"Fitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death before the dissolution, are now beginning to admit that it is by no means improbable that Mr. Gladstone may survive the century. Nor was it quite so fantastic as it appears at first sight, when an ingenious disciple told him the other day that by the fitness of things he ought to live for twenty years yet. 'For,' said this political arithmetician, 'you have been twenty-six years a Tory, twenty-six years a Whig Liberal, and you have been only six years a Radical Home Ruler. To make the balance even ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... him an adept in many things he might otherwise have cared little about. At eighteen he was a graduate from the Sorbonne, and a musical virtuoso as well. He could fence, ride, and carry off the prize in games requiring physical prowess as well as mental fitness. He was, in fact, a prodigy in many ways, and was so considered by his fellow-students. He, however, was not perfect; he lacked social charm, and in so far failed of being the complete gentleman. This he was made to realize ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... for their moral state as for their physical fitness, and labored to exalt their imaginations as well as to harden their bodies. In that camp, and amidst those toils in which he kept them strictly engaged, frequent sacrifices, and scrupulous care ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... at the strangeness of the situation, though not for an instant did he doubt Kiddie's fitness and ability. In Rube's estimation there was nothing great and honourable that Kiddie was incapable ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... now know as the survival of the fittest, the mere's capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse's incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and the dot system, relegated to the ignominy of passing his days washing dishes—dishes which she cooked and served—dishes, it should be added, which she was entirely conscious ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... pleased as he was in the wrong," said Lydia. "Intolerant refusal to listen to an opponent is a species of violence that has no business in such a representative nineteenth-century drawing-room as yours, Mrs. Hoskyn. There was a fitness in rebuking it by skilled physical violence. Consider the prodigious tact of it, too! One gentleman knocks another half-way across a crowded room, and ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Governor as a judge of character reenforced Archie's own opinion of the leader's fitness to command. That he should have been received into the strange brotherhood of the road, which the Governor controlled with so little friction, never ceased to puzzle him. He was amused to find himself feeling very humble ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... required of all the boarding pupils is intended to include a practical knowledge of agriculture, animal husbandry, apiculture, poultry raising, carpentry, cobbling, concrete, gardening, domestic science, sewing and laundry work, as the opportunity is afforded and the pupils discover fitness for ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... assigned to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, covered with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or crested with fire, is set before us for contemplation in an uninhabitable magnificence. And that part which we are enabled to inhabit owes its fitness for human life chiefly to its mountain ranges, which, throwing the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in given directions; so that men can build their cities in the midst of fields which they ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... "The fitness of the kangaroo-skin for upper leathers will no doubt obtain preference over most of the imported leather, as it is in general lighter and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... she would not marry foolishly; the wealth she must soon inherit hardly favoured her chances in this respect; doubtless she would be surrounded by unprincipled money-hunters. On the whole, it seemed rather a pity that Lashmar had not chosen and won her; there would have been a fitness, one felt, in that alliance. At the same time, Lashmar's selection of an undowered mate spoke well for him. For it was to be presumed that Lady Ogram's secretary had no very brilliant prospects. Certainly she did not make much impression ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... which we may rather wish than hope to find in the most famous of Shakespeare's successors. But if not his work, we may be sure it was his model; a model which he often approached, which he often studied, but which he never attained. It is never for absolute truth and fitness of expression, it is always for eloquence and sweetness, for fluency and fancy, that we find the tragic scenes of Fletcher most praiseworthy; and the motive or mainspring of interest is usually anything but natural or simple. Now the motive ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... as endeared him to all classes, but especially to those whose humble condition in life gave them the strongest claim upon his virtues, both as a man and a pastor. Difficult, indeed, would it be to find a minister of the gospel, whose practice and precept corresponded with such beautiful fitness, nor one who, in the midst of his own domestic circle, threw such calm lustre around him as a husband and a father. A temper grave but sweet, wit playful and innocent, and tenderness that kept his spirit benignant to error without ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so related to others and to the universe generally, that things may be such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit, and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet existent, a supernatural power must have ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... moral attitude towards their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work, moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for receiving a wage, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Lord Bishop had said. After half-past ten, Members trooped down in scores. When Prince ARTHUR rose to continue the debate he was hailed with ringing cheer from embattled host. Pretty to see how gentlemen to right of SPEAKER, mustered for defence of the Church, were careful to contribute to fitness of things by ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... came to him that perhaps Joan was to be tested and proved here, even as he was being tested in Tim Sullivan's balance for his fitness to become a master over sheep. Here were two fair samples of men out of the world's assorted stock—himself and Reid. One of them, deliberate, calm, assured of his way, but with little in his hand; the other a grig that ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... afraid to acknowledge it? I really don't understand you. But, if Sarudine won't marry you, well—that is a thing to be thankful for. You know now, and you must have known before, what a base, common fellow he really is, in spite of his good looks and his fitness for amours. All that he has is beauty, and you have now had your ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... all things were not equally calculated to inspire the true poet's genius. Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain fitness for poetical treatment. He was not always so careful as he might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the most important tattoo of the Igorot, since it marks its wearer as a taker of at least one human head. It therefore stands for a successful issue in the most crucial test of the fitness of a person to contribute to the strength of the group of which he is a unit. It no doubt gives its wearer a certain advantage in combat — a confidence and conceit in his own ability, and, likely, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. 'Didn't he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier's ideas of fitness.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... proud to ask you to explain, or some little thing in your conduct that irritates her because she does not fully comprehend you. The truth is, Emily would have been more ready to make advances if she had been quite sure of her fitness for Mrs. Barnet's society, who has of course been accustomed to London people of good position, which made ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... reason that underlie the laws of the land, the natural rights and duties which these laws are indeed to enforce to some extent, but which are antecedent and superior to all human laws, being themselves founded on the essential and eternal fitness of things. For things are not right or wrong simply because men have chosen to make them so. You all understand, gentlemen, that, even if we were living in a newly discovered land, where no code of human laws had yet been adopted, nor courts of justice established, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... the unusual presence of this great black woman may be conveyed by the fact that when she said, as she was wont to do in speaking of her own name, "I'm named Moriah—after a Bible mountain," there seemed a sort of fitness in the name and in the juxtaposition neither the sacred eminence or the woman suffered a loss ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... not, however, imagine, that I was, during this state of abandoned libertinism, so fully convinced of the fitness of my own conduct, as to be free from uneasiness. I knew very well, that I might justly be deemed the pest of society, and that such proceedings must terminate in the destruction of my health and fortune; but to admit thoughts ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... offered no opposition; indeed they did not know what else to propose. I must observe that now when we had nothing to do with whaling, in which the others had more experience, Andrew fully showed his superiority and fitness to command, so that we all readily obeyed him whenever he thought fit to issue any orders. However, as he felt that he only held his authority on sufferance, he judged it best, as in the present instance, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... themselves into the House of Commons; they interrupted public meetings, smashed winows, assaulted members of the Cabinet, and, in one case, tried to destroy the ballots at the polls,—in short, they broke the laws in order to convince the country of their fitness to take part in making them. Over six hundred of these offenders were put in prison, not because they asked for "Votes for Women," but because they deliberately, persistently, and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the dwelling is in keeping with the exterior, though in the drawing-rooms, where rich furniture and fine paintings actually lumber the apartments, there is evident the lack of a nice perception of the 'fitness of things,' and over the whole hangs a 'dusty air,' which reminds one that the Milesian Bridget does not 'flourish' in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the shoveller's beak we may proceed (as I have learned from information and specimens sent to me by Mr. Salvin), without any great break, as far as fitness for sifting is concerned, through the beak of the Merganetta armata, and in some respects through that of the Aix sponsa, to the beak of the common duck. In this latter species the lamellae are much coarser than in the shoveller, and are firmly attached ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... great mosaic, from the Fillmore-street hill, at once creates a nerve-soothing impression most uncommon in international expositions, and for that matter, in any architectural aggregate. One is at once struck with the fitness of the location and of the scheme of architecture. Personally, I am greatly impressed with the architectural scheme and the consistency of its application to the whole. I fear that the two men, Mr. Willis Polk and Mr. Edward ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... capital are to be owned by the State, and all business run as the Post-Office is run, or as the Panama Canal was built. The managers of each industry are to be chosen from the ranks, according to their fitness, for proved efficiency and knowledge of the business. Everybody will be upon a salary, and the opportunity of increasing personal profits by lowering wages, cheating the public, neglecting evil conditions of production, or damaging rivals, will be absent. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and justice. One, by his mental power or social position, controls others. They follow his example without always inquiring whether it is good or bad. I want you to think for yourselves; to make up your minds, without any assistance from others, in regard to the fitness of the person for whom you vote. I desire each of you to deposit his ballot in the box, without communication with others—without telling them, or letting them know by any means, for whom you vote. Now the box ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... gentleman's hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman's baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun—still carrying it as if it were a broom—she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself—and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... It knows how to shape itself by means of the crudest tools, in the midst of the greatest difficulties. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift, finds a way to make order, fitness and convenience reign in her house. She puts care and art into everything she undertakes. To do well what one has to do is not in her eyes the privilege of the rich, but the right of all. That is her aim, and she knows how to give her home a dignity and an attractiveness ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with this he was aware of a peculiar gain. His sense of hearing now was most acute, and he could hear the least faint sounds—sounds which, before his taking to the open, he could not have heard. So he was enjoying it all, feeling real comfort, a kind of fitness, as if he belonged here and would better remain here for ever. Then, with a generous supply of alfalfa tossed to him, as to the other horses, he became convinced that he should remain in this little settlement for ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... guilty of art and part in the concealment of that which, had you spoken twenty years ago, would have removed from the kirk of the Marrow an unfaithful minister, and given some one worthier than I to report on the fitness of your son for the ministry. It was you, Gilbert Peden, who made this remit to me, knowing what you know. I shall accept the deposition which you threaten at your hands, but remember that co-ordinately ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Company had a rule that every clergyman who volunteered or was invited to go to a parish in Virginia was to be investigated as to character and fitness, and each one of them was taken by a committee to a church to read the service and preach a sermon as ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... to consider; and to have postponed this question to a question of personalities, even if those personalities had been truly stated, is specifically the error which vitiated all the speculations of our domestic press. We say then, that Shah Soojah had a prima facie fitness for our purposes which the Dost had not; Soojah was the brother, son, and grandson of men who had ruled all Affghanistan; nay, in a tumultuary way, he had ruled all Affghanistan himself. So far he had something to show, and the Dost had nothing; and so far Lord ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... deliberate purpose to avoid a formal revocation, for reasons analogous to those suggested by Jefferson. Throughout he used "rapporter" instead of "revoquer." In the particular connection, the words are nearly synonymous; yet to the latter attaches a natural fitness and emphasis, the avoidance of which betrays the bias, perhaps unconscious, towards seeking escape from self-committal on the matter in hand. His phrases are more definite. July 31 he wrote, "After much reflection upon American affairs, I have decided that to withdraw ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of ugliness and disorder, produced by the violence of the elements around them. Once accustomed to look upon these conditions as inevitable in nature, they may easily transfer the idea of inevitableness and fitness to the same appearances in their own houses. I said that mountains seem to have been created to show us the perfection of beauty; but we saw in the tenth chapter that they also show sometimes the extreme of ugliness: and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... with him this evening that he is able already to take some minor post in a museum. He would very soon make up what he lacks in fitness, if we could put him where he could get hold of the proper books. He must be put under the right influences, for though he seems to have energy, many a boy with an unusual gift gets stranded in a small town like this, and becomes less useful in the end ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... please my own taste as an artist I have made drooping flowers with leaves of the hue of Florentine bronze, such as are found before or after the winter. Would not such a crown on the head of a young woman whose life is a failure have a certain poetical fitness? How many things a woman might express by her head-dress! Are there not flowers for drunken Bacchantes, flowers for gloomy and stern bigots, pensive flowers for women who are bored? Botany, I believe, may be made to express every sensation and thought ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... knife. I had scarce looked at it, on receiving it from the hands of the friendly sailor. Now I examined it carefully—by the touch, of course—I felt it all over; and as well as I was able by such a test, calculated its strength and fitness for the work I ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... shirt of unbleached linen, with an old blanket drawn uncouthly around his waist and shoulders, completed the costume of the man. His wife's was equally scant and rude, but so arranged as to present the idea that even in her breast the sense of fitness, the last feeling of froward womanhood, was not quite extinguished. The squalid rags and matted hair, by a single touch of the hand, a gesture, or a shake of the head, assumed such shape as she fancied would display ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... be the last man to speak lightly of the profession of a clergyman or to urge any one to enter the Church whom I thought unfitted for the sacred office. But in your case, my good sir, there can be no such misgiving. I entertain no doubt whatever of your fitness—your moral fitness, and I will go so far as to say that with competent aid you might, in no very long time, be prepared ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... general weal, not a personal or family aggrandizement. His example might teach others, that offices were created for the public good, not for private emolument. If aspirants for office at the present day, were to regard its perquisites less, and their fitness for the discharge of its duties more, the country would enjoy a greater portion of happiness and prosperity, and a sure foundation for the permanence of these be laid, in the more disinterested character of her counsellors, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... National Capital. I merely say that to the outward eye it is not yet the city it is manifestly destined to become. Its splendid potentialities do some wrong to its eminently spacious and seemly actuality. But to the mind's eye, to the ideal sense, it has the imperishable beauty of absolute fitness. Omniscient Baedeker informs us that when it was founded there was some thought of calling it "Federal City." How much finer, in its heroic and yet human associations, is the name it bears! Since Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon race has produced no ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... other hand, liking and fitness may be discovered by experience. I know a man who, from childhood, took pleasure in construction and invention. At the age of nine he made a real steam engine which "could go" with steam, and which was small enough to be carried in his pocket. He was ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the trees in the avenue formed an adequate and well-fitting frame. It was the picture thus presented that was now interesting Miss Aldclyffe—not artistically or historically, but practically—as regarded its fitness ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... enslavement of the Church, men were appointed to bishoprics without reference to their fitness for this sacred office, and solely with the intention of providing themselves and their relatives with a decent income. Thus for example, James, Duke of Ross, brother of James IV., was appointed to the See of St. Andrew's at the age of twenty-one, and he was succeeded by Alexander Stuart, the illegitimate ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... night-mare—that man is the slave of circumstances (a doctrine which I am inclined to believe, though unwilling to confess); what circumstance can have brought about the sudden awakening of the powers that be to James North's fitness ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Scotland.(1155) That country is very clamorous for it. If the King does send him, it should not be with that sword of mercy with which the present family have governed those people. All the world agrees in the fitness of severity to highwaymen, for the sake of the innocent who suffer; then can rigour be ill-placed against banditti. who have so terrified, pillaged, and injured the poor people in Cumberland, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... these kivas, however, is usually plastered smoothly, but the interior plastering is applied on a base of masonry even in the case of the kivas that are wholly subterranean. It seems to be the Tusayan practice to line all sides of the kivas with stone masonry, regardless of the completeness and fitness of the natural cavity. It is impossible, therefore, to ascertain from the interior of a kiva how much of the work of excavation is artificial and how much has been done by nature. The lining of masonry probably holds the plastering of adobe ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... a popular Piccadilly grill-room provided an intensely thrilling experience. Flamby's acute sensibilities and inherent appreciation of the fitness of things rendered her ill at ease, but the gay music of the orchestra did much to restore her to harmony with herself, and Don's unaffected delight in her company did the rest. So in time she forgot the home-made black dress and became fascinated by her novel surroundings and lost ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of having to part with her for awhile; and, when he finally closed with the offer, she at once resumed her application for a place in the High School, and was soon accepted, for there were not a few in the town capable of doing justice to her fitness for the office; so that now she had the joy not merely of being able to live with her mother as before, and of contributing to her income, but of knowing at the same time that she lived in a like atmosphere with Hector, where ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... hire a stranger, it adds to your confidence and to his chances if he have a testimonial as to character and fitness from his last employer, or from some man ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... persistent Nemesis. Scott is much interested in his hero; one fancies that if it were only possible he would in the end extend his favour to him, and grant him absolution; but his sense of artistic fitness prevails, and he will abate no jot of the painful ordeal to which he feels bound to submit him. Marmion is a knight with a claim to nothing more than the half of the proverbial qualifications. He ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... all that this one woman was to the hundreds of other women who loved her: the gentle demeanor, the thoughtful conversation, the high thinking evidenced not less in her choice of subject than in the fitness of word and phrase which gave a distinctive charm to all her ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... years and had shown sufficient progress in knowledge and strength of character to justify the step. Eager though he was to enrol helpers for the work, Patteson was scrupulously careful to ensure the fitness of his clergy, and to lay hands hastily on no man. In little matters also he was careful and methodical. His scholars in Norfolk Island were expected to be punctual, his helpers to be content with the simple ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... first taken into the cabinet he evidently regarded the finer social amenities as matters of no consequence, or even as effeminacies. He had but little sense of the fitness of things, and was, in consequence, continually making faux pas; but he is observant; he has learned a great deal in the course of his life as a cabinet member, both as to his work in the Department, and as to the niceties ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... smallest, but He at the same time foresaw and foredoomed everything. All that was to happen in this universe did God foresee and foredoom, and lo! it cometh to pass. He appointed me for them and for their sins, that for them I might make prayer and exhortation. Not for my fitness or my strength was I chosen, but only through the grace of His mercy and His long-suffering. For I assure thee, Joshua, not on account of the excellence of this people wilt thou destroy the heathens; all the fastnesses of heaven and the foundations of the universe were created and approved ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... description that he claims the honors of a pioneer or discoverer. Many previous travellers had pursued the same quest, encountered the same hardships and described the same objects. Few of them, however, had enjoyed the same advantages or possessed equal fitness for the task. His previous studies and investigations had familiarized him with the aboriginal history of America and with many of its existing relics; his appointment as commissioner of the United States to Peru for the settlement of some disputed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Lord Lytton: 'It is a thousand pities that J. F. Stephen is a judge; he might have done anything and everything as leader of the future Conservative party.' Lord Beaconsfield was an incomparably better judge than I can pretend to be of a man's fitness for such a position. The opinion, too, which he thus expressed was shared by some of Fitzjames's friends, who thought that his masculine force of mind and downrightness of character would have qualified him to lead a party effectively. I shall only say that ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... even in the nervous infants the specialist in children's diseases is called upon to treat, shows that the nervous system of the better part of mankind is in a state of unstable equilibrium. It may be another example of the curious coincidences that have been called the Fitness of the Environment that the investigation of the endocrines promises to put into our hands the instruments of the control of the future of the nervous system. In general, meanwhile, the eugenist should strive for raising the level of the endocrine potential, and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... did not see. It was rather delicate business to speak, with nothing more tangible than what she had yet seen. That Lottie herself was becoming sincerely attached to a young man of Frank's calling and prospects, could not occur to a lady of Mrs. Marchmont's ideas of propriety and the fitness of things. It was only Lottie's "inveterate disposition to flirt." As to Lottie's "moods and emotions," she smiled at them with cool indifference, as far as she noticed them at all. "Young people pass through such phases as through the measles," ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... men who are to manage the mines, seeing that a man may not become captain or mate of a river steamboat without some certificate on competency, nor drive her engines before he has passed an examination to prove his fitness, surely it is not too much to say that the mine manager or engineer, to whose care are often confided the lives of hundreds of men, and the expenditure of thousands of pounds, should be required to obtain a recognised diploma to prove his qualifications. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... needless to note, belong to those "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... my dear?" exclaimed Cicely. "Why, of course I would. You may not have thought of it, but since you have told me that story, it seems to me that the fitness of things demands that you should wear that gown. As to the fitness of the dress itself, I'll help you about that. I can cut, sew, and do all that sort of thing, and together we will make a lovely ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... and canned oyster stew at fifteen dollars. Daylight indulged in no such luxuries. He did not mind treating a bar-room of men to whiskey at fifty cents a drink, but there was somewhere in his own extravagant nature a sense of fitness and arithmetic that revolted against paying fifteen dollars for the contents of an oyster can. On the other hand, he possibly spent more money in relieving hard-luck cases than did the wildest of the new millionaires on insane debauchery. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... consciousness of power should irradiate our spirits as we do His work, like the gleam from gazing on God's glory which shone on the lawgiver's stern face while he talked with men. We have everything to assure us that we cannot fail. The manifest fitness of the Gospel to be the food of all souls; the victories of nineteen centuries, which at least prove that all conditions of society, all classes of civilisation, all varieties of race, all peculiarities of individual temperament, all depths of degradation and distances ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the nicety of dress in this place, as he would for a military appearance on parade. He 52 is Colonel of the New Grenada Horse. I have not yet learned much of his former pursuits or his origin. There is, however, an anecdote of him circulated, which prove the admirable fitness of such a person for such a command. It is said that when he obtained his appointment, he very significantly asked the General, what stocks he should have for his guns, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... intensely with all her heart of woman. If this thing were true, how he must have suffered, how he must still be suffering—not only in his heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his self-respect, his passion for complete independence, his meticulous consciousness of the fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossible—all must by lying in the dust. She could almost have wept ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... been inquiring into the most minute works of the Infinite Artificer; the same care, the same providence is exerted through the whole, and we should learn from it that to true wisdom utility and fitness appear perfection, and whatever is beneficial ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... undertaken, and, after such conscientious examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we always agree with him,—not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,—but, making all due exceptions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of all the uncounted times that I had entered the hospital for now these many years, I crossed the threshold questioning myself in this manner, and doubting of my fitness to be there, or to be what I had been held to be in that place. Life had carried me gaily and swiftly, as it carries successful men. I had found no time, or made none, to cross-question the sources of conduct. My success ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... added, in a further understanding, "it isn't so much what you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause. It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke of—I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they would think they ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Frivolities.—From the standpoint of inherent fitness and beauty, this Athenian costume is the noblest ever seen by the world. Naturally there are ill-advised creatures who do not share the good taste of their fellows, or who try to deceive the world and themselves as to the ravages of that arch-enemy of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... intention of changing his way of life for her. He was known in the district under the elegant sobriquet of Skinny Graham; and when Gladys heard it for the first time, she laughed silently to herself, thinking of its fitness. The simple-hearted child quickly accommodated herself to her surroundings, accepting her meagre lot with a serenity a more experienced mind might have envied. She even managed to make a little atmosphere of brightness about her, which at once communicated ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... This divine call is named a vocation to the priestly or religious life. We can discover it in our constant inclination to such a life from the pure and holy motive of serving God better in it, together with our fitness for it, or, at least, our ability to prepare for it, also in our true piety and mastery over our sinful passions and ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... an attorney, the time and mode of their service under articles; and the oaths to be administered to them; and authorizes the Judges of the courts of the common law, and the Master of the Rolls to appoint examiners to examine the fitness and capacity of all persons applying to be admitted as attorneys or solicitors; and the certificate, either of the common law or equity examiners, will be sufficient to entitle a person so examined to admission in ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... single region or people, perhaps Germany more than any other land was subject to the demonological fever. A fact to be explained as well by its being the great theatre for more than a hundred years of the grand religious struggle between the opposing Catholics and Protestants, as by its natural fitness. The gloomy mountain ranges—the Hartz mountains are especially famous in the national legend—and forests with which it abounds rendered the imaginative minds of its peoples peculiarly susceptible to impressions of supernaturalism.[95] ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Circumstances interesting to Persons in common Life, as well as to those in exalted Stations. The greatest Regard is every where paid in it to Decency, and to every Duty of Life: There is a constant Fitness of the Style to the Persons and Characters described; Pleasure and Instruction here always go hand in hand: Vice and Virtue are set in constant Opposition, and Religion every-where inculcated in its native Beauty and chearful Amiableness; not dressed up in stiff, melancholy, or gloomy Forms, ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... the life vowed to poverty of St Francis. In the lower church, over the tomb of St Francis, are the four masterpieces with which we have to do. These are the three vows of the order figuratively represented. Mark the fitness and grandeur of two of the figures, the suggestion of which has been attributed to Dante, the woman Chastity seated beyond assault in her rocky fortress, and Obedience bowing the neck to curb and yoke. The fourth fresco pictures ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... that thing know enough to vote?" And jest behind them come a lot of furrin laborers, rough and rowdy-lookin', with no more expression in their faces than a mule or any other animal. "Do they know enough to vote?" sez I. "As for the fitness for votin' it is pretty even on both sides. Good intelligent men ortn't to lose the right of suffrage for the vice and ignorance of some of their sect, and that argument is jest as strong for the ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... blurring of the focus of life there is when, everything being concentrated on to one particular purpose, whether it be a bazaar, an election, or the giving of a ball, all the human beings one encounters are considered from the point of view of their fitness to one particular end—in the aspect of a buyer or seller, as a voter, as a partner, as the case may be. There was no doubt that at this moment the whole of mankind were expected to fit somehow into Lady Chaloner's pattern: to be useful for the ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... placed in water has also been given as an indication of its fitness for use as food. Decayed ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... who never lost an opportunity to praise him, together with Judge Pancoast, Major Clayton, the richest aristocrat about Kennedy Square and whose cellar was famous the county over—and last, the Honorable Prim. Not because old Seymour possessed any especial fitness one way or the other for a dinner of this kind, but because his presence would afford an underground communication by which Kate could learn how fine and splendid Harry was—(sly old diplomat St. George!)—and how well he had appeared ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... here on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed myself with perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so much in Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was unsurpassed in force and fitness, - seeing the true prophet doubled, as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop, - it appeared best to steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over what is imperishably good, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, when not every man could do it, And your passengers, my Captain, are inspired with gratitude. Therefore, Mr. Punch thus thanks you, and right readily enranks you, As a hero on the record of our briny island brood. Verily the choice of "Paris" in this case proved right; and rare is Fitness between name and nature such as that you illustrate. Captain SHARP! A proper nomen, and it proved a prosperous omen To your passengers, whom Punch must on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... of the Bois and the Arc de Triomphe. Thoroughly to appease his conceit, it would have been necessary to swing open the gates of honour in the Arc and allow his fiacre to pass through; to be forced to drive round the monument instead of under it hurt the sense of fitness which champagne engenders. Gerald was in all his pride that day. He had been displaying the wonders to Sophia, and he could not escape the cicerone's secret feeling: that he himself was somehow responsible for the wonders. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... him, but it was becoming comprehensible, and taking on a more favourable aspect now. It was, he felt, born of the tranquillity of this well-trimmed land, a steadfastness that progressed slowly by system and rule, and he recognised that it would have troubled his sense of fitness if this girl had clattered down across the stones hurriedly ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently Wundt has remarked that, when asleep, we "can experience nearly all the phenomena which meet us in lunatic asylums." The grotesqueness of the combinations, the lack of all judgment as to consistency, fitness, and probability, are common characteristics of the short night-dream of the healthy and the long day-dream of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... will be very extraordinary, if, out of that number, one man should be found, whose principles and talents taken together (for some might have principles, and others might have talents) would render him a person truly fitted to fill any very extraordinary office of National Trust. If then such a fitness of character could not be expected to be found in more than one person out of fifty, it would happen but once in a thousand years to the eldest son of any one family, admitting each, on an average, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... escaped her scrutiny and pretty accurate guess as to value, yet she could not see or understand the intolerable disgust and irritation which her ridiculous conduct excited. In a weak mind egotism and selfishness, beyond a certain point, pass into practical insanity. All sense of delicacy, of the fitness of things, is lost; even the power to consider the rights and feelings of others is wanting. Unlike poor Holcroft, Mrs. Mumpson had few misgivings in regard to coming years. As she rocked unceasingly before the parlor fire, she arranged everything ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... to mutter something about ladies and no dress- coats, but this was silenced, and he made a promise contingent on Lance's fitness. He was puzzled by the relations in which Mr. Staples seemed to stand with the lay-rector; but he found that they were not of business, only that elections and county affairs brought them together, and that Mr. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moss-trooper. The Tudor fireplace was designed for folks to whom coal was unknown, and who left their smoking to their chimneys. A house that looked ridiculous with a motor-car before the door, where the electric bell jarred upon one's sense of fitness every time one heard it, was out of date, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... See note above. There is a peculiar fitness in the reference to the sea in this poem; for the constellation of the Pleiades was named by the Greeks from their word plein, to sail, because the Mediterranean was navigable with safety during the months these ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... world were repeated amidst the solitudes which had been consecrated to devotion. But at length its revival arose out of one of the most obvious abuses connected with it. The patronage of the institution, like that of others, had been distributed without any regard to the fitness of the occupants, even to girls of immature age. In this manner the abbey of Port Royal accidentally fell to the lot of one who was destined by her ardent piety to breathe a new life into it, and by her indomitable and lofty genius to give it an ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... faith in him, more than conqueror over all your spiritual enemies: therefore venture wholly upon Christ, and see if he will cast you out: indeed, he never will. Trust in him, hope in him, believe in him, and you will never be disappointed. All our fitness is in Christ. Believe in him, and he is yours. In him dwells all fullness. Believe in Christ, and all that Christ has is yours: his blood is yours, his wisdom is yours, his righteousness, his sanctification ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the prehistoric past to the present day; a past contemporary, perhaps, with the mastodon, but certainly far back in the mists of antiquity. The importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain enough, and therefore the untimely death of Miss Johnson, who was evidently turning with congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to be regretted. For as Mr. Bernard McEnvoy well says in his preface to her "Vancouver Legends," she "has linked the vivid present with the immemorial past.... In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... brick, and never ask us to imagine a brown-stone value to painted sheet-iron. There is, too, a deeper honesty than mere truth-telling in material; a conscientiousness of purpose, an artistic spiritual sense of the eternal fitness, without which there can be no worthy ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... something vaguely vulgar, odious, unpardonable about false stones. I had always maintained there was not, but the stage jewel made me feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them, reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns impartially ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... per day, and young persons between thirteen and eighteen only twelve hours, and none of these at night. Two whole and eight half holidays were required to be given within the year, and each child must have a surgeon's certificate of fitness for labor. There were also clauses for the education of the children and the cleanliness of the factories. But the most important clause of this statute was the provision of a corps of four inspectors with assistants who were ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... had dismissed his valet in Edinburgh, when he determined to go to Pittenloch, but he watched his father's servant brushing his dinner suit, and preparing his bath and toilet, without one dissenting feeling as to the absolute fitness of the attention. The lofty rooms, the splendor and repose, the unobtrusive but perfect service, were the very antipodes of the life he had just left. He smiled to himself as he lazily made contrasts of them. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... hard sort of punishment at all," laughed Nealie; "because, you see, if he had no eye for beauty or artistic fitness the ugliness would not trouble him, he might even take a great deal of satisfaction in thinking how nicely he had ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... of them, I think," said she. "There we have the typical Greek attitude, the genial, cultivated eclecticism that appreciated the fitness of even the most alien forms of art. There is Anubis standing beside the bier; there are Isis and Nephthys, and there below, Horus and Tahuti. But we can't suppose that Artemidorus worshipped or believed in those gods. They are there because they are splendid decoration ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... office, being aided in his suit by the Earl of Essex and others of his friends in Essex's party. Sir Robert Cecil, while encouraging Sidney and professing friendship, secretly aided Lord Cobham for the post. Sidney's military fitness for so responsible a charge was constantly urged against Cobham's lack of martial experience, but the Queen, after a long delay, during which much heat developed between the contestants and their friends, finally decided in favour of her ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... extent the "offspring of the English Reformation in the sixteenth {111} century," will be a very acceptable book to every parent who belongs to the middle classes of society; and who must feel that an endowed school, of which the masters are bound to produce testimonials of moral and intellectual fitness, presents the best security for the acquirement by his sons of a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... at once the law of God and the law for man. For by the nature of anything was meant, not that which we actually find it to be, but that which in the eternal fitness of things it was obviously intended ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... would have placed it,—and the remark applies equally to Ben Ezra (that is, Emanuel Lacunza)—had he trusted the proof to Scriptures of undisputed catholicity, to the spirit of the whole Bible, to the consonance of the doctrine with the reason, its fitness to the needs and capacities of mankind, and its harmony with the general plan of the divine dealings with the world,—and had left the Apocalypse in the back ground. But alas! instead of this he has ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the back of the church. In their black rebozos, the poorest class of poor Mexican women were clad with more fitness than she. For Jane, weighted with the gravity of the occasion, had donned an austere black bonnet such as aged ladies wear, and its effect upon her short locks was incongruous in the extreme. No one, however, ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... felt hat was set jauntily on the fluffy brown hair when she reappeared. Skinny's heart leaped hungrily. Carolyn June was a picture of perfect physical fitness. The cowboy silently wondered how long he could keep from making "a complete, triple-expansion, ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... conformity to the standards which had been established by the European through the traditions of the ages. The higher place in society occupied by the choicest members of the white race, and that too after long years of arduous preparation, had to be assumed by black men without personal or formal fitness. The stronger and more aggressive natures pushed themselves into these higher callings by sheer force of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... interested in watching the negro work. They wove in a great deal of their peculiar, wild, mournful music, whenever the character of the labor permitted. They seemed to sing the music for the music's sake alone, and were as heedless of the fitness of the accompanying words, as the composer of a modern opera is of his libretto. One middle aged man, with a powerful, mellow baritone, like the round, full notes of a French horn, played by a virtuoso, was the musical leader of the party. He never seemed ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the body is asleep, the mind slumbers with it, and has not the power to think, as it has when the body is awake. Again, I believe that all have discovered that the mind is not always equally fitted for thinking about the same subject, but in proportion to the fitness of the body for this or that image to be excited in it will the mind be better fitted to contemplate this or that object. But my opponents will say, that from the laws of Nature alone, in so far as it is considered to be corporeal merely, it cannot be that the causes ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... native agents with very small salaries, and without any responsible intermediate agent whatever to aid him, and to watch over them. The great man was selected without any reference to his knowledge of, or fitness for, the duties entrusted to him, merely because he happened to be of a certain standing in a certain exclusive service, which entitled him to a certain scale of salary, or because he had been found unfit for judicial or other ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Before long a use was found for his slender medical attainments; it became one of his functions to answer persons who visited the office for information as to the climatic features of this or that new country, and their physical fitness for going out as colonists. Of course, there was demanded of him a radical unscrupulousness, and often enough he proved equal to the occasion; but as time went on, bringing slow development of brain and character, he found these personal interviews anything but agreeable. He had constantly before ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... her technique, in which she is characteristically original. This originality is noticeable especially in her use of words. There is a sense of fitness that often surprises the reader. Words at times in her hands reveal a new power and significance. In the choice of words Charlotte Bronte was scrupulous. She believed that there was just one word fit ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Privy Council which he attended, "to discourse about the fitness of entering of men presently for the manning of the fleet, before one ship is in condition to receive them," the king observed, "'If ever you intend to man the fleet without being cheated by the captains and pursers, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... years, with noble heads and flowing snowy beards, bent forms and tattered garments, sit patiently awaiting a demand upon them. Perhaps they could afford better clothing; but they have an eye for artistic effect, and a true sense of the fitness of things. The children, waiting here for the same purpose, captivate our attention by their large black eyes and gypsy complexions. How graceful and kitten-like they are, in their lazy, lolling motions! The young girls are such as are not seen out of Italy, with ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled? During the recent war whenever the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... at his own request, was relieved from the command of the army, and General McClellan resumed the direction. Whatever might have been the real fitness of General Pope to command, his usefulness with the army just driven back upon the defenses of Washington, had departed. The return of General McClellan was hailed with joy by a large portion of ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... maid. I'm very particular about my belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all over ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... leading. The first is imperative, because all education is a matter of organization. The second is part of the first, as supervision is the genius of organization. The third is fundamental, for all expression—true education—depends on the teacher or leader, whose innate idea of the fitness of things keeps him from doing, on the one hand, that which is just customary, or, on the other hand, that which may appear to be just scientific. The science of yesterday should be the tradition of today; that is, if we are making ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... alone in the bush! Nature's precious link between a squalid Past and a nobler Future, broken, snatched away from her allotted place in the long chain of the ages! Heiress of infinite hope, and dowered with latent fitness to fulfil her part, now so suddenly fallen by the wayside! That quaint dialect silent so soon! and for ever vanished from this earth that keen, eager perception, that fathomless love and devotion! But ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the forty-third degree of latitude. Even the birds appeared to rejoice in the beauties of the time, and sang and fluttered among the oaks, in numbers greater than common. Nature usually observes a stern fitness in her adaptation of means to ends. Birds are to be found in the forests, on the prairies, and in the still untenanted openings of the west—and often in countless numbers; more especially those birds which fly in flocks, and love the security of unoccupied regions—unoccupied ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... were too taken up with this gigantic fact to pay satisfactory attention to her inquiries. The old sense of protecting motherhood came back to Esther when she learned the news. Rachel was only eighteen, but at once Esther felt middle-aged. It seemed of the fitness of things that she should go to America and resume her interrupted maternal duties. Isaac and Sarah were still little more than children, perhaps they had not yet ceased bickering about their birthdays. She knew ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... enlistments be for "three years in service and three years in reserve," limited the appointment of officers to those who "shall have successfully passed such tests as to * * * physical, moral and professional fitness as the President shall prescribe," and authorized the President in certain emergencies to "draft into the military service of the United States to serve therein for the period of the war unless sooner discharged, any and all members of the National Guard and National Guard Reserve," who thereupon ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... clouded Mrs. Sheldon's gentle face, and she sighed; the old heart-ache came back, the same pain which had assailed her on the first of June, her birthday, when doubts came thronging into her mind, doubts as to her own fitness for her position with its heavy responsibility of training five young souls in the path of duty and righteousness. "Hugh must have got into some trouble," she thought, "and something, too, which he has not confided to me. I fear it is ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... after the murder as we do now. But the feelings with which he regarded Mrs. Fairbrother—well, that is another thing—and it was not till last night we heard that the attachment which bound him to her was of the sort which takes no account of youth or age, fitness or unfitness. He was no Adonis, and old enough, we are told, to be her father; but for all that we have already found several persons who can tell strange stories of the persistence with which his eager old eyes would follow her whenever chance ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... man would be more likely to confirm her in doubt, if the phrase be permissible. She wants what some would call homoeopathic treatment. And how should they be able to love one another, if they are not fit to be married to each other? The fitness, seems inherent ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... be more appropriate and in accordance with the fitness of things than to make a GARDNER the new Minister of Agriculture. Of course it has been suggested that a Rural Dean should succeed to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... what life might be in the stock yet! Anyhow, it would be better to leave an heir to take the remnant in charge, and at least carry the name a generation farther, even should it be into yet deeper poverty than hitherto. A Warlock could face his fate. Thereupon, with a sense of the fitness of things not always manifested on such occasions, he had paid his addresses to a woman of five and thirty, the daughter of the last clergyman of the parish, and had by her been accepted with little hesitation. She ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... village rung merrily in the clear morning air of a bright summer's day. It was to call the people together, and they all obeyed its summons—for who among the aged, middle-aged, or the young, did not wish to fitness the marriage ceremonies of their favourite, Ellen Lawton? Ere the tolling of the bell had ceased, the gray-haired man was leaning on the finger-worn ball of his staff, in the corner of his antiquated pew; the hale, healthy ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... live honestly without it—or, at all events, he has a right to choose whether he will employ himself or be employed by another. Hence it may turn out that the refusal to labor, so far as there has been any, only serves to prove the more clearly the fitness of the laborers ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... thought was not always clothed in the best language, and often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened considerably; offered to change horses ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... machinery of the law by which it could have been carried out. Some of the surviving bishops were old and inactive. Others were appointed from the ranks of Royalist adherents on grounds of ardent partisanship rather than of fitness for the position; and it would have been too much to expect that in reaching a haven of prosperity after the storm of persecution they should not have been, at times, unduly attentive to worldly advantage. ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... Individual (LANE), essaying a problem novel, does not disdain the old-fashioned way of the woven plot and the dramatic incident. Her hero, Orde Taverner, surgeon by trade and eugenist by profession, falls in love with Elizma, a Cornish beauty and rare fiddler. His inquiries as to her eugenical fitness having been answered satisfactorily but inaccurately, he marries, to find that Elizma's mother really died insane. His principles conquer his desire for children, and his decision is communicated to the fiery Elizma, who, fierce maternalist that she is and coming of a wild stock that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... the service. The ambition that a young officer entering the army ought to set before him, is to lead his own men in action. This ought to inspire his life, and animate his effort. "Stables" will no longer be dull, when he realises that on the fitness of his horses, his life and honour may one day depend. If he thinks that his men may soon be asked to stand beside him at a pinch, he will no longer be bored by their interests and affairs. But when he realises ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... It is so with that old euphuism of the Elizabethan age—that pride of dainty language and curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which often made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense of fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and still more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the young Shakespeare himself. It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied in ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... at once stepped to the window and, unobserved, took a quick survey of the interior. Following some ingenious idea of his own regarding fitness, the beautiful Filgee had induced Uncle Ben to seat himself on the floor before one of the smallest desks, presumably his brother's, in an attitude which, while it certainly gave him considerable elbow-room for those contortions common to immature penmanship, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... mother had taught her that in marriage external accomplishments and possessions were nothing, unless united with virtuous principles and well-regulated passions. The brilliant attractions of Eaverson strongly tempted her to take his moral fitness for granted; but wiser counsels prevailed in her mind; and with a vigorous hand laid upon her heart to keep down its errant impulses, she exercised, with coolness and a well-balanced mind, the powers of discrimination which God had given ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... no step upon the deck, no sound to mar the present serene fitness of things. But out of his dreamings he was drawn back abruptly to the swaying, swinging deck of a crazy schooner by the odd, vague feeling that he was ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... "Nothing sooner dejects a man than clothes out of fashion," is as true now as it was three hundred years ago. Fashion sways the shape of a collar, and the infinitesimal gradations of a hat-brim; but the sense of fitness, and the power of interpreting life, which ennobled fashion in Burton's day, have disappeared ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... herself immensely, she loves children so much. She and Clyde hired the "Tackler"—so called because he will tackle any kind of a job, whether he knows anything about it or not—to paper the room. He thinks he is a great judge of the fitness of things and of beauty. The paper has a stripe of roses, so Tackler reversed every other strip so that some of my roses are standing on their heads. Roses don't all grow one way, he claims, and so his method "makes ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... lost sight of his relatives in London, and had made for them such modest provision as suited his view of the fitness of things. To leave wealth to young men of the working class would have seemed to him the most inexcusable of follies; if such were to rise at all, it must be by their own efforts and in consequence of their native merits; otherwise, let them toil ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... infant band were bright with innocence and that happy alchemy which turns the merest toy to a costly treasure. There was a tender piety on the features of those children that moved the heart. Devotion lies upon the face of youth with a peculiar fitness. As we see it dwelling in that unsullied abode, we remember how the cheek of the Madonna is pressed against the infant in her arms. Their instructor seemed to have caught a portion of their light-heartedness. Sad ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... spread of industrial education, during the past twenty-five years, we seem not to know that the work has been difficult and prosecuted at great sacrifice on the part of the Tuskegee graduates who have sought to interpret Dr. Washington's theory that economic fitness was the basis of racial ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe |
