out upon the mud. "Are all those harnessed men there ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... itself, can hardly support her. In the Church of France, through the ages, there have been many saints; but in the reigns of Louis XVI. and his immediate predecessor there were but few, and none of prominence. The persecution of the Jansenists, petty as were the forms it took, had turned aside from ardent fellowship in the church many of the most earnest, religious souls in France. The atmosphere of the country was not then favorable to any kind of heroism. Such self-devoted Christians ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... were touching Margaret's heart; even this one interview proved to her that under the girlish crudities there was something very sweet and true in her nature; the petty vanities and empty frivolous aims of some women were not to be traced in Fay's conversation. Her little ripple of talk was as fresh and wholesome as a clear brook that shows nothing but shining-pebbles under the bright current; the ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... to make the gods envious; no great joys of having met each other's star-soul; with plenty of little every-day rubs, either in the shape of hateful little economies in the choice of opera-seats and cab-hire, or petty illnesses and nerves. Just a nice, ordinary, pleasant marriage, with only love to keep the machinery from squeaking, and no moral obligation on the man's part to see that the supply of love does not run ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... in among these Indians, to put a stop to their savage nonsense and order them back to their reserves with never a thought of anything but obedience on their part. But as he glanced about upon the circle of faces he hesitated. This was no petty outbreak of ill temper on the part of a number of Indians dissatisfied with their rations or chafing under some new Police regulation. As his eye traveled round the circle he noted that for the most part they were young ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... a footing here a few years ago, by buying out some of the petty traders, whose operations extended to the interior, and consequently interfered with the hopeful Ungava scheme; independently, however, of this consideration, expectations were entertained that Labrador ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... than that it has been my own way—and that is not saying much!" Felix had laid down his palette and brushes; he was leaning back, with his arms folded, to judge the effect of his work. "And you know," he said, "I am a very petty personage." ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... them. The commandant, as magistrate, possessed a summary jurisdiction; and the restrictions in his court he could supplement with the forms and ensignia of power. A late commandant, when he sentenced to small penalties for petty offences, sat at night; and to impress their imaginations, the hall of justice ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... took it into his head to persecute me because once I refused to fetch and carry for him and be his "moricaud," or black slave (as du Tertre-Jouan called it): a mean and petty persecution which lasted two years, and somewhat embitters my memory of those happy days. It was always "Maurice au piquet pour une heure!"... "Maurice a la retenue!"... "Maurice prive de bain!"... "Maurice consigne dimanche prochain!" ... for the slightest possible offence. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of the nature of small minds to disparage great ones; and in general Quita would have dismissed the matter with a light retort. But in her present mood, the man's petty personalities jarred more than usual. "I think we won't discuss Captain Desmond," she said without looking round. "To pick holes in a man of that quality only seems to accentuate ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... latitude, room for expansion, space. The heart leaped up spontaneously like a spring released. In the city this spring was held down rigidly in place, pressed under as by a weight; and the weight, surely, was that one for ever felt compelled to think of self—self in a rather petty, shameful way—personal safety. In the streets, in the houses, in public buildings, shops, and railway stations, even where people met to eat and drink in order to keep alive, were Notice Boards of caution and warning against their fellow kind. Instead of the kindly and unnecessary, even ridiculous ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... for transmission. From the fact that no less than a dozen errors occurred in a dispatch transmitted by a Boston gentleman from Cardenas to Havana, we judge that the telegraphic apparatus, invented by our liberty-loving American, Professor House, rebels at such petty tyranny. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... consume liquor with indifferent effects raised him another notch in their estimation. He was not always talking when some one else wished to—another count. There remained about him that stoical indifference to the petty; that observant nonchalance of the Indian; and there was a suggestion, faint, it was true, of a dignity common to chieftains. He was a log of grave deference which tossed on their sea of ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... will however consider, that that great Favorite and Interpreter of Nature, Aristotle, who was (as his Organum witnesses) the greatest Master of Logick that ever liv'd, disclaim'd the course taken by other petty Philosophers (Antient and Modern) who not attending the Coherence and Consequences of their Opinions, are more sollicitous to make each particular Opinion plausible independently upon the the [Transcriber's Note: extra "the" in original] ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... constitutional fibre, moral, mental, and, let us add, physical too, to overcome the obstacles opposed to the progress of merit, too often by persons in intelligence below contempt, but, in prosperity and accepted pretension, formidable indeed to fight against and overcome. We shudder to think of the petty cabals, the underbred indignities, direct and indirect, which the present eminent Judge had to watch against, to brush aside, to smile at, in course of his epic strides towards the highest local pinnacle of his profession. But [145] with him, as Time has shown, it ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... system prevails from the Supreme Court of the State down to the petty Police Magistrates, before whom the poor ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... been watching it bobbing these five minutes, and now it's out of sight altogether—hang it!" With that hearty exclamation of disgust pulling up a brilliant two-pound perch, the glory of the day! Next week's Punch had a pleasant comic sketch of this petty incident, thereby immortalised by the famous ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... his younger brethren. The king, instead of restraining this imperious spirit in his son, as he might, perhaps, have done by a considerate and kind, and, at the same time, decisive exercise of authority, teased and tormented him by sarcasms and petty vexations. Among other instances of this, he gave him the nickname of Short Boots, because he was of inferior stature. As Robert was, however, at this time of full age, he was stung to the quick at having such a stigma attached to him ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Anthony's uniform kindness and courtesy to reporters, always granting an interview no matter how tired or how busy she might be, and assisting them in every possible way with information and suggestions, it is astonishing that any one of them could indulge in petty, personal ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Every abuse of capitalism calls forth a fresh installment of legislation restrictive of personal liberty, with an army of prying officials. Legislators keep busy making laws, judges keep busy interpreting and enforcing them, and a swarm of petty officials are kept busy attending to this intricate machine of popular government. In sober truth, it must be said that capitalism has created, and could not exist without, the very bureaucracy it charges Socialism with attempting to foist ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Lord." In recollection and faith surround yourselves with Jesus Christ. The more you do so the more you will find that so to be in Him is to "be of one mind in Him." In that PRESENCE self is put to shame indeed. Pique, and petty jealousies, and miserable heart-burnings, and "just pride," die of inanition there, and heart meets heart ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... already struggling into strong life within her breast, that neither for the moment realised the strangeness of the situation or that it was in connection with a crime for which the husband of one of them had suffered, they were raking up this past, and gossiping over its petty details. Possibly recollection returned to them both, when Mrs. Scoville sighed ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... that we are savage,' cried Atlee. 'I contend for it that all our civilisation is higher, and that class for class we are in a more advanced culture than the English; that your chawbacon is not as intelligent a being as our bogtrotter; that your petty shopkeeper is inferior to ours; that throughout our middle classes there is not only a higher morality but a higher refinement than ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... his Dictionary the results of his fellow-members' researches for the Dictionary, then in progress, of the learned company. His Roman is a remarkable study of certain types of middle-class Parisian life, often animated, exact, effective in its satire; but the analysis of a petty and commonplace world needs some relief of beauty or generosity to make its triviality acceptable, and such relief ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... were constantly coming to the house to consult him and to talk over small matters. There also came to him pretty frequently people on police and magistrate's business, to get warrants signed, so that the offenders could be legally held till brought before the Petty Sessions. At these interviews, whether economic, administrative, or constabulary, I and my brothers were permitted to attend. While my father sat at his table in what was called "the magistrate's room," or "Sir Edward's business room," and the other persons of the drama either sat opposite ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 'high thinking' or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul. They are, of course, intensely personal in expression. They could not fail to be so. But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it. The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here. In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion. Such a sonnet as the following ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... his brows together over his narrow eyes. I think what first set me against the man was the look of those eyes, at once malevolent and petty. You may see the like in any man completely ungenerous. Also the bald skin upon his skull was drawn extremely tight, while the flesh dropped in folds about his neck and under his lean chaps, and the longer I pondered this the more distasteful I ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... swayed by personal predilections or antipathies, but, in the life of Christ, we can discover no memorial of any such infirmity. Like a sage among children, He did not permit Himself to be influenced by the petty partialities, whims, or superstitions of His countrymen. He inculcated a theological system for which He could not expect the support of any of the existing classes of religionists. He differed from the Essenes, as He did not adopt their ascetic ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Jersey landscape with its warm red soil to the distant rise of low blue hills; but it was not fair enough in a general way to justify its name. Yet Fairbridge it was, without bridge, or natural beauty, and no mortal knew why. The origin of the name was lost in the petty mist of ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 480. It seems unlikely that Johnson passed a whole week on ship-board. Loplolly, or Loblolly, is explained in Roderick Random, chap. xxvii. Roderick, when acting as the surgeon's assistant on a man of war, 'suffered,' he says, 'from the rude insults of the sailors and petty officers, among whom I was known by ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of Shelburne in Ireland, the last of the male descendants of Sir William Petty. Upon his death his titles extinguished; but his estates devolved on his nephew, the Lord John Fitz Maurice, in whose favour the title ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Graunt (1620-1674) was a draper by trade, and was a member of the Common Council of London until he lost office by turning Romanist. Although a shopkeeper, he was elected to the Royal Society on the special recommendation of Charles II. Petty edited the fifth edition of his work, adding much to its size and value, and this may be the basis of Burnet's ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... disaster—the surprise at Isandhlwana (January, 1879) of a British force, which was almost annihilated by a vastly superior native army. Ultimately, however, Cetewayo was defeated and made prisoner. Zululand was divided among thirteen petty chiefs under a British resident, and subsequently, in 1887, annexed to the British crown as a dependency, to be administered by the Governor of Natal. Except for some disturbances in 1888, its people have since remained peaceful, prosperous, and to all appearance ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Monica, don't you think at such a moment it is hardly natural that he should form such petty schemes, even were he capable at other times of practising so low? Is it not judging him hardly? and you, you know, so little ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Goldscheid reminds us, this War is making all of us into citizens of the world. A world-wide outlook can no longer be reserved merely for philosophers. Some of the old bridges, it is true, have been washed away, but on every side walls are falling, and the petty fears and rivalries of European nations begin to look worse than trivial in the face of greater dangers. As our eyes begin to be opened we see Europe lying between the nether millstone of Asia and the upper ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... a sudden bitterness, a sudden anger. And with it he felt a deep contempt for them, for their petty, unenlightened lives, their coarseness, their blackened hands and unshaved faces. He was a gentleman and a Conniston! He was the son of William Conniston, of Wall Street! He told himself that when they came to know who he was, who his father was, their ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... and for a moment he believed that she was about to break down completely. He aimlessly brushed the cigar ashes from the tablecloth. He hated a scene in public. In the theater it was different; it was a part of the petty round of business to have the leading lady burst into tears when things didn't suit her. What fools women are in general! But the girl surprised him by holding up determinedly, and sinking her white teeth into her lips to smother the sob which rose ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... or if learned, what room To put it into act,—else worse than naught? We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream, Than in a cycle of New England sloth, Broke only by a petty Indian war, Or quarrel for a letter more or less In some hard word, which, spelt in either way, 190 Not their most learned clerks can understand. New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... drowsiness made him appear stupid and ill at ease in the presence of this forceful man who stamped in and proceeded to exploit and enjoy his newly acquired authority. Mr. Starr hung up his coat and hat and swooped like a hawk on the daybook, at the same time calling for the book of "petty cash." ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... sprang, like a newly created species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners, his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... stern was blown off or completely ruptured. The after living compartments and after storerooms are completely wrecked or gone, and all stores and clothing from these parts of the ship are gone or ruined. About forty-five members of the crew, including the chief petty officers, lost practically everything but the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... "Of all petty tyrants, he is one of the pettiest, as are most demagogues, that ever I knew. He is a Swiss by birth, and a Greek by assumption, having married a wife ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... is, the world has nearly outgrown the petty jealousy, the cool assumption of inferiority, the flippant criticism of her weaknesses, the insulting catering to her foibles, with which woman has been accustomed to be treated, and which have made her either the slave, the toy, or the ridicule of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is the ability to please rather than offend, by saying or doing the right thing in a pleasant way at the right time, ignoring petty slights and insults and leading disagreeable people ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... that the coming of the Wise Men—the Magi—was in accordance with the astrological signs, of the interpretation of which they were adepts and masters. When this truth is known, how puerile and petty seems the myth of the "traveling star" of the commonly accepted exoteric version? And the pictures of the Wise Men being led by a moving heavenly body, traveling across the skies and at last standing still over the cottage of Joseph, with which the Sunday school books are ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... itself was amazingly prosperous. There were internal feuds, mainly petty, some serious. George Keith grievously divided the Quakers by his teachings against slavery, going to law, or service as magistrates on the part of Quakers, thus implying that only infidels or churchmen ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... group of pupils belonged to the most devoted royalist families in Paris. It would be difficult to give an idea of the exaggerations prevalent at this epoch, and of the horror inspired by the Bonapartists. However insignificant and petty Amelie's action may now seem to be, it was at that time a very natural expression of the prevailing hatred. Ginevra Piombo, one of Servin's first pupils, had occupied the place that was now taken ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... Pyncheon's mode of setting about his commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his veins, through whatever channel it may have found ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not just; and such men are willing to free women from the ecclesiastical bondage that makes her responsible for all the ills of life, for all the pains of deed and creed, while it allows her no choice in their formation, no property in their fruition. Such men are outgrowing the petty jealousies and musty superstitions of narrow-minded dogmatists sufficiently to look upon the question not as one of personal preference, but as one of human justice. They do not ask, "Would I like to see woman ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... more chance, Weron. Go out and find what happened to that money. I don't care how you do it, and I'm not going to be bothered with your petty details. But find out where that money has gone. Is that simple enough for you ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... long before. She could not bring herself to believe that her brother would really force her into such wretchedness, and possibly he would never have done so, much as he desired it from the standpoint of personal ambition, had it not been for the petty excuse of that ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... instincts of petty tyranny, the Caesar kept the praefect of Rome kneeling before him for close on half an hour; all this while volleys of vituperations poured from his mouth against all traitors in general, and more especially against the praefect whom he accused of selling his services only in order to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... $800 have been spent thus far, the electrotype coins cost something less than $750, and the balance of the total quoted was made up by such incidentals as the draperies and upholstering, photograph frames, the designer's commission and petty expenses. ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
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