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More "Racy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... written for children's entertainment and instruction, is equally delightful to the fathers and mothers. It is life in New England, and the racy history of a long railway journey to the wilds of Colorado. The children are neither imps nor angels, but just such children as are found in every happy home. The pictures are so graphically drawn that we feel well acquainted ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... painful sensation of melancholy and regret. Upon the long tables still remained the scattered fragments, remnants of the banquet. Here the sumptuous display of the looms of Valencia were stained with the waste of racy and highly flavoured wines, and there broken goblets and ornaments of curious workmanship were flung around in the reckless excitement of the revellers. The lamps were out, and the few that still glimmered in the sockets served but to ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... ardor, and this ardor was infectious, for, ignorant as I was, he fixed my attention and stimulated my curiosity. How I wish I could reproduce the glamour of his discourses, the peculiar mixture of accurate knowledge and of racy imagination which gave them their fascination, until even the Professor's cynical and sceptical smile would gradually vanish from his thin face as he listened. He would tell the history of the mighty river so rapidly explored ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seat for my friend, and he stood leaning against the wall, trying to get her into easy conversation. The little kitchen looked so cheerless and bare that dull morning that it reminded me again of a passage in that rude, racy song of the Lancashire weaver, "Jone ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... the many rich and racy things the writer has run across in his explorations in the literature of American cities, the richest and raciest is a book called St. Louis: The Future Great City of the World, by L.U. Reavis. The very title-page gives ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Napoleon and Ivan-angel on the stage and lay the foundation of the plot. The story-teller's keen sense of fun and humor is shown in many little touches, but he never means to be irreverent. The whole legend is set forth in the racy, idiomatic, highly elliptical language of the common Russian muzhik, and is therefore extremely difficult of translation; but I have tried to preserve, as far as possible, the spirit and ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... art they were arranging, and in this atmosphere her womanly nature, chilled and dwarfed though it was, would often manifest itself in ways sweet and unexpected. Under no other circumstances could she have appeared so well. She as often spoke to herself in racy comment on what was before her as to Dennis, and ever and anon would make some pleasant remark to him, as she might throw a dainty morsel to her greyhound Wolf, looking wistfully at her while she ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Treasury." Tom Corwin, of the same State, with a portly figure, swarthy complexion, and wonderful facial expression, and an inexhaustible flow of wit, who was not a buffoon, but a gentleman whose humor was natural, racy, and chaste. Gulian C. Verplanck and Thomas J. Oakley, two members of the New York bar, who represented that city, were statesmen rather than politicians. John Chambers, of Kentucky, a gigantic economist, was ever ready to reform small ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... is a singularly racy piece of English, in which with the utmost plainness of speech the compilers give their reasons for having dealt with the old services as they have done. This reappears in the English Prayer Book of ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... was his custom to return for a few weeks to huge, crude synthetic, nature for relief. After endless discussion of "whorls of force" and of "the office of germs in the human organism," he enjoyed the racy vernacular of the plainsman, to whom bacteria were as indifferent as blackberry-seeds. Each year he resolved to go to the forest, to the lake regions, or to the mountains; but as the day of departure ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Where hints of racy sap and gum Out of the old dark forest come; Where birds their beaks like hammers wield, And pith is pierced and bark is peeled; Where the green walnut's outer rind Gives precious bitterness to the wind; There lurks the sweet creative ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... flowers, and its bright Lehigh fire, and softly cushioned chairs; that cozy parlor, where the little round table, with its snowy cloth, had been so often spread; and the fragrant coffee, and delicate tea-biscuit, and racy newspaper had been so often discussed; where John, in his slippers and dressing-gown, with his dark hair pushed off his broad forehead, read to us page after page of some favorite author, while the wind was welcome to whistle itself ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... of the generation before him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected blackguardism ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... there: if you want that sort of thing to amuse children with, the language of thieves is peculiarly suitable, in so far that if ever the young people who devoured "Oliver Twist" had over among themselves any of the Dodger's and Charley Bates's racy expressions it was with a wholesome sense of its being highly improper; whereas one cannot imagine the little folk of to-day seeing any impropriety in an equally debased decoction of English—albeit somewhat more mildly drawn—when put into the mouths of children like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... not lie in the rich interest of his matter alone. He wrote a racy style with a strong individual as well as Elizabethan flavor; and his personal comment upon the manners of his time serves as a piquant sauce to the solid meat ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Blanco upheld his name. He was a huge, massive, thick-flanked stallion, a kingly mate for his full-bodied, glossy consort, Blanca Reina. The other mare, Blanca Mujer, was dazzling white, without a spot, perfectly pointed, racy, graceful, elegant, yet carrying weight and brawn and range that suggested ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... that Captain Ellesborough from Ralstone camp had come "to tell us what America is doing!" A roar from the crowd. Ellesborough saluted gaily, and then his hands in his pockets began to talk to them. His speech, which was a racy summary of all that America was doing to help the Allies, was delivered to a ringing accompaniment of cheers from the thronged market-place, rising to special thunder when the captain dwelt on the wheat and bacon that ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... also that curious strength of which there are great resources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a story which comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other element of its early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another story printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... talk, flying thus helter-skelter through the gamut of opinion, went forward chiefly in German, which the foreigners of the party spoke with various accents, but glibly enough; only now and then did one of them spring over to his mother-tongue, to fetch a racy idiom or ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... rhythms, far looser and more varied than those of his contemporaries, are marvellously expressive, while yet they never depart from a secret and controlling sense of form. His vocabulary is very rich—stocked chiefly with old-fashioned words, racy, colloquial, smacking of the soil, and put together with the light elliptical constructions of the common people. Nicknames he is particularly fond of: the cat is Raminagrobis, or Grippeminaud, or Rodilard, or Maitre Mitis; the mice are 'la ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... August. Once or twice he delivered the annual address before the alumni; several times he secured appropriations for his alma mater from the State. His visits to Athens were always occasions of honor. Young men flocked wherever his voice was heard, fascinated by his racy conversation. No "Disinherited Knight" ever returned to more certain conquest or more ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... have natural vigour, the writer has a rough, true faculty of characterisation, and the book is racy of the ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... living museums, forming one of the most delightful, delicate and fragile ornaments of Europe. The things which are beginning here and which may be completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to our race for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar aspect—familiar, kindly, racy of the soil and unique—of that beauty which a long series of comely human lives is able to acquire and to hoard would disappear for ever from the face of the earth; and we cannot, in the trouble and confusion of ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... temperament, were very warm friends. Winifred saw beneath a light exterior a quantity of good, sound sense and a warm heart. She was a frequent guest at their house. Mrs. Gray liked her, though deploring her occasional indulgence in slang. Mr. Gray enjoyed her racy conversation, and Hubert professed a dislike of her volatile qualities. This last fact grieved Winifred, who liked her friend ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... or both of them, in the following paper of the Tatler (No. 221, Sept. 7, 1710), has given one of those quietly satiric pictures of many a well-known man of the day, some Petiver or Hans Sloane. The widow Gimcrack's letter is peculiarly racy. Although old books, the Tatler and Spectator still furnish rare material to many a popular magazine writer of the day, who sometimes does little more than dilute a paper in these and other rare repertories of ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... trudge homeward under the star-lit skies all our racy anecdotes are of the fine fast runs we have had with the 8.52, the brave swinging of the tail carriage, the heavy work over the points, the check and find again at East Croydon main.... Those who arrive ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... time you go to see a musical comedy at home, the second act is laid in Paris, and you see a whole stageful of girls doing the hesitation, and a lot of old sports having the time of their lives. All your life you hear that Paris is something rich and racy, something that makes New York look like Roanoke, Virginia. Well, you fall for the ballyhoo and come over to have your fling—and then you find that Paris is largely bunk. I spent a whole week in Paris, trying to find something really awful. I hired one of those Jew guides at ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... of indexes of Kervyn de Lettenhove's complete edition (vols. XX.-XXV.) are still of immense use, though his text and comments are inferior to those of Luce, Froissart's spirit may well be caught in Lord Berners's racy English translation (Tudor Translations), or in G.C. Macaulay's useful abridgment. The three redactions of Froissart's first book (from 1327 to 1373-1377), which is all that concerns our period, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess, when October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that "they have ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... He is the observer of the immediate, as Mr. Abbey is that of the considerably removed, and the conditions he asks us to accept are less expensive to the imagination than those of his colleague. He is, in short, the vigorous, racy prosateur of that human comedy of which Mr. Abbey is the poet. He illustrates the modern sketch of travel, the modern tale—the poor little "quiet," psychological, conversational modern tale, which I ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... intentionally cast in a homely style in contrast to the courtliness of the main plot; but Greene, as some of his later works attest, knew the value of strong racy English no less than his friend Nashe, who, in the preface he prefixed to this very work, pushed colloquialism and idiom to the verge of affectation ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... stupid," thought the chevalier. "I have nothing to contend with in such a rival; if the others are no more dangerous, it will be very easy for me to make Blue Beard adore me; but I must find the road to Devil's Cliff. It will be truly racy to be conducted thither by this bear." He spoke: "But, my brave hunter, alas! all glory is bought; I wished to see you, I have ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... extraordinary rapidity to a state of merriment, which would have been incomprehensible to one who did not understand her peculiarly complex character. Mrs. Raeburn listened with a good deal of amusement to her racy description of Charles Osmond. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... translated selections from Luther's works, two being from his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch divines of the 16th century, and with the old racy German.[1] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of twelve Racy Prints, from my fertile pencil, entitled, 'Scenes of Modern Prison Life,' by Thersites Junior. The two first designs will be ready by the end of the week, to be paid for on delivery, according to the ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... over the charming little volume, Home Pictures of English Poets, which thou wast kind enough to send me, and which I hope is having a wide circulation as it deserves. Its analysis of character and estimate of literary merit strike me as in the main correct. Its racy, colloquial style, enlivened by anecdote and citation, makes it anything but a dull book. It seems to me admirably adapted to supply a want in ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... weather alike—for his Sunday hat. His head-part was therefore official and lent additional value to the words recorded. He spoke them, moreover, with a dim note of aggressiveness which might only have been racy of a soil breeding men who are curt and clear of speech. But there was more than an East Anglian bluffness in the statement and the manner of its delivery, as his next ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... so accustomed to the sea, and the relish of salt breezes, and the racy dance of little waves that crowd on one another, and the tidal delivery of delightful rubbish, that to fail of seeing the many works and plays and constant variance of her never wearying or weary friend was more than she could long put up with. She called upon Lord ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Mr. Vaughan omitted to give us a few racy lines on Sir Matthew Hale's "Divine Contemplations of the Magnet," Sir Kenelm Digby's "Weapon-Salve," and Valentine Greatrake's "Magnetic Cures"? He should have told the world a little, too, about the strange phenomenon of the Jesuit Kircher, in whom Popery attempted to recover the very ground ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk, or a merry conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy—begotten of the occasion; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled with it; and any suppression of such complacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply, but that your company is weak or foolish enough to be moved by ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sound fame your not inerudite correspondent can conscientiously lay claim to; and although there is, with regret I admit it, a considerable portion of the square superficies alluded to, waste and uncultivated moor, yet I can say, wid that racy touch of genial and expressive pride which distinguishes men of letters in general, that the other portions of this fine district are inhabited by a multitudinity of population in the highest degree ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... written for the violin. Spohr was a man of immense self-assertion, and believed in the greatness of his own musical genius as a composer in the higher domain of his art. His "Autobiography," one of the most fresh, racy, and interesting works of the kind ever written, is full of varied illustrations of what Chorley stigmatizes his "bovine self-conceit." His fecund production of symphony, oratorio, and opera, as well as of the more elaborate forms ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... future! Flow on, beautiful one!—which of the world's streams canst thou envy, with thy beauty and renown? Stately is the Danube, rolling in its might through lands romantic with the wild exploits of Turk, Polak, and Magyar! Lovely is the Rhine! on its shelvy banks grows the racy grape; and strange old keeps of robber-knights of yore are reflected in its waters, from picturesque crags and airy headlands!—yet neither the stately Danube, nor the beauteous Rhine, with all their fame, though abundant, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... in the public eye. Her house, during the hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, was little else than a halting-place between two journeys. Visits to the poor, long watches by the sick; committees, in which her racy breadth of character gave her always an important place; discussions with the vicar, arguments with the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that—these were the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... only moderately introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He lacked imagination; but his descriptive powers were racy, and he knew instinctively what was likely to take, and what would be caviare ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... "Sibyl," are effeminate, extravagant, conventional, and prematurely worn-out. These words represent ideas which are theirs only by courtesy and conservatism, like the law-terms of the courts, or the "cant" of certain religious books. We have also a plebeian tongue, whose words are racy, vigorous, and healthy, but which men look askance at, when met in polite usage, in solemn literature, and in sermons. Norman and Saxon are their relative positions, as in the old time when "Ox" was for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... by adding a whole group of specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms of romance. Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and way the chief interpreter of America to England; Whittier, so intensely local that, as Professor Matthews puts it, "he wrote for New England rather than for the whole of the United States;" Lowell, courtly, cultured, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... (1850), Mr Taylor declines from the promise of his earlier efforts. The preface suggests great things; but they are not forthcoming. There is much careful finish, much sententious rhetoric, much elegant description; but there is little of racy humour (the play is a 'romantic comedy'), little of poetical freshness, little of lively flesh and blood portraiture, and more of melodramatic expedience than dramatic construction. Neither comedy nor melodrama is our ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... after all, the personality back of the book was the supremely interesting thing. He abounded in anecdote, and could describe graphically the men he had met, the orators he had heard, the occasions of importance where he had been an interested spectator. His conversation was delightfully fresh and racy because of the vividness of the original impressions, the unusual force of the ideas which were the copies of these impressions, and the fine artistic sense which enabled him to determine at once what points should be omitted, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... your pardon, sir; but that story of yours was particularly rich. He—he! Particularly racy," said he. "I tell you, sir, I took you wholly! I smoked you! I believe you and I, sir, if we had a chance to talk, would find we had a good many opinions in common. Here is the 'Blue Bell,' a very comfortable place. They draw good ale, sir. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the climate in that season heightens the charm of the strange scenery. In the brilliancy of the sky, in the lightness of the atmosphere, the sense of life is wondrously quickened. With the very breath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air, he feels as ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I could get from Alathea was interesting to me. Apart from the sadly interesting subject, she had admirable powers of narration. Her language (when it did not become too local for my comprehension) was forcible and racy to a degree, and she was not checked by the reserve which clogged Mr. Jonathan's lips. The following morning she came to the door of the drawing-room (a large dreary room, which, like the rest of the house, was handsomely upholstered rather than furnished), and beckoned mysteriously to ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Vanity Fair, purporting to come from the proprietor of a 'side-show,' as cheaper, or less than twenty-five cent exhibitions, are called in this country. To say that they are excellent, spirited, and racy—full of strong idioms of language and character, and abounding in novelties in type which are no novelties to those familiar with popular life—would be doing them faint justice. They embody a new and perfectly truthful conception ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... never can be a real and lasting democ-racy in belief, opinion and ideal. The mass must always lag behind the leaders, since it takes a generation or two for the ideas of the old leaders to permeate any society. Now and then a great leader finds a great following in his own lifetime, but his leadership rarely involves ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... dependent, in these her later years, on such sources of information as the peddler's garrulous tongue supplied. In the end she had found his talent for fiction quite as reliable as that of the journalists, besides being infinitely more entertaining, abounding in personalities which were the more racy, as the pedler felt himself to be exempt from that curse of responsibility, which, in French journalism, is so often a barrier to the full ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the duty of the Clerk of the Acts shows the importance of the office, and the statement that if the clerk is not fitted to act as a commissioner he is a blockhead and unfit for his employment is particularly racy, and not quite the form of expression one would expect to find ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... was the residence of Captain Glascock, who commanded H.M.S. Tyne, and whose pen has enriched the nautical novel literature of England {73} with the same racy humour which has distinguished his professional career. When commanding in the Douro, some communications which Glascock had occasion to make to the Governor of Oporto not having received that attention which ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... touched, have given, by their ringing sound, assurance of their emptiness. In bins, at one extremity of the cellar, were a number of bottles, whose thick mantle of dust and cobwebs spoke volumes for the ripe and racy nature of their contents. A large chest of cedar-wood stood in the innermost nook of the cellar, with raised lid, disclosing a quantity of cigars, worm-eaten and musty from extreme age. In the massive wall, forming one end of the vault, and which was in fact the foundation of the outer wall ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... pamphlet is given over to expounding the illogicalities and inconsistencies of the established spelling, and here G. W.'s style of writing, which is colloquial, racy and allusive, is effective enough. It is not so well suited, however, to orderly and clear exposition of his proposed amendment—unfortunately, since this is what is likely to be of most interest to us today (and numerous misprints increase the difficulties of grasping his proposals). Perhaps ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... thoroughly. His cricket "Bible," if I may use the expression, was Prince Ranjitsinhji's excellent "Jubilee Book of Cricket." He often accompanied the 1st XI for out-of-town matches, to act as scorer or reporter. His cricket reports in The Alleynian make racy reading. The following is taken from a picturesquely-written account of a victory over Brighton at ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Thousand to the bad, Our Lifeboat Service, once our glory? Nay, JOHN, that will not do, my lad; Next year must tell a different story. Think, what would "tuneful CHARLEY" say To such a thing? In racy lingo, Upon our backs his lash he'd lay, And give the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... has preserved a good deal of the life and humour—racy of the soil—that gave Rouen her character, even after the sixteenth century was over. Something of the old life and its bravery lingered a little longer, and in the more pretentious Latin poems of Hercule Grisel you see how all these fetes and jollities lasted on till well into the seventeenth ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... But in his conversation there was no trace of evil; nothing equivocal; he studiously shunned an indelicacy, never swore, and chiefly abounded in passing puns and witticisms, varied with humorous contrasts between ship and shore life, and many agreeable and racy anecdotes, very tastefully narrated. In short—in a merely psychological point of view, at least—he was a charming blackleg. Ashore, such a man might have been an irreproachable mercantile swindler, circulating ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni—compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at the pretty Teatro Apollo, while ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Nueil amused himself at the expense of the circle. He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their "Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... elected to remain in this land rather than penetrate the questionable beyond. As they crossed the open spaces the racy smell of the sage leaked through the packed drifts underfoot and they knew that parts of these valleys were carpeted with the same brush that clothed the foothills of their home land. This was the summer range of the elk herds and once well down ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... the Scenes from Clerical Life are many. They are simple, charming stories, full of life, and delightful in tone. Their humor is rare and effective, never coarse, but racy and touching. Their tenderness of tone lays warm hold upon the reader's sympathies and brings him closer to the throbbing hearts of his fellow-men. There is a pure idyllic loveliness and homelikeness about these stories that is exquisite. They all evidently grew out ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... greatly relieved. "I want a book of twenty pages. Write anything you like, only bring the pickles in on each page. You know the style. Twenty blood-curdling ballads, or Aesop's fables, or something the public's bound to read. Something racy, mind, and all ending in the pickle. It's a good thing, so you needn't be afraid of overdoing it. You shall have a bob a page, money down, or twenty-five bob for the lot if you let me have it this time to- morrow. Remember, nothing meek and ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... Memoires I., ch. i. In the above passages Dannett's translation is followed for the racy English.] ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... parentage. As Walpole sketched the society of Rome, Atlee, who had cultivated the gift of listening fully as much as that of talking, knew where to seem interested by the views of life thrown out, and where to show a racy enjoyment of the little humoristic bits of description which the other was rather proud of his skill in deploying; and as Atlee always appeared so conversant with the family history of the people they were discussing, Walpole spoke with ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of all Byron's works, the most racy and original, are undoubtedly those which relate to Greece; but it is only travellers who have visited the scenes that can appreciate them properly. In them his peculiar style and faculty are most eminent; in all his other productions, imitation, even ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... materials but always with the eye of a craftsman for striking effects and incidents.... The "Return from Market," "The Marriage Bargain," and the last scene ... have the illusion of life, and are in a phrase—which, though blunted by misuse, expresses a real need in Irish Art—"racy ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... there and watch his horses graze, but ever he saw that the riders were close at hand, and that the horses did not get out on the slope of sage. He sat back and gloried in the sight. He owned bands of mustangs; near by was a field of them, fine and mettlesome and racy; yet Bostil had eyes only for the blooded favorites. Strange it was that not one of these was a mustang or a broken wild horse, for many of the riders' best mounts had been captured by them or ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... beach-combers, or Americans. In The Beach of Falesa the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Here on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children—and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory, like a dish by a provident French chef that one could not help enjoying, even though one knew that the ingredients were ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... founded in 1790, the papers entitled "The Lay Preacher," upon which rests his literary fame. Of this magazine he became editor in 1796, and at once gathered about him a number of noble swelling spirits who contributed racy and original reading ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... hand, his opinions on all subjects, on public affairs and public men, on such questions of speculation or ethical interest as astrology and witchcraft, often strikingly expressed in language always racy and sincere, are scattered through the published volumes of his writings, all printed without note or comment. It may at least be a tribute to Fountainhall's memory to present a short view of his opinions, and for that purpose I have not scrupled to quote freely, especially from the Historical ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... favour, but on the accession of Elizabeth, he left the country, and went to Mechlin, where he d. He was famous as a writer of interludes, a species of composition intermediate between the old "moralities" and the regular drama, and displayed considerable constructive skill, and a racy, if somewhat broad and even coarse, humour. Among his interludes are The Play of the Wether (1532), The Play of Love (1533), and The Pardoner and the Frere. An allegorical poem is The Spider and the Flie (1556), in which the Spider stands for the Protestants, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... ornament of those who have any place in the government of the world.... His pen seems most proper for a troubled and sick state, as ours at present is; you would often say it is us he paints and pinches.' Sir Henry Savile, Warden of Merton and Provost of Eton, who translated the Histories into racy Elizabethan English at a time when the state was neither 'troubled' nor 'sick' is as convinced as Montaigne or the theorists of the French Revolution that Tacitus had lessons for his age. 'In Galba thou maiest learne, that a Good Prince gouerned ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... is not obscure. Too original to be an imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman. There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... immensely impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy, vital talk—and all in ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... happened that while Hodge the lately intoxicated, or Hodge the recent pugilist, was stolidly waiting for his sentence, the two justices in the retiring room were convulsed with laughter; the one recounting, the other imbibing, some curious racy anecdote concerning the family ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the incomparable old-new French of the original, was ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... When they happen to be there. She had a bugbear; Slang. Could not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded many a good "racy idiom" along with the real offenders; and monosyllables in general ran some risk of' having to show their passports. If this was pedantry, it went no further; she was open, free, and youthful with her young pupils; and had the art to put herself on their level: often, when they ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and then the three students burst out laughing. "Why, you juggins!" cried the senior man, "there never was an operation at all! They found the patient didn't stand the chloroform well, and so the whole thing was off. Archer has been giving us one of his racy lectures, and you fainted just in the middle of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sensuous literature of England drop from our people's hands. Let us encourage native genius to dip her pen into the old holy well of Catholic truth, and build up a literature that will be racy of the soil and redolent of its Faith. Let us feed the minds of the young on the untainted productions of our own countrymen and women. Let us brace them with robust Catholic principles that are mortised into the solid bed-rock of knowledge. Then the most powerful foe the future ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... is frequently disfigured by the commonest faults; yet the breath of a lofty purpose has been breathed upon every page. The personality of the author never pierces through his theme. The language is fresh, racy, vigorous, and utterly free from the impress of modern masters: much of it might have been written by a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... he asked Barker, and musingly listened while Barker told him. The Governor had thought to make it a racy story, with the moral that the joke was now on Lusk; but that inner man had spoken and revealed the cow-puncher to him in a new and complicated light; hence he quieted the proposed lively cadence and vocabulary of his anecdote about the ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... in it that at once tell the reader that he is in the hands of a very remarkable writer. But it is not Lady Culross's literature that so much interests us and holds us, it is her religion; and it is its depth, its intensity, and the way it grows in winter. After a long and racy introduction, sometimes difficult to decipher, from its Fife idioms and obsolete spelling, she goes on thus: 'Did you get any heart to remember me and my bonds? As for me, I never found so great impediment within. Still, it is ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... in another moment, because some profane eye had looked at them too closely, or some intruder had cast a shadow on their mirth, the sylvan pageant had utterly disappeared. If a few of the merry-makers lingered among the trees, they had hidden their racy peculiarities under the garb and aspect of ordinary people, and sheltered themselves in the weary commonplace of daily life. Just an instant before it was Arcadia and the Golden Age. The spell being ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... permission to receive her answer from her own lips. He was guarded enough; but on the way home I met Clinton who had been one of the guests at Mistress Katie's attempted wedding last week. He gave me details. Here they are." And these details lost nothing through Edmonson's racy recital of them. "No, Bulchester," he finished, "out of six people that I could name mixed up in this affair, on the whole, I am ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... that Mr. Heady (Uncle Juvinell) has produced a very entertaining and instructive volume. It is written in a racy, sprightly style, that cannot fail to captivate the mind. Partaking himself of the buoyancy and good humor of boyhood, the author is able to write for the boys in a manner that is at once attractive and profitable. ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... after the Sherwood interests. You see, my mother—father died ten years before she did—my mother, being dotty about the innate superiority of the male, left me in control of practically everything, and I do as well by it as the more important occupation of farming will permit. Which completes the racy history ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... universities, and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the other—that quality of merit has never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... reads it will, I am sure, find the brief and somewhat comprehensive title either arrogant or misleading. It contains some of the profoundest, truest and most courageous considerations stated with connected and well-supported conviction. The book is not only racy and readable, but—rarest of all things on this subject—it is comprehensible. The value of the book as an illuminant to thought on painting is henceforth impossible to ignore."—Mr. WALTER SICKERT in ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... observation, he added a racy humor which those who knew him in his hours of relaxation and familiarity will not easily forget. His mind was stored with quaint and pithy phrases, and apt illustrations, which he not unfrequently seasoned with his native idiom, the broad Barnsley dialect. His north-country pronunciation, ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... have excelled Bacon. He had a mind stored with imagery, able to produce various and vivid illustrations of whatever thought came before him; but these illustrations touched no deep feeling; they were fresh, original, racy, fanciful, picturesque, a play of the head that never touched the heart. The man was by nature cold; he had not the emotional depth or compass of an average Englishman. Perhaps his strongest feeling of ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... was really tempting. The absence of meat was compensated to us by the crisp and racy onions, and I craved only a little salt, which had been interdicted, as a most pernicious substance. I sat at one corner of the table, beside Perkins Brown, who took an opportunity, while the others were engaged in conversation, to jog my elbow gently. As I turned towards him, he ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... way of deliverance is held to exist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—though ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... well seasoned, and tenderly browned, Is flanked by the spiciest a la mode "round;" The great "priestly ham," in its juiciest pride, Is there,—with the tenderest surloin beside; Neat bottles, suggestive of ketchups and wines, And condiments racy, of various kinds; And firm rolls of butter as yellow as gold, And patties and biscuit most rare to behold, And sauces that richest of odors betray,— Are marshalled in most appetizing array. Then Beverly brings of his nuts ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... enjoyable book and never lacking in interest. It will be an inspiration for American girls to read its chapters. She gives graphic pictures. The volume contains several fine portraits. The book is racy and pleasing, whether the reader agrees with the author in ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... been largely featured at any other time. Some lesser scribe on Barlow's staff had been assigned to this minor item of news. He had gotten hold of the unfortunate Moody, and under the caption, "Der Jail Is Oudt" he had written a racy, humorous account of a Lady-Fair with Knockout Drops, a Resourceful Romeo and a hoodwinked Jailer. It ended with the statement that Romeo and the Lady were still missing, and that a ticket agent on night duty at the railroad station had seen two muffled figures unostentatiously board the last ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Buckingham, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow. It was no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable examples, and they had many imitators; but the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea's poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in at the appearance of something new in American literature. The force which Lowell ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... too slight,' goes on Colonel Sterett, followin' a small libation, 'to strike a blow for the confed'racy, but my soul is shorely in the cause. I does try to j'ine, final, an' is only saved tharfrom, an' from what would, ondoubted, have been my certain death, by a reb gen'ral named Wheeler. He don't mean to do it; she's inadvertent ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Norman chroniclers describe the preparations of William on his landing, with a graphic vigour, which would be wholly lost by transfusing their racy Norman couplets and terse Latin prose into the current style of modern history. It is best to follow them closely, though at the expense of much quaintness and occasional uncouthness of expression. They tell us how Duke William's own ship was the first of the Norman fleet. "It was called the ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... brightness, and with appropriate action. Praxinoe, the fashionable belle of the third century B. C., donned her garments for the festival with a mixture of coquetry and Greek dignity that delighted the audience; Gorgo's passage of arms with the Stranger of Alexandria, was smart and racy, while Edith, as the affected "man-about-town" of the period was considered a huge success. As nobody in the school was young enough to take Zopyrion, they had borrowed the gardener's three-year-old baby, and had trained him to walk on, holding ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... of some of his Dresden china. That there should be little interest in the record of rich men buying costly books which they know nothing about and never become acquainted with, is an illustration of a wholesome truth, pervading all human endeavours after happiness. It is this, that the active, racy enjoyments of life—those enjoyments in which there is also exertion and achievement, and which depend on these for their proper relish—are not to be bought for hard cash. To have been to him the true elements of enjoyment, the book-hunter's treasures ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... than the Americans themselves—just as many Americans assert to-day that their speech is nearer to the speech of Elizabethan England than is the speech of modern Englishmen? Is it possible that it will be only in the common language of Englishmen that philologists will be able to find surviving the racy, good old American words and phrases of the last decades of the nineteenth century—a period which will be to American literature what the Elizabethan Age is to English. It may, of course, be absurd, but already there are certain individual ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... made it the vehicle for every sort of quaint and exaggerated story that the free and rollicking West could furnish or invent. He was not particular whether the Times printed the first, fullest, or most accurate news of the day so long as its pages were racy with the liveliest accounts and comments on the daily comedy, eccentricity, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... was expressing his surprise at this information, in very racy language, they entered the village; and, mingling with the throng of holiday-keepers, followed the stream towards the ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... there were nearly as many gay barges and wherries as lighters lying off the Vintry Wharf; and sometimes, when accommodation was wanting, the little craft were moored along the shore all the way from Queenhithe to the Steelyard; at which latter place the Catherine Wheel was almost as much noted for racy Rhenish and high-dried neat's tongues, as our tavern was for fine Bordeaux and ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... his are natural growths; they have their own circulation of vital juices, their own peculiar properties; they smack of the soil, are racy and strong and aromatic, like ground-juniper, sweet-fern, and the arbor vitae. Set them out in the earth, and would they not sprout and grow?—nor would need vine-shields to shelter them from the weather! They are living and local, and lean toward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... rank in modern Catholic literature, and is brought before the American public by Bishop Hughes in a warm introductory encomium. It discusses many of the leading religious questions of the day in a racy and pointed style, and while opposing what the author deems the errors of Protestantism in general, reserves its hottest fire for modern Pantheism, Socialism, Rationalism, and other kindred innovations, which he regards as gaseous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... To raise the Devil, and mean one thing, And that is down-right conjuring; And in itself more warrantable, 595 Than cheat, or canting to a rabble, Or putting tricks upon the Moon, Which by confed'racy are done. Your ancient conjurers were wont To make her from her sphere dismount. 600 And to their incantations stoop: They scorn'd to pore thro' telescope, Or idly play at bo-peep with her, To find out cloudy or fair weather, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... well to fortify this point by a racy extract from that rare and amusing old book, the pioneer of its class, entitled "The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights, or the Lawes Provision for Woman. A Methodicall Collection of such Statutes and Customes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... abusive and less cogent in reasoning, as well as less relieved by any sparkle of wit or racy anecdote than those of Alesius, are certainly written in a more easy and flowing Latin style, and, in that respect at least, the Scottish prelates had no reason to be ashamed of the champion who had volunteered his services in their cause. Nor were they wanting in ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... inconsiderable value, the sale of which might support him, in such obscure and humble quarter as he could alone venture to inhabit, for several weeks, perhaps months. This thought made him cheerful and elated; he walked lustily on, shunning the high road. The day was clear, the sun bright, the air full of racy health. Oh, what soft raptures swelled the heart of the wanderer, as he gazed around him! The Poet and the Freeman alike stirred within his shattered heart! He paused to contemplate the berries of the icy trees, to listen to the sharp glee of the blackbird; and once—when he found beneath a hedge ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such as are seldom united in one person; which indeed seem not easily reconcilable with each other: namely, much prudence, with much generosity; great tenderness of heart, with a firm will. To these was superadded that racy humor which has served to distinguish him from other men. There is no other writer, that I know of, in whom tenderness, and good sense, and humor are so intimately and happily blended; no one whose ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... boldness and originality of idea and ethical character, had laid strong hold on him, and he passed into one of the most thoroughgoing adherents of Mr. Newman. There was something to smile at in his person, and in some of his ways—his unbusiness-like habits, his joyousness of manner, his racy stories; but few more powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, and he has justified his University reputation by his distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian and professor, and as a profound ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... ten-thirty. On the way we buys the papers, and the first thing we see is a column on the front page about our little imposition. It was a shame the way that reporter intimated that we were no blood relatives of the late George W. Childs. He tells all about the scheme as he sees it, in a rich, racy kind of a guying style that might amuse most anybody except a stockholder. Yes, Atterbury was right; it behooveth the gaily clad treasurer and the pearly pated president and the rugged vice-president of the Golconda ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... and starvation. Cimarosa (1749-1801) is the brightest name of the next generation. He shone particularly in comedy. His 'Gli Orazi e Curiazi,' which moved his contemporaries to tears, is now forgotten, but 'Il Matrimonio Segreto' still delights us with its racy humour and delicate melody. The story is simplicity itself, but the situations are amusing in themselves, and are led up to with no little adroitness, Paolino, a young lawyer, has secretly married Carolina, the daughter of Geronimo, a rich and avaricious merchant. In order to smooth away ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... at the door tossing their heads and eager to be off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which rolled from hip to back, making a sturdy back for the splendid full tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up straight, deep-chested, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... petticoats, and yelled when he dropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture, and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting guardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward's racy stories for anything, nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old- time Lichfield, and of those 'lunar meetings' at which the wise ones foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one another's expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... treatment of certain city conditions. In the choice of Mr. Augustus Thomas's "In Mizzoura"—"The Witching Hour" having so often been used in dramatic collections—the Editor believes he has represented this playwright at a time when his dramas were most racy ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: - Introduction and Bibliography • Montrose J. Moses
... an elephant's sinewy proboscis to the soul's bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing the life cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the gigantic beast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally a woman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of a racy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to the Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium the adventures he had passed through, living successively in the character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a beau, a monk, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... companions, whose shameless effrontery was backed by cunning, whose wit though common was abundant and effective through long practice—a sort of licensed tavern-king, whose mere entrance into a room set the table in a roar. Shakespeare was attracted by the many-sided racy ruffian, delighted perhaps most by his easy mastery of life and men; he studied him with infinite zest, absorbed him wholly, and afterwards reproduced him with such richness of sympathy, such magic of enlarging invention that he has ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... corrupt the mind of the simple. Democracy in England has been the chief representative of veritable Englishness up to these days. It was never Latinized or Frenchified. The cottage garden refused to follow the bad example of the "carpet-bedder." The poor have always been racy of the soil. They have laughed at the absurdities of fashion and seen through the pretensions of wealth. They have believed in heartiness and cheerfulness. All their proverbs spring out of a keen sense ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... avoided treating his subject from a too human point of view, and we are paying him a very high compliment when we say that the more we study the work the more we are impressed with what we may best describe as the "vegetability" of the writer's mind. The book is racy of the soil; it is written in a charming and convincing style, and bears the stamp of imaginative originality. An acquaintance to whom we lent the book admirably expresses the impression we had formed of it by saying that it might have been written by EUSTACE or HALLIE MILES. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... that is quite contagious. As a writer of simple narrative, his imagination sometimes outstrips his discretion, but every one who reads his book will admit that he is not often surpassed for the fresh and racy character of his anecdotes. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... and racy" scenes that came off in the Convention, we will leave our several friends from Nashville, who were there as reporters in the Convention for the American papers, to set forth. With more truth than poetry, the "unterrified Democracy" convened at Cincinnati can say, "Our ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... no question, I think, that Arthur's grave and humorous ways attracted her. He, when at his best, was a racy and paradoxical talker—with that natural tinge of veiled melancholy or cynicism half-suspected which is so fascinating, as seeming to imply a "past," a history. He ventured to speak to her more than once about her tendency to "drift." He told me ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... power as a player, and his works written for the violin. Spohr was a man of immense self-assertion, and believed in the greatness of his own musical genius as a composer in the higher domain of his art. His "Autobiography," one of the most fresh, racy, and interesting works of the kind ever written, is full of varied illustrations of what Chorley stigmatizes his "bovine self-conceit." His fecund production of symphony, oratorio, and opera, as well as of the more elaborate forms of chamber music, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... sea-captain, whom I disturbed in his nap to inquire whether he let lodgings. As it happened, he didn't. Then (as I very nearly went back and told him) what right had he to sport a brass plate? However, I got some good racy dialogue for the Nautical ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... popular journal that had been founded in 1790, the papers entitled "The Lay Preacher," upon which rests his literary fame. Of this magazine he became editor in 1796, and at once gathered about him a number of noble swelling spirits who contributed racy and original reading to the ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... of articles, written from the Seat of Hostilities, and for another, Bingo was on the Staff, and it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his wife near him in case he happened to get ... was "chipped" the proper technical term, or "potted"? The articles were intended to be the real thing—racy of the soil, don't you know? and full of "go" and atmosphere. Let it be said here that they achieved raciness. The London print in which they appeared came to be christened by the scoffer and the incredulous ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... talking eagerly and with the naivete of a child, wondered why he had never liked this man so much before. And Larch told the somewhat abject story of his life three times with an introduction of much racy anecdote. ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... in addition to vigorous and fearless comments on the events of the times, genial gossip with the reader on all current topics, and also devote abundant space to those racy specimens of American wit and humor, without which there can be no perfect exposition of our national character. Among those who will contribute regularly to this department may be mentioned the name of CHARLES ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... dandiest little affair I ever did see," said Frank half enviously. "Just big enough for two of us." He glanced over to the boy-size automobile standing in the shade. It was a long, racy looking toy, closer to the ground than a motorcycle, but evidently equipped with a good-sized engine. "Where did you get ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... a snaky slim cowpuncher on a racy horse intensified this impression in Pan's mind, stamped the future more vividly on his heart. It was what he had been ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... trotting the globe—an exercise foreign to his habit—when he went on to Australia for a reason racy of his blood. He wished to witness a certain game of cricket between the full strength of Australia and an English team which included one or two young men of his acquaintance. It was no part of his original scheme to see ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... extraction, the price of transportation, and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them twelve hundred dollars. The estimate may be extravagant. Cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our racy Territory. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of novels:—"Vivian Gray" Was positively charming, And "Almack's" infinitely gay, And "Frankenstein" alarming; I said "De Vere" was chastely told. Thought well of "Herbert Lacy," Called Mr. Banim's sketches "bold," And Lady Morgan's "racy;" I vowed the last new thing of Hook's Was vastly entertaining; And Laura said—"I dote on books, Because it's ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... carried with me, and which was as novel as it was popular with those who listened to it. The chief personages in the social circle besides my friend the lieutenant were Major Molloy, who was in command, a racy and juicy old campaigner, with a face like a sunset, and the surgeon, Dr. Dudeen, a long, dry, humorous genius, with a wealth of anecdotical and traditional lore at his command that I have never seen surpassed. ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... been merely disagreeable. He had infinite wit in him. It was his carnal genius that saved him. He wrote sixty books, and two of them—the "Siege of the Town of Mansoul" and the "Pilgrim's Progress"—exceed all ever written for creative swiftness of imagination, racy English speech, sentences of literary art, cunningness in dialogue, satire, ridicule, and surpassing knowledge of the picturesque ways of the obscure minds of common men. In his pages men rise out ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... beautiful one!—which of the world's streams canst thou envy, with thy beauty and renown? Stately is the Danube, rolling in its might through lands romantic with the wild exploits of Turk, Polak, and Magyar! Lovely is the Rhine! on its shelvy banks grows the racy grape; and strange old keeps of robber-knights of yore are reflected in its waters, from picturesque crags and airy headlands!—yet neither the stately Danube, nor the beauteous Rhine, with all their fame, though abundant, needst thou envy, thou pure island stream!—and far less yon ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... praise. The spirited talk, flying thus helter-skelter through the gamut of opinion, went forward chiefly in German, which the foreigners of the party spoke with various accents, but glibly enough; only now and then did one of them spring over to his mother-tongue, to fetch a racy idiom ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... they were almost the only readers of his published writings. They came to call him Bishop Bunyan. His native genius, his great human-heartedness and loving-kindness, his burning zeal and indomitable courage, his racy humor and kindling imagination, all vitalized by the spiritual force which came upon him through the encompassing atmosphere of devout Puritanism, were consecrated to the welfare of his fellow-men. His personal friend, Mr. Doe, describes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman. There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar with every ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... him spread out, moving nearer to me; and they laughed at his comical threat—which sounded all the more humorous from the Irishman's racy brogue, which became all the more prominent when Garry was at all excited. God knows, though, their merriment, untimely as it might have sounded to outside ears, betrayed no want of sympathy with their comrade. They laughed, ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... may be but a dull commoner, one of the third or fourth estate. But for all that, he has a comfortable fund of the vis comica, upon which he rubs along pleasantly enough, hospitably entertaining not a few congenial spirits who can put up with him as they find him, relish his simple and often racy fare, and enjoy a decent quantum of jokes of his own growing, without pining after the brilliant banquets of comedy spread by opulent barons ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... the Colonial directness and vividness of speech; a larger, freer diction upon the whole than that of the Londoner born and bred; more racy, less clipped and formal, but, in certain ways, more correct. The society cliche, and the society fads of abbreviation and accent, were missing; and in their place was an easy, idiomatic directness, distinctly ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... repartee that endear Mr. John Burns' speeches to the multitude. His sayings and phrases are quoted. His wit is the wit of the Londoner—the wit that Dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. It is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. Apt Shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. Personality, vital ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... rejoice the heart of many a lad. Mr. Turley knows boys and writes lovingly of them. His story is vivacious, the heroes are real live ones, the style is racy and true to reality in its descriptions of masters, boys and sports, and even in its use of school slang, the book throughout is clean, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... meat-eaters began to look upon it as a bad omen, and to wonder why a baseless rumour should stir up so much indignation. Tales of this kind, whether or not they tallied with probability, had come to be pooh-poohed, to be treated with disdain. Hence it was rather odd that an anecdote so racy should excite ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... events, but rarely practised those Cadmean arts. Yet they could tell the time of day by the sun, and steer through the silent night by the stars; and each of them had—as Emerson, a very bookish person, has said—a dial in his mind for the whole bright calendar of the year. How racy was their talk; how wise their judgments on men and things; how well they did all that at the moment seemed worth doing; how universally useful was their garnered experience—their acquired learning! How wily were these illiterates in the pursuit of game—how ready in an emergency! ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... right, because the wrong is sure to be almost right and the truth on its side neglected,—the letters are full of fresh, acute, and even profound ideas, sharp exposition of those primary objects of government which demagogues and buncombe legislators ignore, racy wit, sarcasm, and description (in one passage he rises for a moment into really blood-stirring rhetoric), and proofs of his capacity thus early for reducing the confused cross-currents of daily life to the operation of great embracing laws. No ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Hyperborean regions, and add its generous warmth to Transatlantic banquets. Even as it is now made, with very little care bestowed on cultivation and none to speak of on selection of the grape, the wine is rich and noble, slightly rough to a sophisticated palate, but clean in quality and powerful and racy. It deserves the enthusiasm attributed by Redi ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... dimly manifested. The structure of the verse, sometimes so stately and majestic, is frequently disfigured by the commonest faults; yet the breath of a lofty purpose has been breathed upon every page. The personality of the author never pierces through his theme. The language is fresh, racy, vigorous, and utterly free from the impress of modern masters: much of it might have been written by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... of course, intentionally cast in a homely style in contrast to the courtliness of the main plot; but Greene, as some of his later works attest, knew the value of strong racy English no less than his friend Nashe, who, in the preface he prefixed to this very work, pushed colloquialism and idiom to the verge of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... made upon all the camps and bungalows round the station. Croquet, badminton, and other games go on until dinner-time. I could linger lovingly over a camp dinner; the rare dishes, the sparkling conversation, the racy anecdote, and the general jollity and brotherly feeling; but we must all dress for the ball, and so about 9 P.M. the buggies are again in requisition for the ball room—the fine, large, central apartment in ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... part of it,' he replied, with a return to his former embarrassment; 'she does not seem to care for me now at all. Indeed, she positively refuses me. She says—to put it in the dear child's own racy language—that she wouldn't take me on at any price. She says it would be like marrying a clockwork figure without the key. She's more frank than ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... earliest of which may date from about the year 1500 B.C. The Hindus, or, as they call themselves, the Aryas, had by that time entered India, and were dwelling in the north-western portion, the Panjab. The hymns, we may say, are racy of the soil. There is no reference to the life led by the people before they crossed the Himalaya Mountains or entered by some ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... why it is dangerous to omit it—our guest is a distinguished citizen of the Great Republic beyond the seas. In America his 'Huckleberry Finn' and his 'Tom Sawyer' are what 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Tom Brown's School Days' have been to us. They are racy of the soil. They are books to which it is impossible to place any period of termination. I will not speak of the classics—reminiscences of much evil in our early lives. We do not meet here to-day as critics with our appreciations and depreciations, our twopenny little prefaces ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are redolent of the hearty fun and strong masculine sense of our old friend Sam Slick. The last work of Mr. Haliburton is quite equal to the first. Every page of the 'Old Judge' is alive with rapid, fresh sketches of character; droll, quaint, racy sayings; good-humoured practical jokes; ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the record of rich men buying costly books which they know nothing about and never become acquainted with, is an illustration of a wholesome truth, pervading all human endeavours after happiness. It is this, that the active, racy enjoyments of life—those enjoyments in which there is also exertion and achievement, and which depend on these for their proper relish—are not to be bought for hard cash. To have been to him the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... above; To her whose vigorous pencil-strokes Sketched into life her Oldtown Folks; Whose fireside stories, grave or gay, In quaint Sam Lawson's vagrant way, With old New England's flavor rife, Waifs from her rude idyllic life, Are racy as the legends old By Chaucer or Boccaccio told; To her who keeps, through change of place And time, her native strength and grace, Alike where warm Sorrento smiles, Or where, by birchen-shaded isles, Whose summer winds have shivered o'er The icy drift ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Jack' used to come and dine and sleep at my old home to keep his birthday, in company with my father and mother. At such times we as children used to come down to dessert to hear him tell stories in his racy way of Katerfelto, of long gallops over Exmoor after the stag, or of hard runs after the little 'red rover' ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... Matthew Grant, who landed in 1630 and was Surveyor of Connecticut for over forty years. Grant's mother was one of the Simpsons who had been Pennsylvanians for several generations. His family was therefore as racy of the North as Lee's was of the South. His great-grandfather and great-granduncle, Noah and Solomon Grant, held British commissions during the final French-and-Indian or Seven Years' War (1756-63) when both were killed in the same campaign. His grandfather Noah served all ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... full of flowers, and its bright Lehigh fire, and softly cushioned chairs; that cozy parlor, where the little round table, with its snowy cloth, had been so often spread; and the fragrant coffee, and delicate tea-biscuit, and racy newspaper had been so often discussed; where John, in his slippers and dressing-gown, with his dark hair pushed off his broad forehead, read to us page after page of some favorite author, while the wind was welcome to whistle itself dumb ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... his horses graze, but ever he saw that the riders were close at hand, and that the horses did not get out on the slope of sage. He sat back and gloried in the sight. He owned bands of mustangs; near by was a field of them, fine and mettlesome and racy; yet Bostil had eyes only for the blooded favorites. Strange it was that not one of these was a mustang or a broken wild horse, for many of the riders' best mounts had been captured by them or the Indians. And it was Bostil's supreme ambition to own a great wild stallion. There ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... learned the story of the intrigue, and had declared that she would never suffer the mistress's presence at her Court: and as soon as she discovered the name of the newly presented lady, she showed her sense of the indignity by bursting into tears, and by retiring from the room. The racy scandal of a royal disagreement was thus published to the Court, and Charles was speedily confirmed in feeling that his own authority was concerned in dealing firmly with an unseemly outburst of what he and his chosen companions deemed to ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... racy, a. fine-flavored, pungent, rich; spirited, piquant, fresh and lively. Antonyms: insipid, vapid, tasteless, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... power of a poet goes, few men have excelled Bacon. He had a mind stored with imagery, able to produce various and vivid illustrations of whatever thought came before him; but these illustrations touched no deep feeling; they were fresh, original, racy, fanciful, picturesque, a play of the head that never touched the heart. The man was by nature cold; he had not the emotional depth or compass of an average Englishman. Perhaps his strongest feeling of an enlarged or generous description was for ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... address before the alumni; several times he secured appropriations for his alma mater from the State. His visits to Athens were always occasions of honor. Young men flocked wherever his voice was heard, fascinated by his racy conversation. No "Disinherited Knight" ever returned to more certain conquest ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... rest of the members of St. Chad's Honor was also on good terms. She could be very amusing and full of racy Irish humour when she liked, and would send the girls into fits of laughter with her quaint sayings and funny stories. Her nickname of "Paddy Pepper-box" stuck to her, and she certainly justified ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... we must wake up to the fact that, as the very heart of our problem, we have a bolshevist nucleus in America composed of virile, red-blooded Americans, racy of our soil and history, whose conditions of life and labor are such as to develop in them the psychology of reckless, despairing, revengeful bolshevism. They really are little concerned with theories of the state and of social development, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... about ten-thirty. On the way we buys the papers, and the first thing we see is a column on the front page about our little imposition. It was a shame the way that reporter intimated that we were no blood relatives of the late George W. Childs. He tells all about the scheme as he sees it, in a rich, racy kind of a guying style that might amuse most anybody except a stockholder. Yes, Atterbury was right; it behooveth the gaily clad treasurer and the pearly pated president and the rugged vice-president of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company to ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... French comedy in the eighteenth century, we shall promptly shut up the volumes of Diderot, and turn to the ease and soft gracefulness of Marivaux's Game of Love and Chance, to the forcible and concentrated sententiousness of Piron's Metromanie, to the salt and racy flavour of Le Sage's Turcaret. Gresset, again, and Destouches wrote at least two comedies that were really fit for the stage, and may be read with pleasure to-day. Neither of these compliments can fairly be paid to The Natural Son and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Toro Blanco upheld his name. He was a huge, massive, thick-flanked stallion, a kingly mate for his full-bodied, glossy consort, Blanca Reina. The other mare, Blanca Mujer, was dazzling white, without a spot, perfectly pointed, racy, graceful, elegant, yet carrying weight and brawn and range that suggested her relation to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... 1474 fell on April 10th, thus giving, as the day of the conclusion of the translation, 31 March 1475, the same year being the earliest possible period of its appearance as a printed book." Then there is Caxton's own racy account of the circumstances under ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... Berners shouted at this point. "Jasper, a lute!" And then he halloaed, "Gregory, Madame de Farrington demands that racy song you made against Queen Ysabeau during your last visit." Thus did the Queen begin ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... Casey. And you know it. Oh, Casey,"—(I wish your imagination would supply that brogue, because it was such a deliciously soft and racy thing)—"Oh, Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... exist. We shall see enough of the religious melancholy in a future lecture; but melancholy, according to our ordinary use of language, forfeits all title to be called religious when, in Marcus Aurelius's racy words, the sufferer simply lies kicking and screaming after the fashion of a sacrificed pig. The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche—and in a less degree one may sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier 'sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... in anecdote, and could describe graphically the men he had met, the orators he had heard, the occasions of importance where he had been an interested spectator. His conversation was delightfully fresh and racy because of the vividness of the original impressions, the unusual force of the ideas which were the copies of these impressions, and the fine artistic sense which enabled him to determine at once what points should be omitted, and what words ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... remembered, then, that anybody can write English as she "should be wrote," and hence that a certain meed of admiration is due to those who, exercising their right of independent action, succeed in making it at once original and racy, and in conveying, without the least effort, meanings totally opposed to their intention, affording thereby admirable examples of English as "she ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... attraction was the personification of Bailie Jarvie by Charles Mackay, who, being himself a native of Glasgow, entered into the minutest peculiarities of the character with high gusto, and gave the west country dialect in its most racy perfection." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 56, November 23, 1850 • Various
... upon me by various other books, and especially by Fra Paolo Sarpi's "History of the Council of Trent," probably the most racy and pungent piece of ecclesiastical history ever written; and though I also read as antidotes the history of the Council by Pallavicini, and copious extracts from Bossuet, Archbishop Spalding, and Balmez, Father Paul taught me, as an Italian historian phrases ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair" found himself again in his native land he seems to have burst forth with the most genuine impulse into the broad fun, rustical and natural and racy of the soil, which perhaps was more congenial to his Scottish audience. "Peblis to the Play" and "Christis Kirk on the Green" are poems full of the very breath of rural life and the rude yet joyous meetings of the country folk at kirk and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... But if any of the old disputes came up again, I would certainly speak out my mind next hot-pot day. But you are hardly acquainted with our Darkshire fellows, for all you're a Darkshire man yourself They have such a sense of humour, and such a racy mode of expression! I am getting really to know some of them now, and they talk ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Liversage Spence." It was an attempt, as she explained to me, to return to the rational style and improving tone of Jane Austen, whose novels were sound educators as well as sources of amusement. From Miss Kingsley's natural fluency and sprightliness I expected something "racy," to quote Paul Barr, and I was disappointed to find "Moderation" dull and didactic. It was however heralded and published with a great flourish of trumpets; and Mr. Spence wrote a review of it in one of the leading newspapers under the symbol XXX (a signature ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... warm friends. Winifred saw beneath a light exterior a quantity of good, sound sense and a warm heart. She was a frequent guest at their house. Mrs. Gray liked her, though deploring her occasional indulgence in slang. Mr. Gray enjoyed her racy conversation, and Hubert professed a dislike of her volatile qualities. This last fact grieved Winifred, who liked her ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... mark you, did he reveal his interest in the Street and its doings. By not a single quaver was the cheeriness of his snatchy, racy, merry voice affected. By not the fraction of an inch nor a second was his gay little trot altered. But when the ends of his mustache stood out straight, his friends, no matter how slight was their acquaintance with financial ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... intensified, and the stove in the parlor attracted every one. A San Francisco lady, much "got up" in paint, emerald green velvet, Brussels lace, and diamonds, rattled continuously for the amusement of the company, giving descriptions of persons and scenes in a racy Western twang, without the slightest scruple as to what she said. In a few years Tahoe will be inundated in summer with similar vulgarity, owing to its easiness of access. I sustained the reputation which our country-women bear ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... "The most racy, mischievous role imaginable," said Herode warmly, "and she plays it to perfection—it is her chef d'oeuvre. She is always applauded to the echo ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... will find that Mr. Heady (Uncle Juvinell) has produced a very entertaining and instructive volume. It is written in a racy, sprightly style, that cannot fail to captivate the mind. Partaking himself of the buoyancy and good humor of boyhood, the author is able to write for the boys in a manner that is at once attractive ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... poured him out a cup of tea; gloomily he watched him drink it. Heedless of his gloom, Mr. James plunged into an account of his stay in Scotland, telling of the country, the food, and the people with an agreeable, racy vivacity. Slowly the great cloud lifted from Hilary Vance's ample face. He grew interested; he asked questions; at last ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... up this stuff before you, here in your own garden; I ask your pardon, I ask the pardon of the Princess; and I give you my word of honour as a gentleman and an old man, that when my book of travels shall appear it shall not contain so much as the name of Grunewald. And yet it was a racy chapter! But had your Highness only read about the other courts! I am a carrion crow; but it is not my fault, after all, that the world is such ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling rather than infallible logic, so he never wrote above the heads ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Robert, or Bob, as he is commonly called despite his sixty years, is quite a character in his way. He is an amusing old gossip, with a turn for racy comment and a finger in everybody's pie. He knows everything about everybody in ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... telling. He gave a faithful account of the fight, making mention of many incidents which his friend had omitted to touch on, and dwelling particularly on the deeds of Kettle. As to that flat-nosed individual himself, when called upon to speak, he addressed the assembly with a dignity of manner and a racy utterance of language which amazed those who had only known him as a thrall, and who now for the first time met him as a freed man. He moreover introduced into his speech a few touches of humour which convulsed his audience ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... under the star-lit skies all our racy anecdotes are of the fine fast runs we have had with the 8.52, the brave swinging of the tail carriage, the heavy work over the points, the check and find again at East Croydon main.... Those who arrive early ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... detail the early adventures of a Middy with much of that delightful ease we are wont to admire in the writings of Smollett, Fielding, and the character novelists of the latter half of the past century. The style of Captain Marryatt is fresh, vigorous, and racy—"native and to the manner born,"—abounding in lively anecdote, but never straying into caricature—with just enough of the romance of life to keep the incidents afloat from commonplace, and probability above-board. This and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... which, limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his" "hers," for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second intention." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... three-halfpence. "For how much?" quoth Paddy. The bottle was handed to him, and he was told to take as much as he liked. Paddy's joy knew no bounds at this liberality, and, unable to contain his ecstasy, he rushed to the door to communicate the good news to his companions, which he did in the following racy sentence: "Mike! Mike, my sowl! com' an' haf a dhrink—only thruppence for both of us, an' the botthel in yer ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... service by adding a whole group of specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms of romance. Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and way the chief interpreter of America to England; Whittier, so intensely local that, as Professor Matthews puts it, "he wrote for New England rather than for the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Sam Fisher, however, his manner peeled off him like a skin, and he began to talk as himself, a racy and vigorous self vastly different from the episcopal person he thought it necessary ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... with others, particularly fine—some with tall storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass—all the streets with little canals of mountain water running along the sides—plenty of people, "business," modernness—yet not without a certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... these racy descriptions appeal, it is suggested that they familiarize themselves with the "Reprinted Pieces," edited by Charles Dickens the younger, and published in New York in 1896, a much more complete edition, with explanatory notes, than ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... have said," continued the duchess, "try, if you can, to be novel, and be a bodkin only to the victim's face, save, of course, in the case of a new bit of racy scandal. That must be used to the greatest advantage as soon as possible, for scandal, like unsalted butter, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... be distinguished from the ancient; nay, he inserted lines and half lines, with such skill and nicety, that antiquarians are perplexed to settle which is genuine or which is simulated. Yet with all this he abated not of the natural mirth or the racy humour of the lyric muse of Scotland: he did not like her the less because she walked like some of the maidens of her strains, high-kilted at times, and spoke with the freedom of innocence. In these communications we observe how little his border-jaunt among the fountains of ancient ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... grasp whatever of individual character. Even Candide is but a "humour," and Pangloss a very decided one; as are Martin, Gordon in L'Ingenu, and others. His women are all slightly varied outline-sketches of what he thought women in general were, not persons. Plot he never attempted; and racy as his dialogue often is, it is on the whole merely a setting for these very sparkles of wit some ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... but a half-year back cooling my heels in a highland burn, should be now part and parcel of this great Argonaut army. Already my native uncouthness was a thing of the past, and the quaint mannerisms of my Scots tongue were yielding to the racy slang of the frontier. More to the purpose, too, I was growing in strength and wiry endurance. As I looked around me I realised that there were many less fitted for the trail than I, and there was none with such a store of glowing ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... but recourse has also been had to the original edition for the purpose of comparison. The only translation into English hitherto has been that of George Borrow, published in London in 1860, and written in that charming and racy style which characterises his other and better known works. He has, however, fallen into many errors, which were only natural, seeing that the Visions abound in colloquial words and phrases, and in idiomatic forms of expression which ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... yellow stubble, rolling sometimes over a muddy, brown river, and skirting now and then a welcome wooded cleft in the monotony of the landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full of the picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun and a brace of rabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to or at the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch frock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... days, was always bright and warm and snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam and flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around. Sometimes, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of his time, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... fragile ornaments of Europe. The things which are beginning here and which may be completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to our race for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar aspect—familiar, kindly, racy of the soil and unique—of that beauty which a long series of comely human lives is able to acquire and to hoard would disappear for ever from the face of the earth; and we cannot, in the trouble and confusion of these too tragic hours, realize the ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... living boys, with the virtues and faults which characterize the transition stage between boyhood and manhood. The Cornish fishermen are drawn from life, they are racy of the soil, salt with the sea water, and they stand out from the pages in their jerseys and sea-boots all ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... minor as well as major delinquencies of those who breathe the same air with us; they could not fail to be interesting to us all, were we not aware that, like the novels which are said to be "founded on fact," their most rich and racy parts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... of Will and John, named for the two uncles, would prove racy reading through many chapters. "The Twins" were the father's text for spicy stories galore many years before their death. From the first, they were "two young sinners." They both had active minds— overactive in devising deviltry. Mischievous as little fellows, never ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... of the pamphlet is given over to expounding the illogicalities and inconsistencies of the established spelling, and here G. W.'s style of writing, which is colloquial, racy and allusive, is effective enough. It is not so well suited, however, to orderly and clear exposition of his proposed amendment—unfortunately, since this is what is likely to be of most interest to us today (and numerous misprints increase the difficulties of ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... side, and well-broke setter or stanch hound recumbent at my feet. And one of these tales will I now venture to record, though it will sound but weak and feeble from my lips, if compared to the rich, racy, quaint and humorous thing it was, when flowing from the nature-gifted tongue of ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... heap too slight,' goes on Colonel Sterett, followin' a small libation, 'to strike a blow for the confed'racy, but my soul is shorely in the cause. I does try to j'ine, final, an' is only saved tharfrom, an' from what would, ondoubted, have been my certain death, by a reb gen'ral named Wheeler. He don't mean to do it; she's inadvertent so far as he's ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... "Bright," came from all parts of the House. The member for Birmingham is stout, bluff, and hearty, looking very much like a prosperous, well-dressed English yeoman. He is acknowledged to be the best declaimer in the House. Piquant, racy, and entertaining, he is always listened to with interest and pleasure; but somehow he labors under the prevalent suspicion of being insincere, and beyond a small circle of devoted admirers has no influence whatever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... national conditions, gave him an insight into the politics and society of the past not otherwise to have been obtained. Of still more value, perhaps, was the association with his young companions in the profession, and daily contact with the racy personalities which traditionally haunt all courts of law, and particularly Scotch courts of law: the first association kept him from the affectation and sentimentality which is the bane of the youthful romanticist; and the second ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Colored man in that section of the country. He was gifted in the use of good English, had an easy flow of language, was master of the most galling satire, quick in repartee, prompt to see a weak point and use it to the best advantage. He was a pungent and racy writer, and for a number of years contributed many able articles to the "Quincy Whig." He never spared slavery. In the pulpit, in the public prints, and in private, he fought manfully against the nefarious traffic in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... days—perhaps it is well that they are not more common— when by some singular harmony of body and spirit, every little sound and sight strikes on the senses with a peculiar sharpness and distinctness of quality, has a keen and racy savour, and comes as delightfully home to the mind as cool well-water to thirsty lips. Everything seems in place, in some well-designed combination or symphony of the senses; and more than that—the sound, the sight, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our "fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so superior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed to take account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the work as ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... surmise. Among gypsy women skill in begging implies the possession of every talent which they most esteem, such as artfulness, cool effrontery, and the power of moving pity or provoking generosity by pique or humor. A quaint and racy book might be written, should it only set forth the manner in which the experienced matrons give straight-tips or suggestions to the maidens as to the manner and lore of begging; and it is something worth hearing when several sit together and devise dodges, and tell anecdotes illustrating ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Raschi lay Stretched 'twixt tall tapers lit at head and foot. She held in both hands leafy, flowerless plants, Some she had fastened in her twisted hair, Stuck others in her girdle, and from all Issued a racy odor, pungent-sweet, The living soul of Spring. Death's chamber seemed As though clear sunshine and a singing bird Therein had entered. From the precious herb She poured into a golden bowl the sap, Sparkling like wine; ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... at the newspaper table. He seized the Journal Amusant, and began to make merry remarks upon the illustrations. A little circle quickly gathered round him, and he was inexhaustible in racy stories and whimsicalities. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... accompaniment of fiddle, flute or clarionet, one of those stirring songs which, week after week, appeared about this time in the "Nation" from the pens of Thomas Davis, and the brilliant young men in O'Connell's movement known as the "Young Irelanders "—songs "racy of the soil," like the "Nation" itself, which stirred the hearts of the Irish race like the blast of a trumpet, songs which are still sung by Irish Nationalists ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... course, intended to be pitied, and pitied he was accordingly. And then he would turn the conversation, and begin telling Italian stories, after the Italian fashion, according to his auditory: the pathetic ones when Rose was present, the racy ones when she was absent; so that Rose had wept over the sorrows of Juliet and Desdemona, and over many another moving tale, long before they were ever enacted on an English stage, and the ribs of the Bideford worthies had shaken to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... purpose of taking evidence on the subject; and the districts of London and Berkshire were allotted to him. His report, published in the following year, was a model of what a report should be. It was full of information, admirably classified and arranged, and was so racy,—by virtue of the facts brought to light, and the care taken to preserve the very words of the witnesses as they were spoken,—that the report may be read with interest by the most inveterate enemy ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... with the second course. The table was no sooner cleared of the cloth, and the racy wine with double rows of glasses again placed in array, than almonds, raisins, olives, oranges, Indian conserves, and biscuits deviled, covered the board! To it again they fell, with unabating vigour! I soon ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... a child, being rescued from a burning house, with his father right in the foreground giving thanks to God in the old-fashioned knee-breeches that were then worn. The other represented the Duke of Wellington in a similar frame on his famous charger Copenhagen and in the act of saying in his racy way, 'Up, Guards, and at 'em!' My great-uncle would often point to these two pictures and spell out the names for us as children, 'W-e-s-l-e-y' and 'W-e-l-l-e-s-l-e-y,' he would say. 'What different destinies the Almighty can spell into the ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... if I may use the expression, was Prince Ranjitsinhji's excellent "Jubilee Book of Cricket." He often accompanied the 1st XI for out-of-town matches, to act as scorer or reporter. His cricket reports in The Alleynian make racy reading. The following is taken from a picturesquely-written account of a victory over Brighton at Brighton ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of Smollett in his first fiction, and in general, has marked dramatic flavor: his is a gift of forthright phrase, a plain, vernacular smack characterizes his diction. To go back to him now is to be surprised perhaps at the racy vigor of so faulty a writer and novelist. A page or so of Smollett, after a course in present-day popular fiction, reads very much like a piece of literature. In this respect, he seems full of flavor, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... danger. He had spent his life everywhere by bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... a scholarly work, notwithstanding its author's undoubted learning, but is a lively and gossipy account which has at least one virtue, that it entertains the reader. The Worthies, the most widely read of his works, is a racy account of the important men of England. Fuller traveled constantly for years, collecting information from out-of-the-way sources and gaining a minute knowledge of his own country. This, with his overflowing humor and numerous anecdotes and illustrations, makes lively ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... divided my time between sea sickness and Charles Reade's novel of "Never too Late to Mend," a cheery companion under such circumstances. The purposed rowdyism of the man's style shows a little too plainly, but his language is so racy and muscular, his characters so fairly and sharply drawn, that one must not be censorious. Towards evening I remembered that it was the Fourth, and so procured a specific for sea-sickness, with which Braisted and I, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded many a good "racy idiom" along with the real offenders; and monosyllables in general ran some risk of' having to show their passports. If this was pedantry, it went no further; she was open, free, and youthful with her young pupils; ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Mr Trotter, greatly relieved. "I want a book of twenty pages. Write anything you like, only bring the pickles in on each page. You know the style. Twenty blood-curdling ballads, or Aesop's fables, or something the public's bound to read. Something racy, mind, and all ending in the pickle. It's a good thing, so you needn't be afraid of overdoing it. You shall have a bob a page, money down, or twenty-five bob for the lot if you let me have it this time to- morrow. Remember, nothing meek and mild. Lay it on thick. They're the best thing going, ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... would deplore, as all honourable men in their hearts must deplore it. When you were at the University (let me congratulate you on your degree) you edited, or helped to edit, The Bull-dog. It was not a very brilliant nor a very witty, but it was an extremely "racy" periodical. It spoke of all men and dons by their nicknames. It was full of second-hand slang. It contained many personal anecdotes, to the detriment of many people. It printed garbled and spiteful versions of private conversations on private affairs. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Press throughout the whole Republic from Boston to New Orleans. Boston styles it a "vigorous volume;" Philadelphia, a "delightful treat;" New York, "interesting and instructive;" Albany admires the Author's "keen discriminating powers;" Detroit, "a lively and racy style;" The Christian Advocate styles it "a skinning operation" and then adds, it is a "retort courteous" to Uncle Tommyism; Rochester honours the author with the appellation of "the most chivalrous American that ever crossed the Atlantic." New Orleans winds up a long paragraph ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... to amuse children with, the language of thieves is peculiarly suitable, in so far that if ever the young people who devoured "Oliver Twist" had over among themselves any of the Dodger's and Charley Bates's racy expressions it was with a wholesome sense of its being highly improper; whereas one cannot imagine the little folk of to-day seeing any impropriety in an equally debased decoction of English—albeit somewhat more mildly drawn—when put ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat, his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says the author of Nine Acres on the Hillside, "The agriculturist walks side ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... White; by his "Story of My Heart" he stands by himself, a little apart from the poets, and by "Amaryllis at the Fair" he stands among the half-dozen country writers of the century whose work is racy of the English soil and of rural English human nature. We will name three of these writers, Barnes, Cobbett, Waugh, and our attentive readers can ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... one of the first books I remember reading as a child. Some of the items are thoughtfully written, like how to write checks. Many others are just rumors or careless opinions. Some are "racy" ads. Many articles are lead-ins to the advertisements. Whatever their truth, they are interesting reading, calculated to draw the attention of ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Puss, with a cautious pat To feel the pulse of the quivering Bat, That had not, under her tender paw, A limb to move, nor a breath to draw! Then she called her kit for a mother's gift, And stilled its mew with the racy lift. ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... day, rich in light and shade, and there was only a breath abroad of the racy freshness that meant subsequent decay. The leaves were turning red and orange, but had not begun to fall; the sky was deeply blue; outlines were sharp and precise. They were both in a mood this morning ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... disapprovingly in a corner of the car. The girl was of a type as yet not common in Western Canada, reserved, quietly imperious, and annoyingly free from any manifestation of enthusiasm. She had also listened languidly to their most racy stories with a somewhat tired ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Jim, whose guest I was. The fact that we were without butter, and that "sweetness" (molasses) was low, was scarcely even noticed. I remember as if it were yesterday the stimulating tang of the frosty air and the racy problem of the open sea yet to be covered. The bag of birds which we had captured when we had driven in for shelter from the storm made our dry-diet supper sweeter than any Delmonico ten-course dinner, because we had wrested it ourselves from the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to converse with her through an ear trumpet, we left her to do most of the talking. She gave us many amusing experiences of her travels in America, and her comments on the London Convention were rich and racy. She was not an attractive woman in either manner or appearance, though considered great and good ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... chroniclers describe the preparations of William on his landing, with a graphic vigour, which would be wholly lost by transfusing their racy Norman couplets and terse Latin prose into the current style of modern history. It is best to follow them closely, though at the expense of much quaintness and occasional uncouthness of expression. They tell us how Duke William's own ship was the first of ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... upon the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. On the contrary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk, or a merry conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy—begotten of the occasion; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled with it; and any suppression of such complacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
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