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More "Second-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hero of the following story a Yankee, but he will wager a sixpence that he was born in Pennsylvania. But no matter, it is a good joke:—"'What do you charge for board?' asked a tall Green Mountain boy, as he walked up to the bar of a second-rate hotel in New York—'what do you ask a week for board and lodging?' 'Five dollars.' 'Five dollars! that's too much; but I s'pose you'll allow for the times I am absent from dinner and supper?' 'Certainly; thirty-seven and a half cents each.' Here the conversation ended, and the ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... of them would have gladly abandoned have connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities. The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice, and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some high-bred, worn-out animal, useless in himself, but infinitely ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Francis never succeeded in retaining a first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome from the king he was offered an annual retaining fee of three hundred crowns. He at once dismissed his two ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the sunlight. Indeed, the opulence and splendor of our climate, at least the climate of the Atlantic seaboard, cannot be fully appreciated by the dweller north of the thirty-ninth parallel. It seemed as if I had never seen but a second-rate article of sunlight or moonlight until I had taken up my abode in the National Capital. It may be, perhaps, because we have such splendid specimens of both at the period of the year when one values such things highest, namely, in the fall ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Cristo, "I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one's hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and property form a total ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... present the Sala di Niobe, we come to the Sala di Giovanni di San Giovanni, which is given to a second-rate painter who was born in 1599 and died in 1636. His best work is a fresco at the Badia of Fiesole. Here he has some theatrical things, including one picture which sends English ladies out blushing. Here also are some Lelys, including "Nelly Gwynn". Next are two rooms, one leading from the other, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting, but ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... made his philosophical Chinaman visit Vauxhall, the other members of the party consisting of the man in black, a pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. Tibbs, the second-rate beau, and his wife. The Chinaman was delighted, and, by a strange coincidence, Addison's metaphor crops up once more in his rapturous description. "The illuminations began before we arrived, and I must confess that, upon entering the gardens, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. Beowulf itself consists of one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale, hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is, for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. One may look back to the Odyssey itself ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... leading line or so. At Bursley his leading line was apparently "Singapore delicious chunks at 7-1/2d. per large tin." Rachel knew Wason; she had known him at Knype. And she was well aware that his speciality was second-rate. She despised him. She despised that multitude of simpletons who, full of the ancient illusion that somewhere something can regularly be had for nothing, imagined that Wason's bacon and cheese were cheap because he sold ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... cut out a perfect axe-handle, while the master- carpenter finds it difficult to accomplish the same thing. The best yacht-builders in Ocean County generally fail in modelling a sneak- box, while many second-rate mechanics along the shore, who could not possibly construct a yacht that would sail well, can make a perfect sneak-box, or gunning-skiff. All this may be accounted for by recognizing the fact that the water-lines of the sneak-box are ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... evenly. At last the right hand one shot up the long flame that precedes the death of candles; the contest took on interest, and even excitement, when, just as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it went out without guess or warning, like a second-rate person leaving this world for another. The right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as though in triumph, outlived its colleague just the moment to enjoy glory, and then in its turn went fluttering ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Kean play all those harlequin tricks of singing, dancing, fencing, etc.? They say, 'It is for his benefit.' It is not for his reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he was first, not second-rate in both. There is not a greater impertinence than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession. I have heard of people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon try to entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument. Good nature and common sense are required ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with stone, in "wretched taste," in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan barrister, named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, has preserved the interesting fact that in this hall in February, 1602—probably, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... knew it, and expected it; it never gave him a moment's chagrin. "He was not insensible," says D'Alembert, "to glory; but he had no desire to win but by deserving it. Never did he attempt to enhance his reputation by the underhand devices and secret machinations by which second-rate men so often strive to sustain their literary fortunes. Worthy of every eloge and of every recompense, he asked nothing, and was noways surprised at being forgot. But he had courage enough in critical circumstances to solicit the protection at court of men of letters ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... been half pained and half amused if he had known how foolishly his plans, which came in time to be his ward's also, were smiled and frowned upon in the Oldfields houses. Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue. If we keep near a certain humble level of morality and achievement, our neighbors are willing to let us slip through life unchallenged. Those who anticipate the opinions and decisions of society must expect to be ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... he thinks we ain't cut our eye-teeth!" And he would instantly begin speculating as to whether this was a new scheme for selling him second-rate nursery stock, or the smooth ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... furious charge of the Wild Boar and driving his hunting-knife into him behind his shoulder? Besides, if the actual assault is without danger, the approach is attended with a difficulty that increases the merit of these second-rate poachers. The coveted game is invisible. It is confined in the stronghold of a cell and moreover protected by the surrounding wall of a cocoon. Of what prowess must not the mother be capable to determine the exact spot at which it lies and to lay ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... made another jump—one which took the breath away. Several of the most conservative owners parted with their estates after naming a figure which they supposed beyond the danger point, and half a dozen second-rate situations, affording but a paltry glimpse of the ocean, were snapped up in eager competition by wealthy capitalists from Chicago, Pittsburg, and St. Louis who had set their hearts on securing ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... powders, and paints under her eyes; when she adopts, with eager enthusiasm, every outre, unnatural fashion that comes from the most dissipated foreign circles,—she is in bad taste, because she does not represent either her character, her education, or her good points. She looks like a second-rate actress, when she is, in fact, a most thoroughly respectable, estimable, lovable little girl, and on the way, as we poor fellows fondly hope, to bless some one of us with her tenderness and care in some nice home in ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 'd gumption enough the right means to imploy;[14] Fer the silver spoon born in Dermocracy's mouth Is a kind of a scringe thet they hev to the South; Their masters can cuss 'em an' kick 'em an' wale 'em, An' they notice it less 'an the ass did to Balaam; In this way they screw into second-rate offices Wich the slaveholder thinks 'ould substract too much off his ease; The file-leaders, I mean, du, fer they, by their wiles, Unlike the old viper, grow fat on their files. Wal, the Wigs hev been tryin' to grab ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird sings." Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of technique, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... already existed to women, and I left it to others to nurse the young life of this. The first medical men, I felt assured, would never, in the present state of public opinion, take an interest in a female college; and I desired, above all things, to protect women from second-rate instruction. ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... "You don't understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He killed himself to cause a sensation, and ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... say, Count. Youre going to say that the whole thing seems to you to be quite new and unusual and original. The naval lieutenant is a Frenchman who cracks up the English and runs down the French: the hackneyed old Shaw touch. The characters are second-rate middle class, instead of being dukes and millionaires. The heroine gets kicked through the mud: real mud. Theres no plot. All the old stage conventions and puppets without the old ingenuity and the old enjoyment. ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... Orators and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... at all events, and I'd rather be a second-rate doctor than a second-rate actor. But I know you don't mean it, and only say so ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... all, we must regard him as the first of American orators; but posterity will not assign him that rank, because posterity will not hear that matchless voice, will not see those large gestures, those striking attitudes, that grand manner, which gave to second-rate composition first-rate effect. He could not have been a great statesman, if he had been ever so greatly endowed. While slavery existed no statesmanship was possible, except that which was temporary and temporizing. The thorn, we repeat, was in the flesh; and the doctors were all ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the virtual domination of a single power on land and sea. Regrets or misgivings we may have, but the time for their utterance has long since passed. The British nation must have no illusions; defeat means the downfall of the Empire, and the reduction of Britain to the position of a second-rate power. Either we shall emerge victorious, or for all practical purposes we shall not emerge at all. Even if we shrink from a "fight to a finish," our enemies can be relied upon to persist to the bitter end. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... why. "For England," as one man has put it, "victory must mean prosperity. However triumphant she may be in arms, her future lies in a preeminence in world industries. Through it she will rise as an empire or sink to a second-rate nation." ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... there are no pictures of merit; but sometimes a second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room appropriated to Belgian artists, of which I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miserable ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the egoistic,—aesthetic philosopher, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... careless, easy-going, irresponsible way of the young girl so attractive to men? It does not make for domestic happiness; and why, Oh why, do some of our best men marry such odd little sticks of pin-head women, with a brain similar in caliber to a second-rate butterfly, while the most intelligent, unselfish, and womanly women are left unmated? I am going to ask about this the first morning I am in heaven, if so be we are allowed to ask about the things which troubled ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... you take a langouste, three rascas (an edible but second-rate fish), a slice of conger, a fine 'chapon,' or red rascas, and one or two 'poissons blancs' (our grey mullet, I take it, would be an equivalent). You take a cooking-pot and put your langouste in it, together with four spoonfuls ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from Florence, they were quickened from ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the last works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is both sumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unity of general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, by any undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques. Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgione successfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on a more extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These last are among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work of Titian. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... take the aristocratic view," said Father Payne, "which is that you do more for the human race by having a few fine people, than by having an infinite number of second-rate people. What the first-rate man thinks to-day, the second-rate people think to-morrow—that is how we make progress; and I would like to take infinite pains with the best material, if I could find it, and leave discipline for the second-rate. The Jews ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... board the canal packet, that the Indian referred to, was not the notorious chief of that name, but a second-rate warrior, who, having headed a band of marauders, ***med the soubriquet. How far this may be the fact, I cannot determine. I, however, frequently heard Poe's name mentioned as a brave defender of the hearths and homes ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... take her place, she said. So, one day, when I was in my office alone, Lizzy came to me, looking like a dead body out of which the soul had been crushed. She had been hurt, I told you:—she came to me with an open letter in her hand. It was from the manager of one of the second-rate opera-troupes. The girl can sing, and has a curious dramatic talent, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of that kind. But I should like to make Buckingham Palace second-rate; and I'm not quite sure but I can. I dare say ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... impertinence which characterized Charlie was fondly set down as savoir-faire and dash. A cheap wit was held to be brilliancy and conversational finish. And somehow we had all fallen into the way of humouring the brigadier. I never told him, for instance, that his son was a very second-rate doctor and a nervous operator. I never hinted that many of the cures which had been placed to his credit were the work of Fitz—that the men had no confidence in Charlie, and that they were somewhat justified in ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... at the door. It was a second-rate theatrical journal, still damp from the press. The handwriting on the wrapper was that of Josephs, and there was a paragraph marked in blue pencil. It pretended to be a record of her short career, and everything was in it—the programme selling, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... which leave you disenchanted, and wearied, and depraved, and all in pure waste; for it often happens that you put forth all your strength to win laurels for a man whom you despise, and maintain, in spite of yourself, that some second-rate writer is a genius. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of which it consists, and, besides, each section is repeated. That convenient form of accompaniment soon came into vogue. It occurs frequently in the sonatas and concertos of J.C. Bach and Haydn, but it is in the works of second-rate composers that one sees the full use, or rather abuse, made of it. No. 8 of the Paradies sonatas is particularly attractive, and the second movement forms a not unpleasant reminiscence of Handel's ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... good prose; it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality, and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to accept second-rate poetry as musical prose. For, that Mr. Coleridge is a young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed, in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the most fascinating and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... supper after the dance, and costly favours for every figure. The purchasing of these latter had been entrusted to Oliver, and Montague heard with dismay what they were to cost. "Robbie couldn't afford to do anything second-rate," was the younger brother's only ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... when he was overtaken by a violent tempest, which drove him into the channel, and obliged him to make for the port of Plymouth. The weather being hazy, he reached the Sound with great difficulty: the Coronation, a second-rate, foundered at anchor off the Ram-head; the Harwich, a third-rate, bulged upon the rocks and perished; two others ran ashore, but were got off with little damage; but the whole fleet was scattered and distressed. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... an air of quiet and superior knowing which always aggravated her most, "is a good second-rate cayuse when someone who knows horses is in the saddle. I'd give you fifty for him on the strength of his looks and keep him ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... seat in the Lord Mayor's chair. People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... expand, three years were added to that age, Mr. Templeton was most deeply in love. Mary was indeed lovely,—her disposition naturally good and gentle, but her education worse than neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a second-rate fashion, inculcated into her till her father's death, had now succeeded the quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant bigotries, of a transcendental superstition. In a change so abrupt and violent, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book X • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... chief circumstances of Malin's life he had never failed to consult his faithful friend Grevin, the notary of Arcis, whose judgment on men and things was, at a distance, clear-cut and precise. This faculty is the wisdom and makes the strength of second-rate men. Now, in November, 1803, a combination of events (already related in the "Depute d'Arcis") made matters so serious for the Councillor of State that a letter might have compromised the two friends. Malin, who hoped to be appointed senator, was ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... were worshipful people now. Uncle Barnet no longer invited them to his second-rate parties; Uncle Barnet was really proud to visit them in their own home. Sam Winnington was a discerning mortal; he had a faculty for discovering genius, especially that work-a-day genius which is in rising ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... She was not worse than many other girls, with plenty of inquisitiveness and sharp sense, and not too much refinement and feeling; whose accomplishments are learnt from the 'first masters,' and whose principles are left to be picked up from gossip, servants, and second-rate books; digested by ignorant, ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gradually it came to bear an antiquarian value: basins lost their grim appearance, and looked as clean as in gentlemen's houses. And at length the whole system was so thoroughly ventilated and purified, that all good inns, nay, generally speaking, even second-rate inns, at this day, reflect the best features, as to cleanliness and neatness, of well-managed ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... and on a few louis extracted from his relations. Loustalot, still more unknown, was admitted the previous year to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and has landed at Paris in search of a career. Danton, another second-rate lawyer, coming out of a hovel in Champagne, borrowed the money to pay his expenses, while his stinted household is kept up only by means of a louis which is given to him weekly by his father-in-law, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... had gone at once to the scene of the accident, considered it judicious to inform her of Geoffrey's condition, and so it happened that one evening Helen accompanied her hostess to witness the performance of a Western dramatic company. Despite second-rate acting the play was a pretty one, and each time the curtain went down Helen found the combination of bright light, pretty dresses, laughter and merry voices strangely pleasant after her isolation. At times her thoughts would wander back ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... collecting accounts, and Blake had come with me. It was late at night when I saw my last customer at his hotel, and I had a valise half-full of silver currency and bills. Going back along the waterfront where the second-rate saloons are, I thought that somebody was following me. The lights didn't run far along the street, I hadn't seen a patrol, and as I was passing a dark block a man jumped out. I got a blow on the shoulder that made me sore for a week, but the fellow had missed my head with the ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... mannerist to the last. When he died, he passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... he wrote: "I do not at all like the course for the History School (at Oxford). Nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading truly great authors forms it, or even to exercise it, as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.... The regulation ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the presence of a lady, the cafe does not seem such a very bad place; and it isn't. Even the estaminets and brasseries, which are but second-rate cafes, and the ordinary wine-shops, still lower in the scale, in which the coachman and commissionnaire regale themselves, taking a canon across the counter in the morning and playing a game of cards in the back shop at night, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... remember, the second-rate ones are a loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century; and then, silently)—all second-rate artists will tell you that the object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more refined than reality. Put that out of your heads at once. The ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... imperfection that ought to be palliated; but we aggravate it. The first-rate actor always does his best, because the audience expect it, and reward him with their applause; but no one cares for, or observes, the performer of second-rate talents: whether he be perfect in his part, and exert himself to the utmost, or be slovenly and negligent throughout, he is unpraised and unblamed. The general effect, therefore, of our tragedies, is very unsatisfactory; for ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... for the manner, aself-conscious tone appealing rather to an audience than to a reader, venting itself in apostrophes, digressions, hyperbole (over-drawn description), episodes and epigrams, an unhappy laboriousness that strains itself to be first-rate for a moment, but leaves the poem second-rate for ever.' —Heitland. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... nee Saillard, is one of those persons who escape portraiture through their utter commonness; yet who ought to be sketched, because they are specimens of that second-rate Parisian bourgeoisie which occupies a place above the well-to-do artisan and below the upper middle classes,—a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners, dull and insipid though ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... is apt to be detected by his continual cataloguing of prominent names. Mr. Parvenu invariably interlards his conversation with, "When I was dining at the Bobo Gilding's"; or even "at Lucy Gilding's," and quite often accentuates, in his ignorance, those of rather second-rate, though conspicuous position. "I was spending last week-end with the Richan Vulgars," or "My great friends, the Gotta Crusts." When a so-called gentleman insists on imparting information, interesting only to the Social ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... intelligence has now overrun the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in making the congeries of villages into—I do not say a city, for that is almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent struggles with the vestryman level of intellect ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... grocer's—I think he will be the best to ask if he knows of any family that wants a charwoman or could give me any sort of work. There's more than one kind of thing I could turn my hand to—needle-work, for instance. I could make a child's frock as well, I believe, as a second-rate dressmaker. Can you tell me who was the first tailor, Hector? It was God himself. He made coats of skins for Adam ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... There was no too modern uneasiness about it, no trifling, gim-crack furniture constructed to catch the eye and the angles of any one venturing to seek repose upon it, no unmeaning rubbish of ornaments or hectic flummery of second-rate pictures. Above the high oaken mantel-piece was a little pure bust in marble of the Prophet when a small boy. To right and left were pretty miniatures in golden frames of the Prophet's delightfully numerous grandmothers. Here might be seen Mrs. Prothero, the great ship-builder's ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... it had mumps, and I substituted. I thought I did it superbly: Death to Decollete: Peignoirs Popular for Suburban Suppers. That was the way I did it, and I was sure she would be pleased; but she cut me dead on the stairs, the first day she convalesced enough to be out. Arlt, musicians are second-rate ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves. I read about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary 'Sandford and Merton,' his interest in the whole ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not, however, conspicuous, although he held that only a second-rate man is diffident. At thirty-five years of age he already stood high in the criminal investigation department of the police. He was indeed about to receive an inspectorship, well earned by those qualities of imagination and intuition which, added ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... poor girl at all,' said Elena, 'but I like her a thousand times better than some conceited second-rate celebrity who would grimace and attitudinise all the while for effect. This girl seems as though it were all in earnest; look, she pays ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... statement; on the contrary, she invariably pleaded poverty; and the Honourable Miss Delmar, after Lord de Versely's death— which happened soon after that of his steward—sent both the daughters to be educated at a country school, where, as everything that is taught is second-rate, young ladies, of course, receive a second-rate education. Mrs Mason was often invited by the Honourable Miss Delmar to spend a month at Madeline Hall, and used to bring her eldest daughter, who had left school, with her. ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... thought of mine, and I didn't expect it to be accepted. My happiest thoughts are approved by myself alone, and so I'll keep 'em to myself. My second-rate thoughts are for others, over the heads of whom they will ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be a second-rate personage in the tale;—but it was with reference to her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a preface,—in doing ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... toward novelty and tentative, rather than bring forward a candidate who would represent, possibly misrepresent, the same beliefs and intentions on a lower personal level. As there was no first-rate man of the same sort to succeed Farquharson, Cruickshank suggested the undesirability of a second-rate man; and he did it so adroitly that the old fellow found himself in a good deal of sympathy with the idea. He had small opinion of the lot that was left for selection, and smaller relish for the prospect of turning his honourable activity over to any one of them. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in the presence of abstractions. This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work,' etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective. As against this, objective truth must be something non-utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, august, exalted. It must be an absolute correspondence of our thoughts ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... inconvenience of the most demoralizing sort simply to be in one for any length of time. A first-rate man who has been breathing carbonic acid and oil vapour under a pressure of four atmospheres becomes presently a second-rate man. Imagine yourself in a submarine that has ventured a few miles out of port, imagine that you have headache and nausea, and that some ship of the Cobra type is flashing itself and its search-lights about ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama, without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... gentleman (almost always an amiable and a hospitable man) would ask the artist to his house and introduce him to the distinguished individuals who frequented it; but would never admit his picture, on terms of equality, into the society even of the second-rate Old Masters. His work was hung up in any out-of-the-way corner of the gallery that could be found; it had been bought under protest; it was admitted by sufferance; its freshness and brightness damaged ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... letters and statesmanship as often as in money-matters) have lived to a serene old age, but the man who in any of the unuseful arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in the world. Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... corner the Master watched with amusement the flattering eagerness with which Mr. Pryce, who was a fellow of his own college, was laying siege to the newcomer. Pryce was rapidly making a great name for himself as a mathematician. "And is a second-rate fellow, all the same," thought the Master, contemptuously, being like Uncle Ewen a classic of the classics. But the face of little Alice Hooper, which he caught from time to time, watching—with a strained and furtive attention—the conversation between Pryce and her cousin, was really ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... represents his type and is, says McGregor, a mere bully. He has become a bully because he could succeed as nothing else. Given peace, it is doubtful if he could get and keep the job of errand-boy in a second-rate butcher's shop. Lacking the intelligence or spirit to succeed normally, he has not the decency to live quietly in the cheaper suburbs of Berlin and let other people do it. Flourish they must, HINDENBURG and his lot, and so the world is at war to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... Jack is another late variety, which is enormously productive of medium-sized berries. It is a great favorite in Missouri and some other regions. The berries carry well to market, but their flavor is second-rate. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... frescos by a very second-rate artist, Poccetti. Among them is a portrait of Savonarola; but as the reformer was burned half a century before Poccetti was born, it has not even the merit of authenticity. It was from this house that Savonarola was taken to be imprisoned and executed in 1498. There seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... West will have lost the cold war. Every neutral in the world will jump on the bandwagon. International trade, sources of raw materials, will be a thing of the past. Without a shot being fired, we'd become second-rate powers overnight." ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... no compromise with existing conditions; concedes not one point to the second-rate standards that we supinely accept; faces the question of cost, that basic difficulty which most theoretical educators waive aside, and which the public never dreams of trying to meet and overcome. Here are ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... like second-rate writers generally, fade gradually into dreamland; but the great poets ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... unfair that British authorship should be protected (as it now practically is) at the cost of our own, and for the benefit of such publishers as are willing to convey an English book without paying for it. The reprint of a second-rate work by an English author has not only the advantage of a stolen cheapness over a first-rate one on the same subject by an American, but may even be the means of suppressing it altogether. The intellectual position of an American is so favorable for the treatment of European ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea—its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped—if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the street: they walk and talk like men ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... to speak to Wolgemut about my brother, and to ask him whether he can give him work until I get back, or whether he can find employment with others. [Editor's note: Drer's brother was Hans Drer, who was fifteen at this date. He became a painter of second-rate ability, and afterwards helped Albrecht in the decoration of the Emperor Maximilian's prayer book]. I should like to have brought him with me to Venice, which would have been useful both to me and to him and ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... rest of the Dartons gave no sign. Old Con, I discovered, made occasional obscure trips to the city where he saw Lin Darton and Miss Etta, the former established as a second-rate real-estate dealer, the latter, as buyer for a large department store. Later it became more apparent that it was after these trips of his that he was able to purchase another horse. He quoted more and more frequently from the Bible and the "Elegy." Such feeling as ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wherein lies the pre-eminence of the work you have just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We listen to their strains, their would-be ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... own heart, as to her deficiency—but none were equal to counteract the persuasion of its being very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second-rate and third-rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them. But now she made the sudden resolution of not passing their door without going in—observing, as she proposed it to Harriet, that, as well as she could calculate, they were just now quite safe ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... was but a second-rate artist, even for his time, yet these frescoes, in spite of the feebleness and general inaccuracy of the drawing, are attractive from a certain naive grace; and the romantic and curious details of the legend have lent them so much of interest, that, as Lord Lindsay says, "when standing ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... his purposes. Nothing could be done effectively to change the political composition of the Lower House; something could be essayed with the reasonable hope of modifying the composition of the Upper House. Lord Temple, a second-rate statesman, whose position gave him almost first-rate importance, was the instrument by which the King was able to bring very effective pressure upon the peers. George wrote a letter to Lord Temple in which he declared that he should deem those who should ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... scattered throughout Europe, and studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of Greek art at its best. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles, in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the Correggio, or ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the sake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and weakness of aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually that sharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which shines out ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borne politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... ought to discriminate," she ended. "It's a pity to be intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the Dalloways, and to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... 1597. This is a small deciduous shrub, with ovate leaves, and short racemes of pretty pure white flowers. A not very hardy species, and only second-rate as an ornamental ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... been long distinguished for its elegance and height. Probably these are the most appropriate, if not the only, epithets of commendation which can be applied to it. After Strasburg and Ulm, it appears a second-rate edifice. Not but what the spire may even vie with that of the former, and the nave may be yet larger than that of the latter; but, as a whole, it is much inferior to either—even allowing for the palpable falling off in the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... may be called one, the notorious Captain Gee was a very active partizan of Mr. Davis's; he headed a gang of blackguards, a set of second-rate prize-fighters, amongst whom was the notorious Bob Watson. This gang used to annoy the voters of Sir Samuel Romilly most infamously. Watson used to come into the box, where ten or twelve of Sir Samuel Romilly's voters were ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... philanthropy, that in blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also, without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men, have been mainly instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," [De Stael.] and by the envy which talent too often ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... was so favourably represented by lord Ossory, that he was advanced to the command of the Catharine, the best second-rate ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... in print. Bouilhet, whom I first came to know somewhat intimately about two years before I gained the friendship of Flaubert, by dint of telling me that a hundred lines—or less—if they are without a flaw and contain the very essence of the talent and originality of even a second-rate man, are enough to establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence of a subject in perfect concord with the tendency of our mind, lead ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... present on the Wednesday. It is essential to the decisions of most business, and not least of the banking business, that they should be made constantly by the same persons; the chain of transactions must pass through the same minds. A large business may be managed tolerably by a quiet group of second-rate men if those men be always the same; but it cannot be managed at all by a fluctuating body, even of the very cleverest men. You might as well attempt to guide the affairs of the nation by means of a ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... rise from the study of these annals without a confirmed disgust for political intrigue; a dazzling practice, apt at first to fascinate youth, for it appeals at once to our invention and our courage, but one which really should only be the resource of the second-rate. Great minds must trust to great truths and great talents for their rise, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... five hundred francs for every puff in a first-class newspaper, and already there were ten of them; three hundred francs for every second-rate paper, and there were ten of those,—in all of them Cephalic Oil was mentioned three times a month! Finot saw three thousand francs for himself out of these eight thousand—his first stake on the vast green table of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... qualities, prefer to reserve them for an important affair like the Omnium, on which they can bet heavily and to advantage, especially if they have a "dark horse," or one that is as yet unknown. Otherwise, to what use could these second-rate horses be put? If one should run them in the spring they might get one or two of the smaller stakes, after which everybody would have their measure. Their owners, therefore, show wisdom in keeping them out of sight, or perhaps, as some of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... military lion, and, for that matter, even the living, is a fair mark for the heels of a baser animal. The greatest captains have not escaped the critics. The genius of Napoleon has been belittled on the ground that each one of his opponents, except Wellington, was only second-rate. French historians have attributed Wellington's victories to the mutual jealousy of the French marshals; and it has been asserted that Moltke triumphed only because his adversaries blundered. Judged by this rule few reputations would survive. In war, however, it is as impossible to avoid error ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system, whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the outermost planet—that is to say, so far as ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... its liberty, and then in the brutal and meaningless War of the Roses, a mere cut-throat civil butchery of rival factions with no real principle at stake. Throughout the fifteenth century the leading poets (of prose we will speak later) were avowed imitators of Chaucer, and therefore at best only second-rate writers. Most of them were Scots, and best known is the Scottish king, James I. For tradition seems correct in naming this monarch as the author of a pretty poem, 'The King's Quair' ('The King's Quire,' that is Book), which relates in a medieval dream allegory of fourteen hundred ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Dewidale immediately after my breakfast. I have made arrangements for boarding in this house, which is a second-rate commercial inn. They have agreed to give me board and lodging for twenty shillings a week—the full amount of my stipend: so all that I gain by my researches in the affairs of the departed Matthew is food and shelter. However, as this food and shelter ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... bread. I have sat under the Palm-trees of Tadmor; smoked a pipe among the ruins of Babylon. The great Wall of China I have seen; and can testify that it is of gray brick, coped and covered with granite, and shows only second-rate masonry.—Great Events, also, have not I witnessed? Kings sweated-down (ausgemergelt) into Berlin-and-Milan Customhouse-Officers; the World well won, and the World well lost; oftener than once a hundred-thousand individuals shot (by each other) in one day. All kindreds and peoples and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... not have helped her. Indeed, she did not price herself highly enough to make her feel that she would be justified in being angry. It was natural enough that he shouldn't want her. She knew herself to be a poor, thin, vapid, tawdry creature, with nothing to recommend her to any man except a sort of second-rate, provincial-town fashion which,—infatuated as she was,—she attributed in a great degree to the thing she carried on her head. She knew nothing. She could do nothing. She possessed nothing. She was ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... ascertain the fact. He would have been indignant, indeed, had he known that if Mary had accompanied him, the case might have been rather different, as her beauty would have made her desirable as a show-woman. Then he tried second-rate places; at all the payment of a sum of money was necessary, and money he had none. Disheartened and angry, he went home at night, declaring it was time lost; that dressmaking was at all events a troublesome business, and ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... in Sussex very early, before my day at least [he was born in 1766]; but that there was no good play I know by this, that Richard Newland, of Slindon in Sussex, as you say, sir, taught old Richard Nyren, and that no Sussex man could be found to play Newland. Now a second-rate man of our parish beat Newland easily; so you may judge what the rest of Sussex then were." But this is disregarding the characteristic ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... possibilities for producers and writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spectators, now with the improvement in the stories of serial pictures ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... at the present day, an ungrateful task for an intelligent reader or a conscientious reviewer, it is to be obliged to deal with a work whose whole compass is merely that of a second-rate romance inspired by rococo sentimentalism. We regret to speak thus of a book by so eminent a writer as Mrs. Stowe; but when any one at this time undertakes to build up a novel out of such material as cloisters, monks, and nuns, Beato Angelico and frankincense, cavaliers ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... second-rate Animals for breeding purposes.> — To insure improvement upon stock, no tenant is allowed to keep any bull, stallion, ram, or boar, except such as has been approved of, and permitted in writing by the proprietor or ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... away," he cried, his face reddening. "I've watched Ridgway ever since he arrived here last spring, and I will give you his recipe for success. He didn't fall overboard into a second-rate club as soon as he got here and rub his brushes on his coat-sleeve to look artistic. Not much! He had his name put up at the Union; got Croney to cut his clothes, and Leary to make his hats, played croquet with the girls he knew, drove tandem—his brother-in-law's—and ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... situation points to the advisability of shortly taking steps to prevent the Germans withdrawing their best first-line troops from the Western theatre for employment against Russia and replacing them by second-rate troops. ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... always be round the Pope second-rate people, who are not subjects of that supernatural wisdom which is his prerogative. For myself, certainly I have found myself in a different atmosphere, when I have left the Curia ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and are now falling out, merely from want of care when I was your age. Do you dress well, and not too well? Do you consider your air and manner of presenting yourself enough, and not too much? Neither negligent nor stiff? All these things deserve a degree of care, a second-rate attention; they give an additional lustre to real merit. My Lord Bacon says, that a pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation. It is certainly an agreeable forerunner of merit, and smoothes the way ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... partly in the reader. The backbone dislikes the raising of any question which it deems to have been decided: a peculiarity which at once puts it in opposition to all fine work, and to nearly all passable second-rate work. It also dislikes being confronted with anything that it considers "unpleasant," that is to say, interesting. It has a genuine horror of the truth neat. It quite honestly asks "to be taken out of itself," unaware ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... more enlightened generation is growing up—that the very leaders of the woman's movement have often betrayed the cause of women. They have adopted the ideals of men, they have urged women to become second-rate men, they have declared that the healthy natural woman disregards the presence of her menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim," remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... abortions!" cried Roderick with ire. "Preach that to others. Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing. As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all. I won't do second-rate work; I can't if I would. I have no cleverness, apart from inspiration. I am not a Gloriani! You are right," he added after a while; "this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache. I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... against the government. The powerful Southerners who had been its chief leaders were mainly in the Confederacy. Such Northerners as Douglas and Stanton, and many more, had gone over to the Republicans. Suddenly the control of the party organization had fallen into the hands of second-rate men. As by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, men of small caliber who, had the old conditions remained, would have lived and died of little consequence saw opening before them the role of leadership. It was too much for their mental poise. Again the subjective ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... beat included Bloomsbury Square had their reasons for not liking Mrs. Pennycherry. Indeed it might have been difficult to discover any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured lady. Maybe the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the ...
— Passing of the Third Floor Back • Jerome K. Jerome
... and by the characteristic account of the Huguenot emigration, but it suddenly occurred to her that she was promoting gossip, and she returned to business. Lucy showed off her attainments with her usual self-satisfaction. They were what might be expected from a second-rate old-fashioned young ladies' school, where nothing was good but the French pronunciation. She was evidently considered a great proficient, and her glib mediocrity was even more disheartening than the ungracious carelessness or dulness— there was no knowing which—that made her sister figure wretchedly ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil or water-color, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the second is the object kept ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Lord Mayor's chair. People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... translation of any first-rate poem, nay, even of any second-rate one which has any peculiar charm of rhythm or tone, to be an impossibility. The translation of rhyming Latin verses presents peculiar difficulties. The rhythm is always simple and strongly accented, it is true; but the ear-filling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... her Memoirs, then," said Madame de Ventadour, slightly colouring. "In the current of a more exciting literature few have had time for the second-rate writings of ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are no pictures of merit; but sometimes a second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room appropriated to Belgian artists, of which I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miserable imitations of the French school—great nude Venuses, ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I have sat under the Palm-trees of Tadmor; smoked a pipe among the ruins of Babylon. The great Wall of China I have seen; and can testify that it is of gray brick, coped and covered with granite, and shows only second-rate masonry.—Great Events, also, have not I witnessed? Kings sweated-down (ausgemergelt) into Berlin-and-Milan Customhouse-Officers; the World well won, and the World well lost; oftener than once a hundred-thousand ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... now greatly praised as a market berry. Dr. Thurber and I examined it together, and agreed that its flavor was only second-rate; but, as we have already seen, the public does not discriminate very nicely on this point. It averages large, sometimes exceeding six inches in circumference. It is long, conical, uniform in shape, necked. The first berries ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... essence, and take the lower and spurious forms of it for the higher and nobler, who think of love as being what, alas! it often is, in our imperfect lives, a fierce desire to have for our very own the thing or person beloved. But that is a second-rate kind of love. God's love is an infinite desire to give Himself. If only we open our hearts—and nothing opens them so wide as longing—He will pour in, as surely as the atmosphere streams in through every chink and cranny, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... deplorable results, England now views the wars with Napoleon the First in their true light. So far from British power having been augmented by that tremendous struggle, it has compelled England to descend from the position of a first-rate to that of a second-rate power, so far as it concerns the politics of Europe. Had the first Napoleon survived to this day, she would hardly have consented to act with the same subserviency to him as she now voluntarily acts toward his ignoble counterfeit. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... mighty warlords, the might of three was much more in their armies than in themselves. Cruel Philip was not a warrior of any kind. Ambitious Louis and the vainglorious Kaiser were only second-rate soldiers, who would never have won their own way to the highest command. But Napoleon was utterly different. He was as great a master of the art of war on land as Nelson was by sea; and that is one reason why Nelson, who caused his downfall, stands supreme. But there are other reasons too. Nelson, ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... Abbas and the seventeenth century Persian art becomes definitely and hopelessly second-rate. From the ruins emerge a variety of decadent schools of which two deserve mention. The academic school continued the Behzad tradition, and its hard but capable style did well enough for copying Persian old masters, European ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... no one to take her place, she said. So, one day, when I was in my office alone, Lizzy came to me, looking like a dead body out of which the soul had been crushed. She had been hurt, I told you:—she came to me with an open letter in her hand. It was from the manager of one of the second-rate opera-troupes. The girl can sing, and has a curious dramatic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... never slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face, the kind of face one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it, wondering what was the matter with it, and at last I realized what it lacked—will, desire, ambition,—it was what a second-rate sculptor might have made of Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in him. Once, when he spoke of the strike, of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... doggedly sacrificed herself for them, during their childhood, but naturally she had her own view of what constituted their "good." It did not consist in wasting one's youth and looks among the slums of the East End, or in deserting one's home to study music and mix in a set of second-rate people, in an out-of-the-way district of Paris. As for Hadria's conduct about little Martha, Mrs. Fullerton could scarcely bring herself to speak about it. It terrified her. She thought it indicated some taint of madness ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... renowned benefactor. He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes charities, and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... to an end; and the musicians in the gallery had fallen to tuning their violins. The chairs arrayed along the walls were thinly occupied, and as yet the social temperature scarce rose to thawing-point. In fact, the second-rate people had arrived, and from the far end of the room were nervously watching the door for notables. Consequently my entrance drew a disquieting fire of observation. The mirrors, reflectors, and girandoles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... embarrassing position. He spoke, when he did speak, in as brief terms as could serve to express his opinion. But this modest attitude only threw into relief his inalienable superiority. He cast about the shadow of future greatness. The representative of the second-rate Power, who sat there only by favour, was to make so much more history than any of his colleagues! Curiously enough the only one of the plenipotentiaries who had a prior acquaintance with Cavour was the Austrian, ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Goldsmith made his philosophical Chinaman visit Vauxhall, the other members of the party consisting of the man in black, a pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. Tibbs, the second-rate beau, and his wife. The Chinaman was delighted, and, by a strange coincidence, Addison's metaphor crops up once more in his rapturous description. "The illuminations began before we arrived, and I must confess that, upon entering the gardens, I ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... circumstanced, placed, and governed. Algiers is situated on an amphitheatre of hills, sloping down towards the sea, and presenting therefore the fairest mark to the fire of hostile ships. But where is the capital exactly so situated that we are ever likely to attack? And as to the destruction of a few second-rate towns, even when practicable, it is a mean, unworthy species of warfare, by which nothing was ever gained. The severe loss sustained before Algiers must also be taken into account, because it was inflicted by mere Algerine artillery, and was much inferior ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... country a great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass. The salient features wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction that the world is a changing one and our construction not of granite, nevertheless ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... prose; it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality, and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to accept second-rate poetry as musical prose. For, that Mr. Coleridge is a young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed, in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the most fascinating and delightful novels ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... which the writer throws himself into the spirit and letters of the times whereof he treats; the allusions, the illustrations, the style, all seem to me so masterly in their exact keeping, their harmonious consistency, their nice, natural truth, their pure exemption from exaggeration. No second-rate imitator can write in that way; no coarse scene-painter can charm us with an allusion so delicate and perfect. But what bitter satire, what relentless dissection of diseased subjects! Well, and this, too, is right, or would be right, if ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... capital, on this languid midsummer day, in an upper room of one of its second-rate hotels, the Honorable Pratt C. Gashwiler sat at his writing-table. There are certain large, fleshy men with whom the omission of even a necktie or collar has all the effect of an indecent exposure. ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... starved. They take nothing at first hand. They experience described emotion, and think prepared thoughts. They live not in life, but in printed reports of life. They gather the odour of odours, not the odour itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A poor, sad, second-rate existence! ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... professional effort. Yet since his nature is tolerant, he does not exclude the latter from the scope of his benevolence, and they may occasionally be seen at his parties, wondering how so strange a medley of second-rate incompetencies can have been gathered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... mud-dimmed glass Tartarin of Tarascon caught a glimpse of a second-rate but pretty town market-place, regular in shape, surrounded by colonnades and planted with orange-trees, in the midst of which what seemed toy leaden soldiers were going through the morning exercise in the clear roseate mist. ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... like those of M. Saint-Saens, which are stronger in style and taste than in life and passion. The Conservatoire concerts have also a relative superiority over other concerts in Paris in the performance of choral works, which up to the present have been very second-rate. But these concerts are not easy of access for the general public, as the number of seats for sale is very limited. And so the society is representative of a little public whose taste is, broadly speaking, conservative and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... petty scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in making the congeries of villages into—I do not say a city, for that is almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent struggles with the vestryman level ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... out immense possibilities for producers and writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spectators, now with the improvement in the stories of serial pictures has come an increase in the spectators who follow them ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... never succeeded in retaining a first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome from the king he was offered an annual retaining fee of three hundred ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... had resolved not to read his sermon. So he began to repeat it, with sweeps of the hands, pointings of the fingers, and other such tricks of second-rate actors, to aid the self-delusion of his hearers that it was a genuine present outburst from the soul of Murdoch Malison. For they all knew as well as he did, that his sermon was only "cauld kail het again." But some family dishes—Irish stew, for example, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... a few louis extracted from his relations. Loustalot, still more unknown, was admitted the previous year to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and has landed at Paris in search of a career. Danton, another second-rate lawyer, coming out of a hovel in Champagne, borrowed the money to pay his expenses, while his stinted household is kept up only by means of a louis which is given to him weekly by his father-in-law, who is a coffee-house keeper. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... has been long distinguished for its elegance and height. Probably these are the most appropriate, if not the only, epithets of commendation which can be applied to it. After Strasburg and Ulm, it appears a second-rate edifice. Not but what the spire may even vie with that of the former, and the nave may be yet larger than that of the latter; but, as a whole, it is much inferior to either—even allowing for the palpable falling off in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept and ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what Atlantis was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of Atlantis must have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the cities of ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... true impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be added to it, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... her husband was dead when we were married in Manitoba. She was a waitress in a second-rate hotel; the brute had ill-used and deserted her. But there's now some reason to believe he's farming in Alberta. I haven't made inquiries: I didn't ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written—and well said and written too—on the art of fishing; but loch-fishing per se has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form; but many pent up in our large towns ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... prim peeress by Hoppner; a landscape that smacked of Gainsborough was the companion of a dauby moonlight, that must have figured in the last exhibition; and insipid Roman matrons by Hamilton, and stiff English heroes by Northcote, contrasted with a vast quantity of second-rate delineations of the orgies of Dutch boors and portraits of favourite racers and fancy dogs. The room was crowded with ugly furniture of all kinds, very solid, and chiefly of mahogany; among which were not less than three escritoires, to say nothing of the huge horsehair sofas. A sideboard ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... asked him, "Neale, how do you manage about all this? What do you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably, unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... over the book; but she said little till, pausing before a small, black-looking print in a sheet full of rather coarse coloured caricatures, cuttings from illustrated papers and old-fashioned books, second-rate lithographs, and third-rate original sketches, fitted into a close patchwork, she gave a sort ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... various nations, illustrated by examples drawn from men and women indiscriminately all over Europe, humorous confessions of the innocent follies of his own early life, when he ruled the fashions of a second-rate Italian town, and wrote preposterous romances on the French model for a second-rate Italian newspaper—all flowed in succession so easily and so gaily from his lips, and all addressed our various curiosities and various interests so directly ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... hand one shot up the long flame that precedes the death of candles; the contest took on interest, and even excitement, when, just as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it went out without guess or warning, like a second-rate person leaving this world for another. The right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as though in triumph, outlived its colleague just the moment to enjoy glory, and then in its turn went fluttering down the dark way from which ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... poultry, and who, wrapped in dirty sheep-skins, proudly call themselves Mi dvorane Polaivii, Lords of the Waste. The gypsies of Moscow, who appeared to me the most interesting I have ever met, because most remote from the Surrey ideal, seemed to Mr. Johnstone to be a kind of second-rate Romanys or gypsies, gypsified for exhibition, like Mr. Barnum's negro minstrel, who, though black as a coal by nature, was requested to put on burnt cork and a wig, that the audience might realize that they were getting a thoroughly good imitation. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... transatlantic descendants. I cannot better conclude these observations than by quoting the opinion of so intelligent a nobleman as Lord Durham, who asserts most positively that, "England, if she loses her North American colonies, must sink into a second-rate power." ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... converted into cordiality; for they learnt with amazement that the Prince, during a country visit, had ridden to hounds and acquitted himself remarkably well. They had always taken it for granted that his horsemanship was of some second-rate foreign quality, and here he was jumping five-barred gates and tearing after the fox as if he had been born and bred in Leicestershire. They could hardly believe it; was it possible that they had made a mistake, and that Albert was a good fellow after all? Had ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... that small and lonely minority of men who never know ambition, ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are capable of immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they purchase a second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity for deep feeling. In his seventh decade, Meshach Myatt could look back with calm satisfaction at a career of uninterrupted nonchalance and idleness. The favourite of a stern father and of fate, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... gives a passing touch of disapproval to Pitt's administration, though he imputes all his ministerial delinquencies "to sordid and second-rate men round him." But this is wholly contrary to the character of the man—never individual less acted on the suggestions of others than Pitt. The simple fact is, the biographer knows nothing on the subject, and would have much more wisely avoided ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... How could I be so stupid? But it is two long years since I laid eyes on Bond Street. A humbler person, plain Mrs. Barclay, sends out my gowns. What do you think, dear Miss Percy, shall I look provincial, second-rate, amongst all these lucky ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Shaw's plays and want to listen to Wagner ... that's not the point, and anyhow the middle and the upper classes are not all marvellously cultured. My point is that their lives are such that they don't even know of Meredith and Whistler and Shaw and Wagner. They don't even know of the second-rate people or the third rate. Magnolia, for instance ... I suppose she reads novelettes, and when she grows out of novelettes, she won't read anything. And she can't afford to go to a West End theatre.... When I think of these people, millions of 'em, I think of them as people like ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... and it seems to me, in the case of all who had genius, that their style was the outcome of their characters—their principles—the view they took of the subject—that is, if they were natural and powerful writers. Only the second-rate people have a manufactured style, and force their subject to adapt itself to it—the kind of people whose style is mentioned quite apart from their matter. In the great ones the style is the outcome of the subject. Each emotion has its own form of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He killed himself to cause a sensation, and ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... this magic circle, until, being completely tired down, it is easy for the hunters to ride up beside them and throw the lariat over their heads. The prime horses of most speed and courage, however, are apt to break through and escape, so that in general it is the second-rate ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... Ptolemies for preserving to our times all the best specimens of Greek literature which have come down to us. This encouragement of letters, however, called forth no great original genius; but a few eminent men of science, many second-rate and artificial poets, and a host of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... of second-rate painters were plying side by side, disciples first of one master, then drawn off to become followers of a second; assimilating the influence first of one workshop and then of another. Carpaccio has been lately identified as ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the horses should be the first object of consideration at a stud-farm. Nine-tenths of the land at Hardyman's farm was devoted, in one way or another, to the noble quadruped with the low forehead and the long nose. Poor humanity was satisfied with second-rate and third-rate accommodation. The ornamental grounds, very poorly laid out, were also very limited in extent—and, as for the dwelling-house, it was literally a cottage. A parlor and a kitchen, a smoking-room, a bed-room, and a spare chamber for a friend, all scantily furnished, sufficed ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... gentlemen in question were conversing about the virtue of a particular lady belonging to the court. One of them thought that Pallas was a very second-rate person compared to her; the other pretended that the lady in question was an imitation of Venus alluring Mars; and thereupon the two gentlemen fought as fiercely as Hector ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... deserve. The ablest men in the individual States held aloof from Congress. They felt that they had more dignity and power if they sat in their own legislatures. The assembly which in the first days had as members men of the type of Washington and Franklin sank into a gathering of second-rate men who were divided into fierce factions. They debated interminably and did little. Each member usually felt that he must champion the interests of his own State against the hostility of others. It was not easy to create a sense of national life. The union was only a league of friendship. ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... place in the world. She ought to be more adequately surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn—what were the Elsmeres about? He rebelled against the thought of her living perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen of the second-rate. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... do, Frank?" said he, with a perplexed look. "These Indians cannot return to Moose, having received orders, I find, to journey in a different direction. Our own men know the way, but I cannot spare the good ones among them, and the second-rate cannot be ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... accepted this miracle. It was only a second-rate miracle to her, for it was not the desire of her heart, and she was uneasy about it. She did not want to be involved with Johnny Byrd if Barry Elder should arrive. . . . Of course, if she had never met ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the close of the last century, in his History of Mathematics, summed up the controversy raised by Wallis including the minor one raised by Dr Zach in 1785, clearing Descartes of Wallis's charges and relegating Hariot to the respectability of a second-rate mathematician. If Montucla's verdict be based on mathematical reasoning as loose and slipshod as is his statement of the historical points of the case, to say nothing of his utter ignorance of Hariot's biography and true position as ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... read the sonnet; read another; found I could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the sixteenth century, hitherto a sealed fountain, became an open well of refreshment, and the strength that comes from sympathy. What if its second-rate writers were full of conceits and vagaries, the feelings are very indifferent to the mere intellectual forms around which the same feelings in others have gathered, if only by their means they hint at, and sometimes express themselves. Now I understood this old fantastic verse, and knew that the ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more angelic ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... provincial—a provincial of genius," St. George went on; "her very blunders are charming, her mistakes are interesting. She has come back from Asia with all sorts of excited curiosities and unappeased appetities. She's first- rate herself and she expends herself on the second-rate. She's life herself and she takes a rare interest in imitations. She mixes all things up, but there are none in regard to which she hasn't perceptions. She sees things in a perspective—as if from the top of the Himalayas—and she enlarges everything she touches. Above ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... mother to speak to Wolgemut about my brother, and to ask him whether he can give him work until I get back, or whether he can find employment with others. [Editor's note: Drer's brother was Hans Drer, who was fifteen at this date. He became a painter of second-rate ability, and afterwards helped Albrecht in the decoration of the Emperor Maximilian's prayer book]. I should like to have brought him with me to Venice, which would have been useful both to me and to him and he would have learned the language, but she was afraid ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borne politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... anything like a discriminating knowledge of our public men I could not meet. Webster had been heard of everywhere. They assured me that our really great men were known, our really great deeds appreciated; but this is not true. They make mistakes in their measure of our men; second-rate men who have travelled are of course known to the men whom they have met; these travellers have not perhaps thought it necessary to mention that they represent a secondary class of people, and they are considered our 'first men.' The English forget ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... with cloaks about us, and closed windows, long before we reached Aix-la-Chapelle, at which ancient town we arrived about six. Unlike Spa, where we had the choice among a hundred furnished houses, Aix was so crowded that we got narrow lodgings, with great difficulty, in a second-rate hotel. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended dinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The thing must be done over again; he must wait ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... stage; but she was always much esteemed by those who knew her in private. She sung and sometimes danced, as did her husband, who was an actor of inferior merit. There is something very pathetic in the story of the little second-rate actress who was so conscientious and so persevering, and one cannot but hope that she received her due share of the applause which lends such a fascination to the life of the actor that he rarely abandons it ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... ever she put her foot to the ground—ho, she is the veriest little sillypop, and quite done for. She cannot rival us in action, but she is our mistress in the things of the mind. Let her not by second-rate athletics, nor indeed by any exercise soever of the limbs, spoil the pretty procedure of her reason. Let her be content to remain the guide, the subtle suggester of what we must do, the strategist whose soldiers we are, the little architect ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... kept in his younger days to which he had fed steaks without end. Burke would have given him credit for a thousand steaks—then. But times had changed. Tom King was getting old; and old men, fighting before second-rate clubs, couldn't expect to run bills of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... great battle is even now being fought just outside the gates!—a battle on the issue of which hangs the fate of France—and much more than France. If the thin line which stands between Paris and her enemies does not hold, this day sees France reduced to a second-rate Power and Paris will again hear the tramp of German armies marching down the Champs-Elysees!" My feet walked the familiar streets, but every pulse-beat, every conscious thought was with the Allied armies of defense with which I had so recently been in touch. The ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... orders For Mayors and Recorders I get - and they're highly delighted. M.P.s baronetted, Sham Colonels gazetted, And second-rate Aldermen knighted. Foundation-stone laying I find very paying, It adds a large sum to my makings. At charity dinners The best of speech-spinners, I get ten ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... attacks Turnus when he faces and renews the combat. I need say no more, for Virgil defends himself without needing my assistance, and proves his hero truly to deserve that name. He was not, then, a second-rate champion, as they would have him who think fortitude the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... bitterness. He was not a libertine. Few great artists have ever been that; for in every great painter, or sculptor, or musician there is a poet, and true poetry is the refutation of vulgar materialism. In all the nobler arts the second-rate men have invariably been the sensualists; but the masters, even in their love affairs, have always hankered after an ideal, and have sometimes ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... confirmed disgust for political intrigue; a dazzling practice, apt at first to fascinate youth, for it appeals at once to our invention and our courage, but one which really should only be the resource of the second-rate. Great minds must trust to great truths and great talents for ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... should never be pressed too far.” Are all the lovely passages of human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that is to say—make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellect at the expense of his heart. Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona! Thank Heaven, however, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... energy but inferior vision and range. The history of Political Economy is indeed one of the most striking instances of the mischief wrought by intellectual minds devoid of vision, in the entire history of human thought. Special definition, technicality, are the stigmata of second-rate intellectual men; they cannot work with the universal tool, they cannot appeal to the general mind. They must abstract and separate. On such men fell the giant's robe of Adam Smith, and they wore it after their ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... was not insensible," says D'Alembert, "to glory; but he had no desire to win but by deserving it. Never did he attempt to enhance his reputation by the underhand devices and secret machinations by which second-rate men so often strive to sustain their literary fortunes. Worthy of every eloge and of every recompense, he asked nothing, and was noways surprised at being forgot. But he had courage enough in critical circumstances to solicit the protection at court of men of letters persecuted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... will expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes across their poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on." Yet, continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed, than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, by being sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so, when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil and Varius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor's great achievements; and in this way the poet ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... with some hesitation. Lamh Laudher accompanied them into the town, and saw them safely in a decent second-rate inn, kept by a man named Luke Connor, after which he returned to his father's house, and without undressing, fell into a disturbed ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... himself in many descriptions of pictures quite awake to the beauty manufactured by man, has in no way anticipated the modern discovery that nature is beautiful. To readers who have had enough of the pathetic fallacy, and of the second-rate novelist's local colour, Lucian's tacit assumption that there is nothing but man is refreshing. That he was a close enough observer of human nature, any one can satisfy himself by glancing at the Feast of Lapithae, the Dialogues of the Hetaerae, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... framers of the Constitution expected that the vice-president would be elected by the Electoral College as the second wisest man in the country. The vice-presidentship being a sinecure, a second-rate man agreeable to the wire-pullers is always smuggled in. The chance of succession to the presidentship is too ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... and one can almost always foretell who the few will be. There are men who are destined always to occupy second-rate places, and who seem also to know their fate. I never heard Erle speak even of an ambition to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... class her with the New Zealand coasting craft, yet the residents are very proud of her, and speak lovingly of her, and regard her as a blessed deliverance from the horrors of beating to windward. She has a shabby, obsolete look about her, like a second-rate coasting collier, or an old American tow-boat. She looks ill-found, too; I saw two essential pieces of tackle give way as they were hoisting the main sail. {44} She has a small saloon with a double tier ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... nine. Napoleon Bonaparte was in the flush of youthful success, soon to become the idol of France and the terror of Europe, before whom the boy, now Kaiser Wilhelm, and his royal family fled to Koenigsberg by the Baltic, while the conqueror held Berlin and reduced Prussia to a second-rate province. To this boy the flames of burning Moscow were a transient aurora-borealis under the pole-star; and Nelson and Wellington were unknown to the stories of his childhood, for as yet their fame was not. Goethe and Schiller were in ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... "Tannhauser"! That is extinct, although not yet forgotten music. This whole music of Romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough, to maintain its position anywhere but in the theatre and before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful EPISODE of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... grace was a feat for the performance of which exceptional qualities were required. The conjugal complement to a Nausicaa must be a man of ponderous presence and statuesque demeanor—not a shrill and nervous modern like himself, with second-rate physique, and a morbidly active intellect. No, it mattered little what he did or left undone. The world would be no better and no worse for anything he could do. Very likely, in the arms of this chair where he was now sitting, a dozen Roman Romeos, in powdered wigs and silk stockings, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the most splendid of the schools of elegance; and it is not without reason that the best performances in this lower school are valued higher than the second-rate performances of those above them; for every picture has value when it has a decided character, and is excellent in its kind. But the student must take care not to be so much dazzled with this splendour as to be tempted to imitate what must ultimately ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... of losing their regard or respect, yet he would have been half pained and half amused if he had known how foolishly his plans, which came in time to be his ward's also, were smiled and frowned upon in the Oldfields houses. Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue. If we keep near a certain humble level of morality and achievement, our neighbors are willing to let us slip through life unchallenged. Those who anticipate the opinions and decisions of society must expect to be found ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... wrote: "I do not at all like the course for the History School (at Oxford). Nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading truly great authors forms it, or even to exercise it, as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.... The regulation of studies is all-important, and there is no one to regulate ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Breeds man, "he's got to leave his heart at home, if he doesn't want it to ache when he has to 'gate' the second-rate mutts shown by outsiders who never exhibited before and who think their pet dog ought to get every prize because he's so cunning ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... his father's heart. Instead of following the trail already made, he cuts loose, frequents vulgar resorts, hates his school work, becomes a loafer and a bum—and, finally, a second-rate day laborer. Again, what he is himself, his "vital spark" has been stronger than immediate heredity and ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... you are not sure, that you must take time to consider it. There is no reason why a girl should not say 'yes' or 'no' at once, unless the question comes as an entire surprise, which it does not do except in second-rate ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... been thinking more about this many-sidedness of Goethe. It is by no means that versatility which distinguishes so many second-rate geniuses, which inclines to the selection of many pursuits, but seldom permits the attainment of distinguished excellence in one. It was one and the same principle acting throughout, the striving after unity. It was this which made him seek to idealise the actual, and to actualise the Ideal. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... adapted and translated from the Italian, was produced at Drury Lane. Buononcini's Camilla was given at the house in the Haymarket, and sung in two languages, the heroine's part being in English and the hero's in Italian. Thomas Clayton, a second-rate musician, but a man with literary tastes, who had been introducer of the opera to London, argued that the words of an opera should be not only English, but the best of English, and that English music ought to illustrate good home-grown ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... into the hall, and her father had told her roughly to run away. Then had followed a hasty removal, and they had left their comfortable home in London and had come to live in Naples. After a dreary time in a second-rate Italian boarding-house she had been sent to the Villa Camellia, and all link with England was lost and broken. No aunt or cousins ever wrote to her, and the earlier portion of her life seemed a ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... resentment they rouse in the bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... to point in any one direction to the source of this veiling gloom, for on all sides it was the same. Even the sky overhead lacked its blue; it appeared painted with a muddy brush, and the sun shewed the same faint tinge of red. Yes, it was like that, he said wearily to himself—like a second-rate sketch; there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality. The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... this is twofold; partly in the book, and partly in the reader. The backbone dislikes the raising of any question which it deems to have been decided: a peculiarity which at once puts it in opposition to all fine work, and to nearly all passable second-rate work. It also dislikes being confronted with anything that it considers "unpleasant," that is to say, interesting. It has a genuine horror of the truth neat. It quite honestly asks "to be taken out of itself," unaware that to be taken ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary 'Sandford and Merton,' his interest in the whole page of experience, his perpetual ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drought renders it untenable, the grasses and herbage being principally annuals, which not only die but are swept away by the hot summer winds, leaving the surface of the soil completely bare. On Cooper's Creek, near the boundary, there is a small tract of second-rate country, which, being abundantly supplied with water, may eventually be occupied. The best part is, however, within the province of South Australia. Between Cooper's Creek and Lake Torrens about 120 miles of sandy country intervenes. This tract is destitute ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
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