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More "Specious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however, shout that the assistance of the Holy Spirit is extenuated and diminished if even the least particle be attributed to the human will. Though this argument may appear specious and plausible, yet pious minds understand that by our doctrine— according to which we ascribe some cooperation to our will; viz., some assent and apprehension (qua tribuimus aliquam SYNERGIAM voluntati nostrae, videlicet qualemcumque assensionem et apprehensionem)— absolutely nothing ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... man you would not wonder at his writing such sensible, thoughtful books. He is one of the most "loveable" beings I ever knew. His good wholesome teaching is about the best antidote I have seen to much of the poison circulating about in magazines and alluring ignorant, unsound people with the specious name of philosophy. And he is always fair, and credits his opponents with all that can possibly be imagined to extenuate the injury they are doing by their ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... again when the next budget is introduced at Delhi. If one looks merely at the growth of such expenditure, the enormously increased cost of the British Army which, in respect of the British forces serving in India, falls upon the Indian exchequer, furnishes Indians with a specious plea for reducing the number of British troops as a measure of mere economy. But even if one could concede the Indian argument that, in a contented India marching towards self-government under the new constitution, there can no longer be ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... classes regularly and managed with a modicum of preparation to recite far better than the average student. Furthermore her work was now scrupulously honest, and she was sensitively alert to the slightest imputation of untruthfulness. She offered no specious explanations for her withdrawal from the debate, and when Mary Brooks innocently inquired "what little yarn" she told the registrar, that she could get away so often, Eleanor fixed her with an unpleasantly penetrative stare and answered with all her old-time hauteur that ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... He has come into the neighbourhood with the character of a man worth a million pounds who is to make everybody's fortune; at this time, however, he is not worth a shilling of his own, though he flashes about dexterously three or four thousand pounds, part of which sum he has obtained by specious pretences, and part from certain individuals who are his confederates. But in the year '49 he is really in possession of the fortune which he and his agents pretended he was worth ten years before—he is ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... further the grocery iniquity. I was, in a manner, forced to work, yet I was uneasy and troubled in my mind. Others may think I was blameless; that I was a slave and not accountable for acts my master commanded me to do. This seemed very specious reasoning, but still I felt guilty, and sent fervent and prayerful petitions to the throne of grace for forgiveness and fortitude to withstand temptation, which enable me to do the will of my great Master regardless of the consequences that might ensue to me from the effects of Wilson's wrath ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you speedily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... your way. It makes me unhappy, because the real India—snowed under with specious talk and bitter invective—has less chance now than ever of being understood by those who can't see below ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and again, in the belief that women easily forgive the ill-doing of which they are the cause, to that specious plea, and Marsa asked herself, in amazement, what aberration had possession of this man that he should even pretend to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... with a little of that love of admiration which all pretty women share less or more. She will besides, apparently, be your heiress; a trifling circumstance to those who view Julia with my eyes, but a prevailing bait to the specious, artful, and worthless. You know how I have jested with her about her soft melancholy, and lonely walks at morning before any one is up, and in the moonlight when all should be gone to bed, or set down to cards, which is the same thing. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... say, that a more irreconcileable enemy would not be found than myself to the man (if any such there be) who could attempt to overturn our mingled and limited forms of government: and substitute a wild democracy in their place. I think, indeed, that a democratic form of government, however specious in argument, is by no means so capable of raising a state to that eminence of civilization and prosperity, which this country has reached; a condition, for which it is indebted to better times, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... on the night after the great attack on Marnhoul, weary of directing affairs, misleading the dragoons, whispering specious theories into the ear of the commanding officer and his aides, he had been met at the outer gate of his cabin by a fact that overturned all his notions of domestic economy. Ephraim, precious Ephraim, the Connoway family pig, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to rouse dissension and raise seditions amongst them. Of this their Mormon leaders were informed, and they said they would deal with any of their members who should again in like case offend. But how specious are appearances. In a late number of the Star, published in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become Mormons, and remove and settle among us. This exhibits them in still more odious colors. It manifests a desire ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... encumbered with the performance of their promises, either from their known inability, or total indifference about the performance, never fail to entertain the most lofty ideas. They are certainly the most specious, and they cost them neither reflection to frame, nor pains to modify, nor management to support. The task is of another nature to those who mean to promise nothing that it is not in their intentions, or may possibly be in their power to perform; to those who are bound and principled no more ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... will in favor of the lady Jane. The animosity against his sister Mary, to which their equal bigotry in opposite modes of faith had given birth in the mind of Edward, would naturally induce him to lend a willing ear to such specious arguments as might be produced in justification of her exclusion: but that he could be brought with equal facility to disinherit also Elizabeth, a sister whom he loved, a princess judged in all respects ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... percentage of the divorce cases; for, if you desire very heartily to see anything of another member of a house-party, this lax-minded and easy-going providence will somehow always bring the event about in a specious manner, and without any apparent thought of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... strength or direct its policy. His address as presiding officer was intended to be free from the menacing tone which marked most of the speeches of the Convention, but it veiled the same sentiment in more subtle and specious phrase. He charged both the cause and the continuance of the war upon the Republican party. "Four years ago," he said, "a convention met in this city when our country was peaceful, prosperous, and united. Its delegates ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Annie; and that interview rendered her more miserable, excited still more her indignation against her parents and brother, and strengthened the feelings of devoted affection with which she fancied she regarded Lord Alphingham. Annie's continued notes confirmed these feelings; under the specious intention of soothing Caroline's wounded pride, it was very easy for her to disguise her repeated insinuations of Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton's injustice and caprice towards the Viscount, and tyranny towards herself. The veil she had thrown over ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... now remains to advert to a distinction which is of first-rate importance both for clearing up the notion of cause, and for obviating a very specious objection often made against the view which we have ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... spite of her brother's tone; she looked at the new inmate as if to gauge the capacity of the stomach she might have to fill, and said with a specious smile:— ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... and Company—this was the specious Eldorado, the genuine gold-increaser, the hive where he would store his wealth (as honey left for the bees in winter), and was to have it soon returned fourfold. It was indeed a thought to make ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... when I came to talk to him I soon found that he was even worse to deal with than the boatswain; for although perhaps not quite so ignorant as the latter, he was still ignorant enough to be convinced by the specious arguments of the Socialist, to readily accept the doctrine of perfect equality between all men, and—like most of those whose labour is of an arduous character, and whose life is one of almost constant ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... Maria would not care to espouse his widow, and no less assured that Guidobaldo—who was at heart a kind and clement prince—would be content to let be what was accomplished, since there would be naught gained beyond his niece's widowhood in hanging Gonzaga. It was the specious argument that had lured him upon this rash enterprise, the hopes that he was confident would have fructified but for the ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... history) the only method yet discovered, then we shall have helped, not only to save innumerable souls from sin, and from that misery which is the inevitable and everlasting consequence of sin, but we shall have helped to save them from a specious and tawdry barbarism, such as corrupted and enervated the seemingly civilized masses of the later Roman empire; and to save our country, within the next century, from some such catastrophe as overtook the Jewish monarchy in spite of all its outward religiosity; ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... they had fabricated the story ab initio; or if they had been disposed either to have delivered their testimony as witnesses, or to have worked up their materials and information as historians, in such a manner as to render their narrative as specious and unobjectionable as they could; in a word, if they had thought of anything but of the truth of the case, as they understood and believed it; they would in their account of Christ's several appearances after his resurrection, ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... told Rousseau which side of the question to take," mused Cecil, as he crossed the barrack-yard a few minutes later to visit the incarcerated pratique. "On my life, civilization develops comfort, but I do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, and egotism grows strong and specious. Why is it that in a polished life a man, while becoming incapable of sinking to crime, almost always becomes also incapable of rising to greatness? Why is it that misery, tumult, privation, bloodshed, famine, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... they bend With awful reverence prone; and as a God Extoll him equal to the highest in Heav'n: Nor fail'd they to express how much they prais'd, 480 That for the general safety he despis'd His own: for neither do the Spirits damn'd Loose all thir vertue; least bad men should boast Thir specious deeds on earth, which glory excites, Or close ambition varnisht o're with zeal. Thus they thir doubtful consultations dark Ended rejoycing in thir matchless Chief: As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the North wind sleeps, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... thus maintained in its purity by the Persian monarch, who did not allow himself to be imposed upon by the specious eloquence of the new teacher, but ultimately rejected the strange amalgamation that was offered to his acceptance. It is scarcely to be regretted that he so determined. Though the morality of the Manichees was ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... ought they to have any weight in opposition to the truth of God, since the name of God ought to be sanctified in all places and at all times, whether by miraculous events, or by the common order of nature. This fallacy might perhaps be more specious, if the Scripture did not apprize us of the legitimate end and use of miracles. For Mark informs us, that the miracles which followed the preaching of the apostles were wrought in confirmation[10] of it, and Luke tells us, that[11] "the Lord ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans attributes to them 'a specious and cherche art, demanding, for its appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise the full value, the real charm, of A Rebours, some such initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... motives of humanity, we are glad that the end of the Union seems more likely to be ridiculous than terrible.... But for our own benefit and the instruction of the world we wish to see the faults, so specious and so fatal, of their political system exposed, in the most effective way.... And the venerable Lincoln, the respectable Seward, the raving editors, the gibbering mob, and the swift-footed warriors of Bull's Run, are no malicious tricks ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... with Chu-ko Liang, Prime Minister of that State. The Wei general Ssu-ma I was then military governor of Wan, and getting wind of Meng Ta's treachery, he at once set off with an army to anticipate his revolt, having previously cajoled him by a specious message of friendly import. Ssu-ma's officers came to him and said: "If Meng Ta has leagued himself with Wu and Shu, the matter should be thoroughly investigated before we make a move." Ssu-ma I replied: "Meng Ta is an unprincipled man, and we ought to go and punish him at once, while he is ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or three facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in 1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its suppression after it was in type. But this theory runs aground upon ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... through the dark places of the most inscrutable work of nature. He had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories which can all be expressed in a few words. In our day, is not the simplest demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than the most specious system though defended by more or less ingenious inductions? But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only conjecture that the bent of his work must have been from ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... hard by, the great Colannah Gigagei. He was fast aging now; the difficulties of diplomacy constantly increasing in view of individual aggressions and encroachments of the Carolina colonists on the east, and the ever specious wiles and suave allurements of the French on the west, to win the Cherokees from their British alliance; the impossibility, in the gentle patriarchal methods of the Cherokee government, to control the wild young men of the tribe, who, as the half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla said, "often ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it; and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... this love, could reassure her conscience with specious logic, but she never lost her coolness of judgment concerning Hamilton Gregory. His lapses from conventionality did not come from deliberate choice, and she realized the danger of letting his feverish impulse grow cold. Even the prospect of waiting one hour at the station ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Zorzi! Do not try your specious logic with me! Invent no absurd arguments, man! Against her will, indeed? How should she know any will but mine in the matter? I shall certainly not marry her against her will! She shall will what I ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... half. The plea that since Fielding was a realist depicting society as it was in his day, his license is legitimate, whereas Richardson was giving a sort of sentimentalized stained-glass picture of it not as it was but, in his opinion, should be,—is a specious one; it is well that in literature, faithful reflector of the ideals of the race, the beast should be allowed to die (as Mr. Howells, himself a staunch realist, has said), simply because it is slowly dying in life itself. Fielding's novels in unexpurgated ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... himself on the 1st of September to bag a hundred leverets in the course of the day. He lost, of course; and upon being questioned as to his reason for making so preposterous a bet, he confessed that he had been induced to do so by the specious promise of an advertisement, in which somebody professed to have discovered "a powder for the removal of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... highest professions of respect to the Governor, he nevertheless considered as an insult; but especially the advice, which he deemed both highly derogatory to his integrity as a man, and his fidelity as a governor. The bait thrown out to appearance was specious and flattering, yet the Governor had too much penetration, not to see under its false colours the naked hook. The letter, however, served to give him notice of the association, and the resolution of the people, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... uninhabited but delightful retreat of the high-souled Apava. Possessed of great energy, Apava, O mighty-armed king, seeing his retreat consumed by the powerful Kshatriya, cursed that monarch in wrath, saying, 'Since, O Arjuna, without excepting these my specious woods, thou hast burnt them, therefore, Rama (of Bhrigu's race) will lop off thy (thousand) arms.' The mighty Arjuna, however, of great prowess, always devoted to peace, ever regardful of Brahmanas and disposed to grant protection (unto all classes), and charitable and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... harmonies, and yet such simpletons as, by doing infinitely more than was necessary, to encounter infinite risks of detection, to no purpose; sagacious enough to out-do all that sagacity has ever done, as shown by the effects, and yet not sagacious enough to be merely specious: and finally, he must believe that these illiterate impostors had the art in all their various writings, which evidently proceed from different minds, to preserve the same inimitable marks of reality, truth, and nature in their narrations—the miraculous and ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... wasted in our earthly state, Here safely treasured—each neglected good, Time squandered, and occasion ill-bestowed; There sparkling chains he found, and knots of gold, The specious ties that ill-paired lovers hold; Each toil, each loss, each chance that men sustain, Save Folly, which alone pervades them all, For Folly never quits ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... were married, the better. But Furlong, with that affectation of propriety which belongs to his time-serving tribe, pleaded the "regard to appearances"— "so soon after the ever-to-be-deplored event,"—and other such specious excuses, which were but covers to his own rascality, and used but to postpone the "wedding-day." The truth was, the moment Furlong had no longer the terrors of O'Grady's pistol before his eyes, he had resolved never to take so bad a match as that ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... and because!" replied Richard in his vivacious way. "I am not sure, my dear girl, but that it may be wise and specious to preserve that outward indifference. It may cause other parties interested to become lax about their interests; and people may die off, and points may drag themselves out of memory, and many things may smoothly happen that are ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... this it is persistently alleged that even if He had the power He could not have performed miracles, because miracles are violations of law, and the Lawgiver cannot violate even mere physical laws; but this specious fallacy is refuted by the simple assertion that He introduced a new power or force to counteract or modify others, which counteraction or modification of forces is no more than what is taking place in every part of the world at ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... to persuade Mr. Woodhouse, as well as Emma, to join the party; and he knew that to have any of them sitting down out of doors to eat would inevitably make him ill. Mr. Woodhouse must not, under the specious pretence of a morning drive, and an hour or two spent at Donwell, be tempted away to ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... instrument whenever he chose, for his own but no one else's gratification, he could not see why he (Mr. Bouncer) might not also, whenever he pleased, play for his own gratification his favourite instrument - the big drum. This specious excuse, although logical, was not altogether satisfactory to Mr. Slowcoach; and, with some asperity, he ordered Mr. Bouncer never again to indulge in, what he termed (in reference probably to the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... up in his face as only a dog can," and causes him to follow her and to retrace his steps against his will. There are her puppies. Is she to leave them to their fate? He tells her to choose between the ties of family and duty: it is a specious form of appeal. To her, duties begin with the family; the puppies cannot be left behind. Nor can she carry them herself. She takes Raphael by the skirt, after bringing the puppies to him one by one. He must carry them, she tells ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... first of men The apple pressed with specious cant, O, what a thousand pities then ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... unique; the mediaeval world was startled in its traditional routine, and Berenguela's audacity became the talk of every court in Europe. Prayers and entreaties were in vain, so firmly did she stand her ground in spite of the countless specious arguments which were used to bend her will, and, finally, the matter was dropped and considered a closed incident. "Woman sees deep; man sees far. To the man the world is his heart; to the woman the heart is her world;" so says Christian Grabbe, and this ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... not I! A stern high duty Now nerves my arm and fires my brain. Perish the dream of shapes of Beauty! And that this strife be not in vain To war on fraud intrenched with power, On smooth pretence and specious wrong, This task be mine tho' Fortune lower— For this be banished ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... reformers;[506] and he attempted to prove his assertions by the signal instances of bad faith which had provoked the recourse to arms. But Conde was impatient. If we may believe Agrippa d'Aubigne, his old love of pleasure was not without its influence;[507] but he covered his true motives under the specious pretext afforded him by the Huguenot nobles, who, fatigued with the incessant toils of the campaign, reduced to straits by a warfare which they had carried on at their own expense, and longing to revisit homes which ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... fly from pomp, I fly from plate, I fly from falsehood's specious grin! Freedom I love, and form I hate, And choose my ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... of his, Eliot that's dead, Rudyard and Hampden here, But for these Wentworth cared not; only, Pym He would see—Pym and he were sworn, 'tis said, To live and die together; so, they met At Greenwich. Wentworth, you are sure, was long, Specious enough, the devil's argument Lost nothing on his lips; he'd have Pym own A patriot could not play a purer part Than follow in his track; they two combined Might put down England. Well, Pym heard him out; One glance—you know Pym's eye—one word ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... wide difference between spending as much as we can on our persons—in the gratification, I mean, of the wants of our depraved tastes, under the specious plea that it encourages commerce and industry—and spending as little as we can on ourselves, and as much as possible in promoting the health, the learning, and the piety of ourselves and those around us. The former has been tried for centuries—with ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... principle in them becomes enamoured of those evil ways, and they are filled with a desire to commit sins. And when, O good Brahmana, their friends and men of wisdom remonstrate with them, they are ready with specious answers, which are neither sound nor convincing. From their being addicted to evil ways, they are guilty of a threefold sin. They commit sin in thought, in word, as also in action. They being addicted to wicked ways, all their good qualities die out, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... they had recourse on entering France, evinces consummate artifice of plan, and not a little adroitness and dexterity in the execution. The specious appearance of submission to papal authority, in the penance of wandering seven years without lying in a bed, combined three distinct objects. They could not have devised an expedient more likely to recommend them to the favor of Ecclesiastics; or better concerted for taking advantage ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... named McPherson. Nick had contrived to gain intelligence of their movements and access to their party, by means of John Valentine, one of his own scouts, who, by his direction, had met and joined the tories with a specious tale, and promised to lead them through the country so securely that none of the prowling rebels ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... him further as to the perfidious intent of those who were for equalizing property and partitioning the land, abolishing wealth and poverty and establishing a happy mediocrity for all. Misled by their specious maxims, he had originally approved their designs, which he deemed in accord with the principles of a true Republican. But Robespierre, in his speeches at the Jacobins, had unmasked their machinations and convinced him that these men, disinterested ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... We cling to our stations in our fellow-creatures' minds and memories; we know too well the frail tenure on which we are in this world great and considered personages. Experience makes us shrink from the specious sneer of sympathy; and when we are ourselves falling, bitter Memory whispers that we have ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... considerations were given weight according to what she saw as their possible effect upon Larry; for Larry was the one person left whom she loved, and on him were fixed the aspirations of these her final years. Therefore her thoughts and arguments were myopic, almost necessarily specious. She wanted to see justice done, of course. But most of all she wanted what was best for Larry. If she told the truth, it might result in some kind of temporary breakdown in Maggie's attitude which would bring her and Larry together. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... by the public plunder and byaiding and abetting the system, all novi homines, men who, had there been more to gain on the other side than by espousing Toryism, would not have been backward; men who are Jacobins in the real sense of the word, however they cloak themselves under the specious names of Church and King men; upholders of Pitt and his system, for which they affect a veneration they are far from really feeling; men, in fact, whose political scruples of whatever nature they be, would soon ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... because, on a cursory glance, it appears to embrace all sects and denominations of Christians. It is proper, therefore, to set the matter in a true light, by showing that this liberality of sentiment is more specious than real; that Mr. Noel is throwing out false colours, and that while, in no measured terms, he condemns the supposed want of brotherly-kindness in the members of the Church of England, his own apparent liberality is resolvable into nothing else ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... sailed to Stockholm, where he anchored in the harbor and opened negotiations with the Swedish senate, then the great source of power in the land. He promised to govern the kingdom in the way they might decide upon and be to them a mild and merciful father. While some of them were seduced by his specious promises, the majority had no fancy to make him their "father." But they made a truce with him until the matter could be decided, the Danes being allowed to buy provisions in the town, and on their side selling salt to the citizens, this being at that time very ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... who do not appear to have been connected with Montanus, but who lived about the same time, held the same views on the subject of marriage. Thus, Athenagoras says—"A second marriage is by us esteemed a specious adultery."—Apology, Sec. 33. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... administered the coup de grace with the air of a John Roberts, and retired triumphant; while the Charchester representatives pointed out that as their score was at seventy-four, they had really won a moral victory by four points. To which specious and unsportsmanlike piece of sophistry Pringle ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... new was not true, and what was true was not new.' This appears to me to express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in dwelling on a common-place, however fashionable or well established: nor am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless I imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest truism. It consists in seeing and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Germany, and, above all, in the numerous schools, where the students were only awaiting the moment for taking up arms. These conjectures as to M. Fouche's presence at Dresden were without foundation. The Emperor in recalling him had a real motive, which he, however, disguised under a specious pretext. Having been deeply impressed by the conspiracy of Malet, his Majesty thought that it would not be prudent to leave at Paris during his absence a person so discontented and at the same time so influential as the Duke of Otranto; ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... both in public and private companies, with silently remarking, the specious errors of those who speak without reflecting. And among the many which I have heard, the following seems the most general, viz. that had this rupture happened forty or fifty years hence, instead of NOW, the Continent would have been more able to have shaken off the dependance. ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... suddenly bereaved, mourned in wild and bitter grief, but woman's pride, at times her guardian angel, at others her destroyer, took up its stronghold in her heart. The tempter Conrad awoke its tones—with specious wile he recalled De Clairville's lofty ideas of name and birth—how proudly he spoke of his lady mother and the castled state of his father's hall. Was it not likely that, at the last, this pride had rallied its strength around him, and ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... is said, who is deficient in common sense, is, in proportion to the imbecility, unfit for social life, and yet the same person might possess a kind of negative excellency, or perhaps even a species of piety. This view appears to me, however, much more specious ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of austerity; But age has brought this piety upon her, And she's a prude, now she can't help herself. As long as she could capture men's attentions She made the most of her advantages; But, now she sees her beauty vanishing, She wants to leave the world, that's leaving her, And in the specious veil of haughty virtue She'd hide the weakness of her worn-out charms. That is the way with all your old coquettes; They find it hard to see their lovers leave 'em; And thus abandoned, their forlorn estate Can find no occupation but a prude's. These pious dames, in their austerity, ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... war he displayed much ability; and his administrative talents and energy as Quarter-Master-General in 1793 should have screened him from the criticism that he discoursed brilliantly on war in salons, and in the council rhetorically developed specious and elegant plans.[345] ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... hope had her periods of control, for there are times when the mind wearies of rationality, and, as it were in self-defense, in obedience to the instinct of progressive life, craves a specious comfort. It seemed undeniable that Mr. Warricombe regarded him with growth of interest, invited his conversation more unreservedly. He began to understand Martin's position with regard to religion and science, and ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the island had welcomed him with joy, for of all men who had ever held office in Jamaica Sir Henry Morgan, sometime the chief devil of those nefarious bands who disguised their piracy under the specious title of buccaneering, was the most detested. But because of the fortunate demise of Lady Morgan, as it turned out, Sir Henry was not present to greet My Lord Carlingford, who ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... disagreement with the methods of the Socialists in practically every State but his own. He and his associates were at one moment so far from the national and international principle that they sought to support a non-Socialist candidate for judge—on the specious ground that no Socialist was nominated. But the National Congress condemned and forbade such action by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Berger's unwillingness to act with his organization even went so far at one point that he was punished by a temporary suspension from the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling: it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn, specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Bonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Dasent, or Perrault. Still, it cannot be denied that true stories are not so good as fairy tales. They do not always end happily, and, what is worse, they do remind a young student of lessons and schoolrooms. A child may fear that he is being taught under a specious pretence of diversion, and that learning is being thrust on him under the disguise of entertainment. Prince Charlie and Cortes may be asked about in examinations, whereas no examiner has hitherto set questions on 'Blue Beard,' or 'Heart of Ice,' or 'The Red Etin of Ireland.' There is, to be honest, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... discerning view even of those who are placed at a secure distance from the flames of persecution. A reason has been assigned for the conduct of the emperors towards the primitive Christians, which may appear the more specious and probable as it is drawn from the acknowledged genius of Polytheism. It has already been observed, that the religious concord of the world was principally supported by the implicit assent and reverence which the nations of antiquity expressed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... that specious soothing we accord to children, "you lay right still, and I'll go out a spell and do a few chores, and then mebbe I'll come in and see ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... new State or States would be formed, which would increase the political power of the South—especially in the United States Senate, where she greatly needed representation to counterbalance the influence of the small States of the North in that body. These arguments were specious, but it was well understood they were only meant to justify a vote for the measure which corruption ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... shadows fear lest ever again they be lured by specious promises to suffer usury at the hands of Yahn, who is overskilled in Law. Only Yahn sits and smiles, watching his hoard increase in preciousness, and hath no pity for the poor shadows whom he hath lured from their quiet to toil ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... of special creation is not only a mere specious mask for our ignorance; its existence in Biology marks the youth and imperfection of the science. For what is the history of every science but the history of the elimination of the notion of creative, or other interferences, with the natural order of the phaenomena which are the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... will be the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessary material in hand to follow these immense reactions in their various fields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates but in the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of being final—and were not final ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... her hand; a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions' den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... And as the sense of peril dulled, the craft of sophistry grew clumsy. Remorse laid hold upon him in these dim watches of the night. Self-reproach had found him out here, defenceless so far from the specious wiles and ways of men. All the line of provocations seemed slight, seemed naught, as he reviewed them and balanced them against a human life. True, it was not in some mad quarrel that his skill had taken it and had served to ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... pretended to disbelieve it utterly, and assured me that all was at peace in the city, that Nek Mahomed would keep the troops quiet, and that I should have no trouble; but I was not taken in by his specious assurances. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... they themselves are all by this time satisfied truth will come out, and I hope you will not be deceived by any specious pretences. Our forefathers have been deluded, but the deception I hope is now at an end. And I must needs say if all these witnesses that have freely discovered their knowledge, joined to that truth which is at length drawn from that Dunne, be worthy of any credit, it is as plain a proof ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... policy, whilst yet the contagion was recent, and had laid hold but on a few persons. The truth is, these politics are rotten and hollow at bottom, as all that are founded upon any however minute a degree of positive injustice must ever be. But they are specious, and sufficiently so to delude a man of sense and of integrity. But it is quite otherwise with the attempt to eradicate by violence a wide-spreading and established religious opinion. If the people are in an error, to inform them is not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a specious appearance, and seemed well calculated for the end which they professed to be the object of all these innovations; they ordered that four knights should be chosen by each county; that they should make inquiry into the grievances of which their neighborhood ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... young man been very simple, and very self-sufficient, he had not been so grossly deluded. Mrs. Bevis has the same plea to make for herself. A good-natured, thoughtless woman; not used to converse with so vile and so specious a deceiver as him, who made his advantage of both these ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... hazard of his fortune is peril to their future." Such doubts and fears, gradually developed by reflection took stronger hold on Miss Paget's mind after every fresh visit to Omega Street. She saw the Frenchman's light-hearted confidence in all humanity, her father's specious manner and air of quixotic honour. His sanguine tone, his excellent spirits, filled her with intolerable alarm. Alas! when had she ever seen her father in good spirits, except when some gentlemanly villany ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... feign to think that he fights merely with the hope of slaying her husband, the King Cavernio. These rascals are none the less mightily afraid of the general's valour and spirit, so they determine to entice him from his camp under various specious pretexts, and then, once he is completely in their power, to have him executed or assassinated. With this object in view they send a friendly letter asking him to attend the Council, to accept a regular commission, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... hastening to a state of ruin, and the despatch tells us that "by the united influence of mock philanthropy, religious cant, and humbug," a reformed parliament was forced "to precipitate the slavery spoliation act under the specious pretext of promoting the industry and improving the condition of the manumitted slaves," still we maintain, and the reasonable will agree with us, that we are much better off now than we have been for a long time, and that Jamaica's brightest and happiest days have ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... singular and the nominative case—so he says; and then proceeds to demonstrate, with unanswerable arguments, that Greek was the spoken language of Nepenthe at this period. Several scholars have been swayed by his specious logic to abandon the older and sounder interpretation. There are yet other conjectures about the word Dodekanus, all more or ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... continued to exist from Roman times until the Middle Ages. Those in southern Europe were recruited from the female pilgrims from the north who set out for Rome or Palestine and whose means failed them.[1873] It is another social phenomenon due to poverty and to a specious argument of protection to women in a good position. This argument came down by tradition with the institution. The city council of Nuremberg stated, as a reason for establishing a lupanar, that the church allowed ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that the enterprize is beyond his powers, and that he acted rashly in undertaking it. But this is no light scheme; no work, begun for want of other amusement, and deserted when a more specious or pleasing subject for poetry presented itself. He has considered it seriously; the subject appears full of poetical capabilities, and superior to many others which offered themselves; and if the opinion of the world coincides ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... it has to be admitted against him that in Pamela he produced an essay in vulgarity—of sentiment and morality alike—which has never been surpassed. In these days it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of this masterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it with patience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it was once found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of Henry Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. To him, a scholar ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... they do not apply so strict a test of membership as the third body, the Fabian Democratic Parliamentary League, which exacts from every applicant a proof of some special deed of ferocity before admission, the most guilty of their champions veiling their crimes under the specious pretexts of vegetarianism, the scientific investigation of supernatural phenomena, vulgarly called ghost-catching, political economy, and other occult and dull studies. But though not yet admitted a neophyte of this body, the prisoner has taken one necessary step towards initiation, in learning ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... no end be hindered, no hope marred, No loss be feared: faith—yea, a little faith— Shall save thee from the anguish of thy dread. Here, Glory of the Kurus! shines one rule— One steadfast rule—while shifting souls have laws Many and hard. Specious, but wrongful deem The speech of those ill-taught ones who extol The letter of their Vedas, saying, "This Is all we have, or need;" being weak at heart With wants, seekers of Heaven: which comes—they say— As "fruit of good deeds done;" promising ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... 'that he is not to be the Lady's nuptial father. He seems apprehensive that I have still, specious as my reasons are, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... untimely truths, and putting every possible impediment in the path of his logic; and if, moreover, he were obliged to mend every flaw, prove every such truth a falsehood, and remove every impediment before he could advance a step. Were such the case, how much less would there be of fine-spun theory and specious argument; how much more of practical truth! Always supposing the logical combatants did not lose their patience and resort to material means and knock-down arguments; of which, judging by the spirit sometimes manifested in theological controversies, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... these matters no blame can attach to Miss Dix. In the first instance she acted no doubt from the dictates of a sound and mature judgment; and in the last was often deceived by false testimonials, by a specious appearance, or by applicants who, innocent at the time, were not proof against the temptations and allurements of a position which all must admit to ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... which almost daily assumes a graver aspect. I refer to what is no less than the trafficking in human flesh between the brothel-keepers and the vagabonds of the Colony. Women are bought and sold in nearly every brothel in the place. They are induced by specious pretexts to come to Hong Kong, and then, after they are admitted into the brothels, such a system of espionage is kept over them, and so frightened do they get, as to prevent any application to the police. They have no relatives, no friends to assist ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... worship which are preserved in the Church of England, and which are so closely incorporated with its services, must furnish an insuperable objection against conformity with all sincere and conscientious Unitarians.'[446] If the common sense and common honesty of Englishmen revolted against the specious attempts of Dr. Clarke and his friends to justify Arian subscription, a much more hopeless task would it have been to reconcile the further development of anti-Trinitarian doctrines with the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... Prince, the moral lay And in these tales mankind survey; With early virtues plant your breast The specious arts of ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... Notwithstanding these specious reasons, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods when the revival of learning, the invention of printing, the fearless investigations of the Reformers into subjects thought formerly too sacred for consideration ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... I not?' retorted the old man, sternly. 'I could not tell how far your specious hypocrisy had deceived him, knave; and knew no better way of opening his eyes than by presenting you before him in your own servile character. Yes. I did express that desire. And you leaped to meet it; and you met it; and turning in an instant on the hand you had licked and beslavered, as only ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... dazzling exploits of the spirit of conquest, the most impassioned efforts of the spirit of armed propagandism; we have seen territories and states molded and re-molded, unmade, re-made, and unmade again, at the pleasure of combinations more or less specious. What survives of all these violent and arbitrary works? They have fallen, like plants without roots, or edifices without foundation. And now, when analogous enterprises are attempted, scarcely have they made a few steps in advance when they pause and hesitate, as if embarrassed ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of a Welsh girl about to elope with a specious rascal, and of the intervention of her old father, who is ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... feelings in his hearers. It was the old subject, but he found something new to say upon it at each meeting with his friends, and they wondered where he got the imagination to construct his telling phrases and specious, virulent arguments. ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... works of this nature to their king; especially when they have had the least encouragement to it, by his approbation of them on the stage. But, I confess, I want the confidence to follow their example, though, perhaps, I have as specious pretences to it, for this piece, as any they can boast of; it having been owned in so particular a manner by his majesty, that he has graced it with the title of his play, and thereby rescued it from the severity (that I may not say malice) of its ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Morgan's indignant thought—and he made the criticism as of a mere external fact from which he stood aloof—to be so friendly with Margaret? How was it that she should show such little insight as to be imposed upon by so specious a personality? No doubt she thought ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... merely equality with men, but actual imitation of men. These women said that since men had attained mastery in life, captured all the best things, and adopted the most successful methods of living, it was necessary for women to copy them at every point. That was a specious plea which even had in it a certain element of truth. But the fact remained that women and men are different, that the difference is based in fundamental natural functions, and that to place one sex in exactly the same position as the other sex is to deform its outlines ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... thump, as the extent of his misfortune dawned upon him. It was not alone that he was without money in a strange city, but he had eaten rather a hearty breakfast, which he was unable to pay for. What would they think of him? What would they do to him? He saw it all now. That specious stranger, Clarence Brown, had robbed him in his sleep. That was why he had invited him to spend the night in his room without charge. That was why he had got up so early and stolen out without his knowledge, after he ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... party spirit had seldom been more strongly excited. On both sides there was doubtless much honest zeal; and on both sides an observant eye might have detected fear, hatred, and cupidity disguised under specious pretences of justice and public good. The baleful heat of faction rapidly warmed into life poisonous creeping things which had long been lying torpid, discarded spies and convicted false witnesses, the leavings of the scourge, the branding iron and the shears. Even ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... times,[273] 'Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes, Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults; And half a column of the pompous page, That speeds the specious tale from age to age; Where History's pen its praise or blame supplies, And lies like Truth, and still most truly lies. 190 He wandering mused, and as the moonbeam shone Through the dim lattice, o'er the floor of stone, And the high fretted ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... shaded and secluded life which Agnes had led with the specious and fatal brilliancy which had been the lot of her mother,—her simple peasant garb with those remembered visions of jewelry and silk and embroideries with which the partial patronage of the Duchess or the ephemeral passion of her son had decked out the poor Isella; and then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... Semernia, the Indian Queen, and who feign to think that he fights merely with the hope of slaying her husband, the King Cavernio. These rascals are none the less mightily afraid of the general's valour and spirit, so they determine to entice him from his camp under various specious pretexts, and then, once he is completely in their power, to have him executed or assassinated. With this object in view they send a friendly letter asking him to attend the Council, to accept a regular commission, and to raise new forces. On ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... appear, if Collonel Lambert and half a dozen Officers, with all their seduced Partizans, make so much as a single Cypher to the Summe Total. And this shall be enough to answer those devious Principles set down in the porch of that specious Edifice; which being erected upon the Sand, will (like the rest that has been daubed with untempered mortar) sink also at the next high wind that blowes upon it. But I am glad it is at last avowed, ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... how thoroughly understood by the common people were the principles of liberty, and with what keen penetration they saw through all shams and specious reasoning, than the decided, nay, fierce, stand they took against the stamp act. This was nothing more than our present law requiring a governmental stamp on all public and business paper to make it valid. The only difference ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... connect, and weave them all together Into one web of treason; all will be plain, My eye ne'er absent from the far-off mark, Step tracing step, each step a politic progress; And out of all they'll fabricate a charge So specious that I must myself stand dumb. I am caught in my own net, and only force, Nought but a sudden rent, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... softens his Ambition by the specious Pretence of serving his King: Whereas his Words in the proper Construction, imply, that if instead of being acted by Ambition, he had been acted by Religion, he should have now felt the Comforts of it, when the whole World turned ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... our tempers and behaviour, whatever good opinion we may form of our notions or state, we are but deceiving ourselves. The tree is known by its fruits [James. ii. 17,18.; Matt. vii. 20.]. In this way true believers are equally distinguished from profane sinners, and from specious hypocrites. The change in their hearts always produces a change in their whole deportment. Sin, which was once their delight, is now the object of their hatred. It was once necessary as their food, but now they avoid it as poison. ...
— An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies, Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. • Richard Johnson
... of September to bag a hundred leverets in the course of the day. He lost, of course; and upon being questioned as to his reason for making so preposterous a bet, he confessed that he had been induced to do so by the specious promise of an advertisement, in which somebody professed to have discovered "a powder for the removal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... it is the arguments about "My opponent's scoundrelly ancestry" which win the verdict. At the same time, your Athenian dicast is a remarkably shrewd and acute individual. He can distinguish between specious rhetoric and a real argument. He is probably honestly anxious to do justice. In the ordinary case where his personal interests or prejudices do not come into play, the decision is likely to match with justice quite as often perhaps as in the intricate court system of a great republic ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... our enemies is— Democracy; The right of nations to self-government; An honest, and not merely a specious, diminution ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... there is nothing to distinguish the canonical from the apocryphal writings." "Their pretences are specious and plausible, for the most part going under the name of our Saviour himself, his apostles, their companions, or immediate successors. They are generally thought to be cited by the first Christian writers with the same authority (at least, many of them) as the sacred ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... devoted sufficient time and intelligence to the subject, undeceived his sovereign as to the exaggerations of the French ambassador; and the Empress had no difficulty in detecting, among the calumnies which he had conveyed to her under the specious excuse of anxiety for her august daughter, proofs of the enmity of a, party which had never approved of the alliance of the House of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dropping a last curtsey with an assumed dignity which would have befitted a mistress of the robes, she took her departure, leaving Adrian smiling with amusement at her specious manner of announcing that his own bedroom—the only one available for the purpose in the ruins—was being duly converted into ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... are all by this time satisfied truth will come out, and I hope you will not be deceived by any specious pretences. Our forefathers have been deluded, but the deception I hope is now at an end. And I must needs say if all these witnesses that have freely discovered their knowledge, joined to that truth which is at length ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... Certain rich bankers and American plutocrats had loaned perhaps a billion dollars to England. Since the war was going against England, these rich men were afraid that they would lose their investment. In their emergency they forced war upon Congress. The speech was clever, specious, cunning, shrewdly calculated to stir up passion. And the speech was applauded to the echo. The second speaker made a no less skillful appeal to the prejudices of the members of the secret German-American ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... I call worthy of the name, is one whose thoughts and exertions are for others rather than for himself; whose high purpose is adopted on just principles, and is never abandoned while heaven or earth affords means of accomplishing it. He is one who will neither seek an indirect advantage by a specious road, nor take an evil path to secure a ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Speak paroli. Speak through the nose nazparoli. Speaker parolanto. Spear lanco. Special speciala. Specialise specialigi. Specialist specialisto. Speciality specialo—eco. Specie monero. Species speco. Specimen modelo. Specious versxajna. Speck makuleto. Spectacle (a sight) vidajxo. Spectacles okulvitroj. Spectator rigardanto. Spectre fantomo. Spectrum spektro. Speculate spekulacii. Speculation spekulacio. Speculative spekulativa. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... supper with a book in her hand; a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions' den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little stimulation. It never occurred ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the world by constant repercussion from one coxcomb to another. He considers himself as obliged to show by some proof of his abilities, that he is not consulted to no purpose, and therefore watches every opening for objection, and looks round for every opportunity to propose some specious alteration. Such opportunities a very small degree of sagacity will enable him to find, for in every work of imagination, the disposition of parts, the insertion of incidents, and use of decorations may be varied in a thousand ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... third of the ways is much the most specious, but nevertheless it is the most mistaken of all: for indeed this way has no more truth in it than the rest, alleging as it does that the Nile flows from melting snow; whereas it flows out of Libya through the midst of the Ethiopians, and so ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... etymological distinction would be complete on these principles. An island being one distinct habitation of men; and a continent land continued from one state to another. The former derivation might be rendered specious by remarking how singularly Homer and others use with, as if they had a natural connection. See II. B. 626. and, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... foolish, very foolish; but never meditated the affair you allude to. The woman was a wanton—I never suspected that the kindnesses she showed me were to lead to guilt. His jealousy stimulated her, and his injustice and malice fired me to revenge, and supplied me with specious arguments of justification. I am sorry it so happened on many accounts. I forgive him, but I cannot hear him mentioned without giving vent to my opinion of him, which is, that he is a very bad fellow, with a very ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... in a general form, would produce but a slight impression. But when applied to any particular order of facts, to any particular article of industry, to any one class of labor, it is extremely specious, because it is a syllogism which is not false, but incomplete. And what is true in a syllogism always necessarily presents itself to the mind, while the incomplete, which is a negative quality, an unknown value, is easily forgotten in ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... Probably that fool Beaumont-Greene had applied to his father, and the father had written to Warde. It was unthinkable that Warde knew more than this. Having reached this conclusion, Lovell turned over in his mind two or three specious lies that might meet ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a black cloud, ready to break. The Ninevites' remedy he felt was now called for. So he gathered his congregation together and appointed a day of fasting and prayer to avert the danger that, under a specious pretext, again menaced their civil and religious liberties. A true, sturdy Englishman, Bunyan, with Baxter and Howe, "refused an indulgence which could only be purchased by the violent overthrow of ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... cunning might have proved of good avail, For Aquilant believed him easily; And, save in taking Gryphon's horse and mail, He to the knight had done no injury; But that he wrought so high the specious tale, As manifested plainly, 'twas a lie. In all 'twas perfect, save that he the dame Had for his sister vouched with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... A specious reason, however, is advanced for exempting Literature from the Censorship accorded to Plays. He—it is said—who attends the performance of a play, attends it in public, where his feelings may be harrowed and his taste offended, cheek by jowl with boys, or women ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he might have grace to resist them. He doubted also very much whether the wily priest was not mocking him. He knew full well from the accounts he had heard in France of the treachery of which the emissaries of Rome were guilty, and he would not place any confidence in the most specious promises any of them might have made to him. He therefore let the priest talk on, endeavouring as far as he could not to listen to him. At length the fort was reached. Nigel was forthwith thrust into a cell, ordinarily used for the confinement of a refractory ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... partly on the gods, and partly to blame the Romans themselves, he took him up, saying that he had heard, indeed, long since from others, and now he knew it himself for truth, that Mithridates was a powerful speaker, who in defense of the most foul and unjust proceedings, had not wanted for specious presences. Then charging him with and inveighing bitterly against the outrages he had committed, he asked again whether he was willing or no to ratify the treaty of Archelaus? Mithridates answering in the affirmative, Sylla came forward, embraced and kissed him. Not ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... doubtless objected, that the enterprize is beyond his powers, and that he acted rashly in undertaking it. But this is no light scheme; no work, begun for want of other amusement, and deserted when a more specious or pleasing subject for poetry presented itself. He has considered it seriously; the subject appears full of poetical capabilities, and superior to many others which offered themselves; and if the opinion of the world coincides with his own in this point, he ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... girl,—simple, warm, outpouring in the sympathetic German woman,—and Faust, gallant, ardent, winning in the bright-eyed Italian,—thoughtful, tender, fervent in the intelligent German,—are background figures in the picture your memory paints; while the ubiquitous, sneering, specious, cunning, tempting, leering, unholy Mephistopheles is a character of himself, in the foreground, whose special interpreter you do not care ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of the French province was much increased by the intrigues of revolutionary agents, he soon perceived their plans to be fatuous and their enterprise devoid of importance. While the forward spirits in Quebec were leavening the mass of the habitants with specious reports of a French fleet ready to co-operate with them, a force composed for the most part of ill-disposed Americans was to percolate into Canada from Vermont. This so-called fleet consisted of a ship, ironically called the Olive Branch, which had sailed from Ostend bound ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... procure prolongation of office for himself, and he became a candidate for the next year's tribunate. [Sidenote: Gracchus stands again for the Tribunate. His motives.] To say that considerations of personal safety dictated his candidature is a very easy and specious insinuation, but is nothing more. It is indeed a good deal less, for it is utterly inconsistent with the other acts of an unselfish, dauntless career. At election-time the first two tribes voted for Tiberius. Then the aristocracy ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things—and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly white ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium or his audience might be stimulated into specious blossom. Phenomena were exhibited which transcended the conscious powers of the human soul,—nay, which testified of its latent ability to work without organic conditions. Our unemployed brain-organs, as Hamilton and others have clearly proved, are always employing themselves. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... perception of truth was as rapid and unfailing as an instinct. Without difficulty he separated the specious from the solid, gave great weight to evidence, but was skeptical and cautious about receiving it. Though a collector of details, he was never incumbered by them. No one was less likely to make the common mistake of thinking that a particular instance established a general proposition. He sought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... movement and no answer, sahib. We did not think; we waited. If he had coaxed us with specious arguments, as surely a liar would have done, that would probably have been his last speech in the world. But there was not one word he said that did not ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... his coffers overflow with pelf. Avoid the irreverent—the scoffer of hallowed things; and him who "looks upon the wine while it is red;" him too, "who hath a high look and a proud heart," and who "privily slandereth his neighbor." Do not heed the specious prattle about "first love," and so place, irrevocably, the seal upon your future destiny, before you have sounded, in silence and secrecy, the deep fountains of your own heart. Wait, rather, until your own character ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... left! As I was quite prepared to find I had committed some awful sin, I did my best to accept this in a nonchalant manner, and not to look as relieved as I felt. As throughout the morning I had preserved a specious aspect of wisdom, and had commanded first one and then the other wing, the fight was really a capital thing for me, for practically all the men had served under my actual command, and thenceforth felt an enthusiastic belief that I would lead ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... conquest, that it ought to be weakened or disarmed: if, being once reduced, it be disposed to renew the contest, it must from thenceforward be governed in form. Rome never avowed any other maxims of conquest; and she every where sent her insolent armies under the specious pretence of procuring to herself and her allies a lasting peace, which she alone would reserve ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... she is advancing to the examination of the problems of life, with an eye single only to the glory of truth. Like the Spartan of old she has thrown her spear into the thickest of the fray, and will fight gloriously in the midst thereof till she regains her own. No specious sophistry or vain delusion—no time-honored tradition or untenable doctrine ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Allah! Barik Allah! Praise be to God! and right or wrong, they all appeared so struck by the specious justice of the decision, that the daroga dismissed us, and told us ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... an element of weakness into the national life; they cripple the justifiable national pride in independence, and support a nerveless opportunist policy by surrounding it with the glamour of a higher humanity, and by offering it specious reasons for disguising its own weakness. They thus play the game of their less scrupulous enemies, just as the Prussian policy, steeped in the ideas of universal peace, did in 1805 and 1806, and brought the State to the brink ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... the estimate we are compelled to form of a man who in his professions has sometimes gone as far, as the most zealous votaries of liberty. And what is the inference we shall draw from this? Shall we, for the sake of one man so specious and plausible, learn to think the language of all men equally empty and deceitful? Having once been betrayed, shall we avoid all future risk, by treating every pretender to patriotism and public spirit, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... the affirmative, Gaston offered him a good round sum (accompanied by plenty of specious reasoning) for a very little service. Would he set aside for the Marquise the game that the Count would bring? It seemed to Jacques to be a matter of no great importance whether the partridge on which his mistress dined had been shot by her keeper or by M. de Nueil, especially since the latter particularly ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... amelioration of a race, but in order to satisfy the idiotic ambitions of a handful. Let not this fact be forgotten. Democracy will not forget it. And foreign policy in the future will not be left in the hands of any autocracy, by whatever specious name the autocracy may call itself. Ruling classes have always said that masses were incapable of understanding foreign policy. The masses understand it now. They understand that in spite of very ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... of the text has stimulated the ingenuity of numerous correctors, who have suggested many acute and convincing emendations, and some very specious ones which sustained scrutiny has proved untenable. It should be needless to remark that success has in general been proportionate to the facilities of access to the manuscripts, which have only of late become generally available. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... with the intention that the thing should happen which happened. I had rather hold, if it be possible to hold, that a Princess so gracious and so unfortunate meant innocently, and was cajoled or overborne by the persuasions of her kinsmen, and perhaps by some specious pretext of State policy. In like manner I am reluctant to think that she planned harm for Mistress Barbara, towards whom she had a true affection, and I will read in an honest sense, if I can, the letter which M. de Fontelles brought with him to Hatchstead. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... and specious explanation Cynthia was convinced. True, she added a question touching the amazing condition of the grooms, in reply to which Joseph afforded her a ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... governing body of the City is based upon a specious theory, which will soon be found to be utterly untenable. It is pretended that if the Courts of Aldermen and of Common Council were rendered more exclusive, it would be considered a greater distinction to belong to them, ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... anger me, Zorzi! Do not try your specious logic with me! Invent no absurd arguments, man! Against her will, indeed? How should she know any will but mine in the matter? I shall certainly not marry her against her will! She shall will what I please, neither more ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... imagination—what we can know of God from what we cannot know. This is the more necessary, too, because, whilst true and false notions about God and religion are blended together in our minds under one specious name of science, the false are more likely to make men doubt of the true, as it often happens, than to persuade men that they are true themselves. Now, in order to this purpose, nothing can be more effectual than to go to the root of error, of that primitive error which encourages ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... the blandishments of the wily serpent, as we moderns, in our Art, have yielded to the licentious, specious life-curve of Hogarth. When I say Art, I mean that spirit of Art which has made us rather imitative than creative, has made us hold a too faithful mirror up to Nature, and has been content to let the great Ideal remain petrified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... soul, where selfishness put on a guise of honesty, all these specious interests were struggling and contending. His first scruples yielded to ingenious reasoning, then came to the top again, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... such circumstances, would be a useless taunt and wanton insult to the South. The famous sentence in which he said that he "would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God," was nothing but specious and brilliant rhetoric. It was perfectly easy to employ slaves in California, if the people had not prohibited it, and in New Mexico as well, even if there were no cotton nor sugar nor rice plantations in either, and ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... means excessive, and the boys' keep not too extravagant, judging by the meals they had. Dr Hellyer was "an ignorant, uncultivated brute," Tom averred, and his degree of "Doctor" was only derived from the fact of his having paid ten dollars to an American university to air this specious prefix to his ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sheer might and unright that their Regency enabled the House of Albany to exercise over the orphans of the royal family, whose head was absent; and a captive knight could be no mischievous person. Still this might be only a specious pretence to impose on the chaplain, and gain admittance to the castle; and Patrick was resolved to be well on his guard, though he replied courteously to the graceful bow with which the stranger greeted him, saying in a manly mellow voice and southern accent, 'I ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... level how the skaters slide, And skim the glitt'ring surface as they go: Thus o'er life's specious pleasures lightly glide, But pause not, press ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now—as he had so often found at lessons—still some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one might wrest from ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... subject to serve at the call of the law, as were the policemen. He was not a dictator merely, he was part and parcel of the strength that he invoked. The reason for obedience rested on the same ground in each case—service in which each stood equal. It is a specious form of mistake to suppose that "men can legislate just what they wish to." They can legislate only what the majority decrees, and they can legislate effectively only what they have power to enforce. Had the saloon-keepers refused to ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... says, "We palliate our sloth by the specious pretext of difficulty." Nothing, in fact, is too difficult to accomplish, which we set about, with a proper consideration of those difficulties, and pursue with perseverance. The Indian language cannot be acquired so easily as the Greek or Hebrew, but it can ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... looking back to the discussions which had taken place on the subject of Slavery, began to think that they had gone too far as slaveholders in their admissions. They began to insinuate, "that they had been taken in, under the specious appearance of promoting the arts, manufactures, and commerce of Barbadoes, to promote dangerous designs against its established laws and customs." Discussions therefore of this sort became too unpopular to be continued. It was therefore not till Mr. Steele ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which, doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford system as in any parental ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... few of the showy sophisms which the orator of the opposition had constructed into his specious argument, I placed the war on the ground of necessity. "Nations cannot act like individuals—they cannot submit to self-sacrifice—they cannot give up their rights—they cannot affect an indolent disdain or an idle generosity. The reason ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... in nothing more specious than in its method, and it is here that charlatanism can most readily intrude itself. Every little change, every inadequate modification, is proclaimed aloud as a new or an improved method; and even the most foolish and superficial changes find at ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... therefore allow yourself to be led astray by the specious good nature of such an institution as ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... "'That's specious, but not true,' said he; 'but it's a matter rather for my consideration than your'n,' and he looked as a feller does when he buttons his trowsers' pocket, as much as to say, you have no right to be a puttin' of your pickers and stealers in there, that's mine. ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... B. Macaulay and Christopher Alexander Hagerman. These names afford sufficient evidence that full justice was done to the case on both sides. Hagerman was a counsel of remarkable ability, and he fought very hard. His argument was a masterpiece of clever, specious reasoning, well calculated to produce an effect upon uneducated or half-educated jurymen. He took an enlightened stand, admitting the advantage to a community of a free and unfettered press. He then proceeded ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... very well imagine some over-righteous person saying, "Alas, poor deluded soul, how little importance can we attach to your specious apologies of a people's lawlessness, when your own personal narrative shows that the moral atmosphere you have been breathing has quite corrupted you! Go back over your own record, and you will find that you ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... demanding a "picture of life." But with the abandonment of the purpose of political propaganda, the consequent disappearance of the chorus with its burlesque trappings (largely through motives of state economy), and the establishment in the New Comedy of a type of dramatic machinery that had a specious outer shell of reflection of characters and events in daily life, the critics instantly seem to demand the standard of dramatic technique of Aristotle and Freytag and condemn all departures from this standard. In reality, we believe that the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... bad to worse, to engender ill feeling and finally desperation. This narrow, selfish policy had about as much soundness in it as the idea upon which it was based, so often brought forward with what looks very suspiciously like a specious effort to cover mental indolence with a glittering generality, "that the Filipino is only a grown-up child and needs a strong paternal government," an idea which entirely overlooks the natural fact that when an impressionable ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... still perpetuate all sorts of primitive barbarism in modern society. The conservative "on principle" is therefore a most unmistakably primitive person in his attitude. His only advance beyond the savage mood lies in the specious reasons he is able to advance for remaining of the same mind. What we vaguely call a "radical" is a very recent product due to altogether exceptional and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... sketches taken by other people of places he had never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him almost every day,—engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living I believe ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... ma'am;—yet I fear our ladies should share the blame—they think our admiration of beauty so great, that knowledge in them would be superfluous. Thus, like garden-trees, they seldom show fruit, till time has robbed them of the more specious blossom.—Few, like Mrs. Malaprop and the orange-tree, are ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... three friendships which are advantageous, and three which are injurious. Friendship with the upright; friendship with the sincere; and friendship with the man of observation: these are advantageous. Friendship with the man of specious airs; friendship with the insinuatingly soft; and friendship with the glib-tongued: ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... retreat of the high-souled Apava. Possessed of great energy, Apava, O mighty-armed king, seeing his retreat consumed by the powerful Kshatriya, cursed that monarch in wrath, saying, 'Since, O Arjuna, without excepting these my specious woods, thou hast burnt them, therefore, Rama (of Bhrigu's race) will lop off thy (thousand) arms.' The mighty Arjuna, however, of great prowess, always devoted to peace, ever regardful of Brahmanas and disposed to grant protection (unto all classes), and charitable ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and intimate fashion, a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely physical, so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while whole they truly and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... audience, rather than on sustained epic dignity and ordered development of his story. But although he cannot give real unity to his epic, he succeeds, by dint of his astonishing fluency and his mastery over his instrument, in giving a specious appearance of unity. The sutures of his story are well disguised and his inconsistencies of no serious importance. He fails as an epic ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... at first sight, a source of intolerance. The man who believes, reckons himself in possession of the right in regard to truth, and to God; he has nothing to respect in error. Thus it is that belief naturally engenders persecution. This reasoning is specious, all the more as it is supported by numerous and terrible examples; but let us look at things more closely. Place yourselves face to face with any one of your convictions, no matter which; I hope there is no one of you so unfortunate as not to have any. Suppose that it were desired ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... as if to breathe in this sunny world were the most ravishing and rapturous bliss. We cling to our stations in our fellow-creatures' minds and memories; we know too well the frail tenure on which we are in this world great and considered personages. Experience makes us shrink from the specious sneer of sympathy; and when we are ourselves falling, bitter Memory whispers that we have ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions into a vague but poetic past. There was something of the dignity of the Spanish chatelaine[157-1] in the sweetly grave little figure that advanced to accept my specious offering. I think I should have fallen on my knees to present it, but for the presence of the all seeing Enriquez. But why did I even at that moment remember that he had early bestowed upon her the nickname of "Pomposa"? This, as ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... danger, the lateness of the hour, after three p.m., and distance from Fort George, Headquarters more than six miles, I hesitated not assuming the responsibility of liberating all the 49th prisoners, on the specious plea of their offence proceeding from a too free indulgence in drink, appealing to them for proof of their loyalty and courage, which they were assured would be severely tested ere another day dawned. Then, after a rapid but effective ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... venerable edifices of antiquity, which rash and unexperienced workmen have ventured to new-dress and refine, with all the rage of modern improvement. Hence frequently it's symmetry has been destroyed, it's proportions distorted, and it's majestic simplicity exchanged for specious embellishments and fantastic novelties. For, to say the truth, almost all the perplexed questions, almost all the niceties, intricacies, and delays (which have sometimes disgraced the English, as well as other, courts of justice) ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... military force, and inveterate against every thing that might be regarded as connected with the Catholic worship. The Calvinists were masters of Caen, and, incited by the information of what had taken place at Rouen, they resolved to repeat the same outrages. Under the specious pretext of abolishing idolatrous worship, they pillaged and ransacked every church and monastery: they broke the windows and organs, destroyed the images, stole the ecclesiastical ornaments, sold ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... operation. This is due, in the highest degree, to certain theories which were developed, and which made their way, pari passu, with the advancements of electrical and electro-magnetic science. These theories, specious, inconsistent, illogical, yet withal plausible, and even fascinating, served to blind the mental vision so that mankind might not appreciate ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler. The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of Van Helmont. I have given some account of his chapter "Butler" in different articles, but I would refer the students of our Homoeopathic educational institutions to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I have thought, A secret glance would tell me she could love, If I but gave encouragement. Before me She keeps some moderation; but is never Closeted with my wife, but in the end I find my Katherine in briny tears. From the small chamber, where she first was lodged, The gradual fiend by specious wriggling arts Has now ensconced herself in the best part Of this large mansion; calls the left wing her own; Commands my servants, equipage.—I hear Her hated tread. What ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... month later she wrote:—"Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling: it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn, specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Bonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the world, I was an easy victim. Somewhere he had formed the acquaintance of my brother, which fact merely increased my confidence in him. I need not dwell in detail upon what followed—the advice of romantic girls, the false counsel of a favorite teacher, the specious lies and explanations accounting for the necessity for secrecy, the fervent pleadings, the protestations, the continual urging, that finally conquered my earlier resolves. I yielded before the strain, the awakened imagination of a girl of sixteen seeing nothing in the rose-tinted ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... and similar objects a great number of persons conspired together, being led by Modestus, the prefect of the praetorium, who was a complete slave to the wishes of the emperor's eunuchs, and who, under a specious countenance, concealed a rough disposition which had never been polished by any study of ancient virtue or literature, and who was continually asserting that to look into the minute details of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... prove that the work was profound and eloquent. My ambition has panted, with equal avidity, after the reputation of literature and opulence. To claim the authorship of this work was too harmless and specious a stratagem not to be readily suggested. I meant to translate it into English, and to enlarge it by enterprising incidents of my own invention. My scruples to assume the merit of the original composer might thus be removed. For this end, your ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... them to the world as they really are. You have not," added he, "been so much in high and noble life as I have been; but if you had fully entered into it, and seen what was going on, you would have felt convinced that it was time to unmask the specious hypocrisy, and show it in ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... dear sir, that this erasure had been made?" was the soft and specious rejoinder. "It must have been done in the last few months. This will was drawn up in August last. I was ignorant of the whole subsequent proceeding, and at that time Mr. Monfort laid peculiar stress on your coincidence ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Peel revived the hopes of the latter by one of his most studied speeches. It was, however, defective in temper, and although received with cheers by the opposition, failed to convince any one that reform was either the unjust or dangerous thing which he represented it. The speech was specious, sophistical and acrimonious; its effect upon the country was to strengthen the public prejudice against the anti-reformers. The Hon. Mr. Stanley, secretary for Ireland, made his reply to Sir Robert effective by illustrations ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... own name. Need he say he alluded to the legend of "Little Jack Horner"? (Cheers.) Some commentators are of opinion that "HORNER." was a typographical error for "HOMER." But the prefix; and the epithet combined to militate against this ingenious and plausible, but specious, theory. "HOMER" was not in any sense "Little," nor was his Pagan name "JACK." Again, "Corner," in the second line, could not in any language have ever rhymed with "HOMER." He knew that "Cromer" furnished them with a rhyme for "HOMER;" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... repaired to her own room to weep floods of tears over her father's anger, and the disobedience that made itself apparent as soon as she was beyond the spell of that specious tongue. There were a few fears too for his disappointment; but when her mother came up in great ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bramante, during his residence in Lombardy, developed a method of erecting piers with rubble enclosed by hewn stone or plaster-covered brickwork. This enabled an unconscientious builder to furnish bulky architectural masses, which presented a specious aspect of solidity and looked more costly than they really were. It had the additional merit of being easy and rapid in execution. Bramante was thus able to gratify the whims and caprices of his impatient patron, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Winthrop to this arrangement were of a nature so violent, so vigorous, at one moment so specious and conciliatory, and the next so abusive, that his listeners were moved by ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... the letter again. Beneath the specious kindliness of Wenceslas lay sinister motives, he knew. Among them, greed, of course. But—a darker thought—did Wenceslas know of Carmen's existence? Could Cartagena have received any intimation of his plans for her? Refusal to comply with these instructions meant—he dared not think what! On the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... be some who, deluded by the specious show of discovering abstracted verities, waste their time in arithmetical theorems and problems which have not any use, it will not be amiss if we more fully consider and expose the vanity of that pretence; and this will plainly appear by taking a view of Arithmetic in its infancy, and observing ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect in the forms of the constitution alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... at the end, dele. and add— , which latter deals with certain specious arguments adduced by these writers against the a priori possibility ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... years your family has run a slave pen. Your fortune is based upon it. And you have perpetuated this traffic in flesh on the specious reasoning that a court judgment of half a millennium ago is as good today as when it was handed down. Never once did anyone have the moral courage to re-examine that old decision. Never once did any human question the rightness of that decision. None ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Scotland as to be jealous, above all earthly things, for the lord regent's safety. Be his guardian angel. Beware of treason in man and woman, friend and kindred. It lurks, my cousin, under the most specious forms; and, as one, mark Lord Buchan; in short, have a care of all whom any of the house of Cummin may introduce. Watch over your general's life in the private hour. It is not the public field I fear for him; his valiant arm will there ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... 405 Or some uneasy thought; yet still his form Kept the same awful steadiness—at his feet His shadow lay, and moved not. From self-blame Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length Subduing my heart's specious cowardice, 410 I left the shady nook where I had stood And hailed him. Slowly from his resting-place He rose, and with a lean and wasted arm In measured gesture lifted to his head Returned my salutation; then resumed 415 His station as before; and when I asked His history, the veteran, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... plying his pen in the street, until one day a dancing-girl from Lucknow called him to her house to write an important missive on her behalf. This chance acquaintance ripened into a friendship that boded no good for Imtiazan: for within a month, amid specious statements of lucrative employment and fair promises of future well-being, he bade her prepare to leave the small room and accompany him to a larger house, fronting a main thoroughfare, which, said he, would henceforth be their home. The sight of the unscreened windows of her new ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... first Discourse with an eloquent plea for sincerity in Art: "Without sincerity of emotion no gift, however facile and specious, will avail you to win the lasting sympathies of men"—a truth which perhaps needs more repeating to-day than ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... has been congested with mills and machinery in this way. As a result of an excessive desire to postpone consumption there are considerable sums of money which cannot find a safe remunerative investment. Here is the material for the company promoter. By means of the specious falsehoods of prospectuses he draws this money together; with him work a builder and an architect who desire the contract of putting up the factory; the various firms interested in manufacturing and supplying the machinery, the boiler-maker ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... solemnized. Leave the rest to Providence, and, to use your own words in a former letter, follow as that leads. You will have a handsome man, a genteel man; he would be a wise man, if he were not vain of his endowments, and wild and intriguing: but while the eyes of many of our sex, taken by so specious a form and so brilliant a spirit, encourage that vanity, you must be contented to stay till grey hairs and prudence enter upon the stage together. You would not have every thing in the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... aroused and concerted representations were urgently made at Constantinople. Midhat Pasha disarmed his opponents by summarily introducing the British constitution into Turkey, but, needless to say, Bulgaria's lot was not improved by this specious device. Russia had, however, steadily been making her preparations, and, Turkey having refused to discontinue hostilities against Montenegro, on April 24, 1877, war was declared by the Emperor Alexander II, whose patience had become exhausted; he was joined by Prince Charles of Rumania, who saw that ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
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