"Grossness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... along the corridor and took off his boots; he was tired out, but still he felt no hunger. Had he been hungry he would have somehow thought it an act of criminal grossness to forage for food. There was none to attend to him, for Mrs. Amber, having waited to reassure herself of her daughter's safety, had been obliged to take the last Tube train home since there was not room for her at the flat. He was about ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... up the bloody flag against all patience] That is, declare war against patience. There is not wit enough in this satire to recompense its grossness. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... compassionating my American stupidity, essayed to initiate me in the cult of 'culture', and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel. I learned it after a time, as I did the multiplication table. 'Culture steps in, and points out the grossness of untempered belief. It tells us the beauty of picturesque untruth; the grotesqueness of unmannerly conviction; truth and error have kissed each other in a sweet, serener sphere; this becomes that, and that is something else. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... any use to her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)—meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Shu[u]zen turned to him impatiently—"The speech of the overlord is without effect. Chu[u]dayu, try your hand, and bend Kiku to consent to my wishes, to become my concubine." Shamed before the whole household? O'Kiku had grown used to this grossness in the determined pursuit of Shu[u]zen. Now openly addressed before the chamberlain and others she looked down; a little flushed, and hearing with astonishment the words which came from such a quarter. Chu[u]dayu spoke slowly; addressed her with a severity ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the ancients to human souls, celestial beings, and even the Deity himself, does not exclude the notion of extended space; and their imagination was satisfied with a subtile nature of air, or fire, or aether, incomparably more perfect than the grossness of the material world. If we define the place, we must describe the figure, of the Deity. Our experience, perhaps our vanity, represents the powers of reason and virtue under a human form. The Anthropomorphites, who swarmed among the monks of Egypt and the Catholics of Africa, could ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Here of such pride is payed the forfeiture: And yet I should not be here, were it not That, having power to sin, I turned to God. O thou vain glory of the human powers, How little green upon thy summit lingers, If 't be not followed by an age of grossness! In painting Cimabue thought that he Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other's fame is growing dim. So has one Guido from the other taken The glory of our tongue, and he perchance Is born, who from the nest shall chase ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives him to understand ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... it now for worthier ends than of old. Similarly, the Dutch stolidity which amuses us in the chronicles, reappears to-day in the form of steadiness and judgment; the obstinacy of headstrong Peter, as self-confidence and perseverance; the physical grossness of the old burghers, as constitutional vigor. Many of their customs too have come down to us; their heavy afternoon teas are recalled in our informal receptions; their New Year's Day sociability in our calls, their Christmas celebrations in our festival of ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... body the image of its Lord's—that the predicted anthem will be heard waking the echoes of the universe—"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" Then, with the organs of their resurrection-bodies ennobled, etherealised, purified from all the grossness of earth, they shall "behold the King in his beauty." "The King's daughter," all glorious without, "all glorious within"—"her clothing of wrought gold"—resplendent without with the robes of ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... obscurity of the oracles was of inexpressible service to the cause of superstition. If the event turned out to be such as could in no way be twisted to come within the scope of the response, the pious suitor only concluded that the failure was owing to the grossness and carnality of his own apprehension, and not to any deficiency in the institution. Thus the oracle by no means lost credit, even when its meaning remained for ever in its original obscurity. But, when, by any fortunate chance, its predictions seemed ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... deserts the Greek example, it strays on dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the past, my image will no more remain in your heart when I am out of your sight, than it will in this glass when I am out of the room." "By heaven, by all that is sacred!" said Jones, "it never was out of my heart. The delicacy of your sex cannot conceive the grossness of ours, nor how little one sort of amour has to do with the heart." "I will never marry a man," replied Sophia, very gravely, "who shall not learn refinement enough to be as incapable as I am myself of making such a distinction." ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... masters. But it seems probable that in the celestial regions there is more, rather than less, of brilliant coloring than on earth. What can be more brilliant than the rainbow, yet what more perfectly free from earthly grossness? Nevertheless, in looking at the pictures of Schoeffer there is such a serene and spiritual charm spread over them, that one is little inclined to wish them other than they are. No artist that I have ever seen, not even Raphael, has more power of glorifying the human face by an exalted and unearthly ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... abstract ideas. The moment that a philosopher opposes thought to movement, I ask myself under what form he can think of a "thought," I suppose he must very poetically and very vaguely represent to himself something light and subtle which contrasts with the weight and grossness of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naive ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... anthropomorphism in Moses. But if man is made in God's image, then God is in man's image too, and we must, if we think of him as a living and real God, think of him as possessing emotions like our human emotions of love, pity, sorrow, anger, only purified from their grossness and narrowness. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... tenets of the druidical priesthood, we have every where apparent proofs of their polytheism: and the grossness of their religious ideas, as represented by some writers, is very inconsistent with that divine philosophy which has been considered as a part of their character. These, however, were popular divinities which the Druids ostensibly worshipped, and popular notions which they ostensibly adopted, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... perfectly divine, With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine About the supreme Throne Of Him, t' whose happy-making sight alone, When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall climb, Then all this earthly grossness quit, Attir'd with stars, we shall forever sit, Triumphing over Death, and ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... is remarkably intelligent and brave,—but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... your liquor eglantine for coolness, borage, rosemary, and sweet-marjoram for vigour, and by which planet each herb or flower is governed. Has our sentiment for the flowers of the field increased now we no longer drink their essence, or use them in our dishes? I doubt it. It is surely a pardonable grossness that we should desire the sweet fresh things to become part of us—like children, who do indeed love flowers, and eat them. In the Appendix I have transcribed a list of the plants referred to. Most cooks would be unable to tell one from another; and even modern herbalists ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... was a thoroughly gross and material epoch. People had a pretty taste in clothes, and a nice feeling for good architecture, graceful furniture, and artistic house decoration, but this was a veneer only, and under the veneer lay an ingrained grossness of mind, just as the gorgeous satins and dainty brocades covered dirty, unwashed bodies. Even the complexions of the women were artificial to mask the defects of a sparing use of soap and water, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the characteristic quality or note of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to be discovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales, this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in this they do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know as the 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... diminution and costumal familiarity! "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said." Dim indeed is the representation, but very distinct is the impression. The phenomenon conforms to the purity of feeling, not to the grossness of sense. Devotion is kindled by the sublime impalpableness; no applause is enforced by appropriate acting. The Greeks, would have played the Book of Job,—the Jews were contented to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... from my attitude of unruffled urbanity, though I feared that his angle of negotiating was unconquerably opposed to mine, "but now its many imperfections are revealed. The inelegance of its outline, the grossness of the applied colours, the unlucky combination of numbers engraved upon this ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... sense of worship. How could he or another find God so? The mood of prayer is the mood of finding God. Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love. Caliban's reasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch. His grossness shames us. And yet were he only Caliban, and if he were all alone, we could forget his maudlin speech—but he is more. He is a voice of our own era. His babblings are not more crude and irreverential than much that passes for profound thinking. Nay, Caliban is our contemporaneous shame. He asserts ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... soon grew thoroughly disgusted with Vendome, who, high as he was in station, displayed a shameless grossness of manner which was more than the pious churchman could endure. The conduct of the affair was therefore left to the interpreter, whose delicacy was not disturbed by the duke's behavior, and who managed to ingratiate himself fully in the good graces of ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... Reve," yawned Storri. "Pardon my grossness;—a yawn in the presence of a lady, and I a Russian gentleman! I took the habit from these pig Americans! You should know, my dear San Reve, that the very name of Harley bores me. No, I shall no more go to those Harleys. They send, they beg; I do not go. Why should I so honor them? ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Air may be observ'd, its Temperature, as to the first four Qualities (commonly so call'd) and the Measures of them: its Weight, Clearness, Refractive power: its Sublety or Grossness: its abounding with, or wanting an Esurine Salt: its variations according to the seasons of the year, and the times of the day; What duration the several kinds of Weather usually have: What Meteors it is most or least wont to breed; and in what order they are generated; and how long they usually ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Princess. "My consenting to know and to spend a friendly hour with you here is sufficient answer. I have not found the slightest fault with your manners. I have seen no suspicion of 'grossness' ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... theatres paid, and they had a much finer opera than at Ephesus or at Halicarnassus. Their cookery was so refined, that one of the least sentimental ceremonies in the world was not only deprived of all its grossness, but was actually converted into an elegant amusement, and so famous that their artists were even required at Olympus. If their dinners were admirable, which is rare, their assemblies were amusing, which is still more uncommon. All the arts of society were carried ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... commentary on the Revelations, and proved the pope to be Antichrist; may not a similar reproach be extended to the famous Napier; and even to Newton, at a time when learning was much more advanced than during the reign of James? From the grossness of its superstitions we may infer the ignorance of an age; but never should pronounce concerning the folly of an individual, from his admitting popular errors, consecrated by the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Englishman, the Lover, the Reader, Town Talk, the Tea-Table, Chit-Chat, the Plebeian, and the Theatre, most of which had a rather ephemeral existence. Among his other services to literature he helped to purify the stage of some of its grossness, and he became the founder of that sentimental comedy which in the days of the early Georges took the place of the immoral comedy of the Restoration period, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... is little sense of awe and mystery. In harmony with the realistic instincts of the nation, everything is dramatically, very humanly conceived; at times, indeed, the personages of the Nativity scenes quite lose their sacred character, and the treatment degenerates into grossness. At its best, however, the French Noel has a gaiety and a grace, joined to a genuine, if not very deep, piety, that are extremely charming. Reading these rustic songs, we are carried in imagination to French countrysides; ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... will merit, as its shade, pursue; But, like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envy'd wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, It draws up vapour, which obscures its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... measured by the law of beauty and usefulness, we find gradually being exterminated. That the earth, as a planet, is obeying this cosmic law of evolution from grossness to refinement; from crudity to perfection; from the limited to the all-inclusive, is indisputable. As the motor power of electricity has become general, we find that beasts of burden are fast disappearing from the earth, according to the law of the "survival of the fittest," this law, always ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... been free from those menial toils which, in that climate, soon obliterate all intellectual characteristics. His face was well formed for an African's. His high and broad brow arched over a straight nose, while his lips had nothing of that vulgar grossness which gives so sensual an expression to his countrymen. Ahmah's manners to strangers or superiors were refined and courteous in a remarkable degree; but to the mob of the coast and inferiors generally, he manifested that harsh and peremptory ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... places opposite him a flower he has plucked or hopes to pluck. He drugs himself deliberately. Half the time when he should be soaring in his thoughts, he descends of deliberate intent. Instead of his flower, he makes his woman the partner of his grossness." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Alas, the grossness of the commercial classes, the brutality of the tired business man! We Americans are a rude folk my friend; the courtesies are absent from our manners. Now, I am a young man with tender feelings, both mental and—er, physical. And these trousers I wear have already ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... it is proper to remark, were made in a country where the art of pleasing was refined only to extract the grossness of vice. He did not go back to nature, or his ruling appetite disturbed the operations of reason, else he would not ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... and Sibley were whirling through the wide apartment as if treading on air; but when, a few moments later, they circled near where he stood, he saw upon the young man's face an expression of earthiness and grossness that was anything but ethereal. Indeed so unmistakably wanton was the look which Sibley bent upon his companion, whose heaving bosom he clasped against his won, that the artist frowned darkly at him, and felt his hand tingling to ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the grossness of his language, as he seemed half out of his mind with fear. When I went upstairs with him he pointed to several footprints upon the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... civic physique, of stupid prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he found them—whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight—one is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced that real apprehension—real apprehensiveness—would not have insisted upon such things, could not have ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... ripple,—and he stood quietly expectant and listening. A Voice floated along the Ray—"You are doing well and rightly!" it said—"You will release her now from the strain of seeming to be what she is not. She is of the New Race, and her spirit is advanced too far to endure the grossness and materialism of the Old generation. She deserves all she has studied and worked for,—lasting life, lasting beauty, lasting love! Nothing must hinder ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... still intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under: that was all the ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... adumbrate; nay, in time, as he grew zealous in the cause, his self-interest and personal ambition would be conquered, or at least would be so blended and fused with the nobility of the cause as to lose any grossness or meanness which might be thought to characterise them in an uncompounded condition. All this might be achieved if only the great idea could be made to seem great enough and the potentialities which lay in its realisation invested with enough pomp ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... may be considered as these three: First, the excessive preponderance of self-love, as the ruling motive of human conduct. Secondly, the short-sightedness of self-love, in magnifying the present, at the cost of the distant future. And, Thirdly, the grossness of self-love, in preferring of present goods the vulgar and the sensible, to the refined and more exquisitely satisfactory. And there are three ways, in which we may attempt the abatement of existing evils; or, there are three agencies we may call ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... with thorough and hearty appreciation after working hard for your food, or walking far to find it, is not gross. Grossness consists in eating heavily when you have not toiled, and stimulating with fire-water, pepper, or mustard, your sluggish appetite. To call ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a deep inhalation. "Haven't you an ideal which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality. To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic grossness and strength. Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this task altogether,—building his dream-world of cloud and cavern loveliness remote from anything we know. It is Browning, the most "actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the "practicality" ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... which Tiberius had not, that there were personal wrongs to be avenged as well as political ideas to be realised. To a narrow mind the vendetta is simply an act of justice; to an intellectual hater such as Gracchus it is also a work of reason. The folly of crime but exaggerates its grossness, and the hatred for the criminal is merged in an exalting and inspiring contempt. Yet the man thus attuned to passion was, what every great orator must be, a painful student of the most delicate of arts. The language of the successful demagogue ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Ecbatana, Bactra, Babylon, Damascus, and Sardis. Anaitis was the Babylonian Venus; and her rites at Babylon were undoubtedly of a revolting character. It is to be feared that they were introduced in all their grossness into Persia, and that this was the cause of Anahitis great popularity. Her cult "was provided with priests and hieroduli, and connected with mysteries, feasts, and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... stomachs had better avoid them. Meat pies and puddings cannot be recommended, but strong stomachs may sustain but little inconvenience from them. It is a confined mode of cookery, and the meat therefore is not at all purified of its grossness. When meat pies and puddings are used, they should be moderately seasoned. Baking meat, instead of roasting it, is a worse manner of dressing it, from the closeness of the oven, and the great variety of things often baking at the same time. Stewing is not a good way of dressing ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... curious that a scholar can take up; but our own age, after all, must be reckoned as the palmy time of slang, for we have gone beyond mere words, and our vulgarizations of language are significant of degradation of soul. The Romans of the decadence had a hideous cant language which fairly matched the grossness of the people, and the Gauls, with their descendants, fairly matched the old conquerors. The frightful old Paris of Francois Villon, with all its bleak show of famine and death, had its constant changes of slang. "Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant," says ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... usual declamation on the dignity and capacity of our nature: the superiority of the soul to the body, of the rational to the animal part of our constitution; upon the worthiness, refinement, and delicacy of some satisfactions, or the meanness, grossness, and sensuality of others: because I hold that pleasures differ in nothing but in continuance and intensity." (Paley, Moral Philosophy, bk. i., ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged tree. The interest lies ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... comply with his demands. If she escaped actual outrage and injury in his house and hers, it was not because she did not provoke him, for there was nothing in his wife which Gervase hated so heartily, resented so keenly, as her refraining from contradicting him. But below the grossness and sin of the poor lout and caitiff there was a fund of sullen, latent manliness and kindness, which held him back from insulting the defenceless woman—for all her pride and purity—who was his wife, just as it had held him back ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... be. He has slurred or slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchman, in short, writes for men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... thrush-hunt. One word at parting, to qualify any too sweeping commendation we may have bestowed on M. Dumas in the early part of this paper. While we fully exonerate his writings from the charge of grossness, and recognise the absence of those immoral and pernicious tendencies which disfigure the works of many gifted French writers of the day, we would yet gladly see him abstain from the somewhat too Decameronian incidents and narratives with which he occasionally varies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... see a drunkard, a buffoon, a cripple, a dwarf, a deformed face, a ridiculous smirk, a grotesque attitude, without remembering one of his figures. All the degrees of stupidity and of drunkenness, all the grossness and mawkishness of orgies, the frenzy of the lowest pleasures, the cynicism of the vulgarest vice, the buffoonery of the wildest rabble, all the most brutal emotions, the basest aspects of tavern and alehouse life, have been painted by him with the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... shuddered. "Quintin is a boor. His conduct is unheard of. That M. de La Tour d'Azyr should parade himself before you so that you may make up your mind whether he is the proper man for you!" Again she shuddered. "It is of a grossness, of... of a prurience almost... Mon Dieu! When I married your uncle, all this was arranged between our parents. I first saw him when he came to sign the contract. I should have died of shame had it been otherwise. And that is how these affairs ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... clear gaze, a confused comprehension began to stir in him—at first only a sort of chagrin, then something more—a consciousness of his own heaviness of intellect and grossness of figure—the fatness of mind and body which had developed so rapidly ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... blaze, which held all the earth and the heavens suspended in flames for a moment, Garth suddenly saw revealed a crouching figure, and a hideous, distorted face no more than six feet from his own. In the blinding glare it was outlined with a horrid clearness; in its grossness and bestial ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... could be no happiness for the wife of the Pretender, and no happiness, therefore, for the man who saw her the daily victim of the cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence of her drunken husband. To an imaginative mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the reality, striving for ever after some poetical or heroic model of love and of life, trying to be at once a patriot out of Plutarch and a lover after the fashion of the Vita ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... its savour; must entertain, be entertained, rub shoulders generally or she is lost. Henrietta Frayling suffered the accustomed fate, though to speak of rubbing shoulders in connection with her is to express oneself incorrectly to the verge of grossness. Her shoulders were of an order far too refined to rub or be rubbed. Nevertheless, after the shortest interval consistent with self-respect, such society as St. Augustin and its neighbourhood afforded found itself enmeshed in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... like isolated heroes, keeping up single-handed a desperate struggling against the onslaught of an army of opponents.[1] Is not this characteristic of the miserable nature of mankind? The dullness, grossness, perversity, silliness and brutality of by far the greater part of the race, are always an obstacle to the efforts of the genius, whatever be the method of his art; they so form that hostile army to which at last he has to succumb. Let the isolated champion ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... fellow-men.'[1] 'Industrial work,' says Levasseur, 'in the times of antiquity had always had, in spite of the institutions of certain Emperors, a degrading character, because it had its roots in slavery; after the invasion, the grossness of the barbarians and the levelling of towns did not help to rehabilitate it. It was the Church which, in proclaiming that Christ was the son of a carpenter, and the Apostles were simple workmen, made known to the world that ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... indelible impression upon my memory: 'We, at the same time,' he said, 'have our eye perfectly open to that great external improvement which has taken place, of late years, in the manners of society. There is not the same grossness of conversation. There is not the same impatience for the withdrawment of him who, asked to grace the outset of an assembled party, is compelled, at a certain step in the process of conviviality, by the obligations of professional decency, to retire from it. There is not so frequent an exaction ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... waistcoat pocket, he looked about him at the women with happy eyes, flinging his head back in three-quarters profile with all the airs of a king of the poultry-yard, airs which were prodigiously admired by the aristocratic circle of which he was the beau. There was a strain of eighteenth century grossness, as a rule, in his talk; a detestable kind of conversation which procured him some success with women—he made them laugh. M. du Chatelet was beginning to give this gentleman some uneasiness; and, as a matter of fact, since Mme. de Bargeton had taken him up, the lively interest taken ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... known the terror of a doubt lest the whole of it should, after all, be but a creation of his yearnings, a mirage of his desires. Everywhere men had believed him mad. He had accepted that as he accepted toil, hunger and exile, as things to be redeemed by their end. But if it should be true! If this grossness and harshness should, after all, be his real life! Bill saw the agony that broke loose within his victim, and bent his head above his work to hide ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... have called him "poor fellow," and wished that he had had a more robust kind of fibre; now that I know he is dead, I cannot find it in my heart to wish him any such qualities. His life appears to me utterly beautiful and fragrant. He never incurred any taint of grossness from prosperity or success; he never grew indifferent or hard; and in the light of his last passage, such a failure seems the one thing worth achieving, and to carry with it a hope all alive and rich with possibilities of blessing and glory. He ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... courtesy, and never can satisfy any one who has breathed the sacred air. It is a rich and strong spirit, not only filling the room, but pouring out from the door and possessing the hall, redeeming an opposite dining-room from grossness, and a more distant drawing-room from frivolity, and even lending a goodly flavour to bedrooms on upper floors. It is distilled from curious old duodecimos packed on high shelves out of sight, and blows over folios, with large clasps, that once ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... defects of style are abruptness and occasional vulgarity, which no man more regretted than their author in his calmer hours. But there can be no apology for his dealing with serious subjects in that vein of sarcasm which reminds us of the grossness of the coarser brood of infidels. An English critic, noticing this defect, says: "His vigor of style was deformed by a power of sarcasm, which often invested the most sacred subjects with caricature and vulgarity; a boundless malignity ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... their lips to utter a word of shame. Desdemona cannot even bring herself to speak the coarse word with which her husband taunts her; she cannot make herself believe that there are women in the world who could stoop-to such grossness.[L] ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... to see the wonderful on the stage; when, therefore, their poets, standing on the lofty eminence of a highly polished state of art and society, gave it the requisite form, breathed into it a musical soul, and refined its beautiful hues and fragrance from all corporeal grossness, there arose, from the very contrast of the matter and the form, an irresistible fascination. Amid the harmony of the most varied metre, the elegance of fanciful allusions, and that splendour of imagery and simile which no other language than their own could hope to furnish, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... law of this analogy so well that men, not seeing it, have denied its being. Is it hopeless to point out that one of the most recognizable characteristics of life is its unrecognizableness, and that the very token of its spiritual nature lies in its being beyond the grossness of our eyes? ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... him, qualifying the grossness of the reality by her own shrewd humor; part he read between the lines of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... may say, is a lady of quite amazing capacities combined strangely with the commonest feminine weaknesses. She has acute business judgment at most times, yet would fly at me in a rage if I were to say what I think of the nipper's appalling grossness. Quite naturally I do not push my unquestioned mastery to this extreme. There are other matters in which I amusedly let her have her way, though she fondly reminds me almost daily of ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... shares them, though in a higher degree, with the brute creation;—but morals are altogether peculiar to higher intelligences. To man, in particular, the value of moral discipline is beyond calculation:—For, however much the present ignorance and grossness of men's minds may deceive them in weighing their respective worth, yet it would be easy to shew, that the knowledge and practice of but one additional truth in morals, are of more real value to a ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... I go on to reproduce his grossness and trivialities? All that he thought, at that hour, was even noble, though he could not clothe it otherwise than in the language of a brutal farce. Presently he bade me call the doctor; and when that officer had come in, raised a little up in his bed, pointed first ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth!—wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal—wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation—from these sins he is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... We met either in some public place or at my hotel, where I entertained him as freely as I might without appearing to be prompted by charity. He seemed always hungry, and this was his nearest approach to human grossness. I made a point of asking no impertinent questions, but, each time we met, I ventured to make some respectful allusion to the magnum opus, to inquire, as it were, as to its health and progress. "We are getting on, with ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... felt about translating Othello in consequence of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate 'Le bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example of the difference between la tragedie philosophique and the drama of real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word mouchoir at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic- ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... was the sign of these two, are gone. The Coat-arm is stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modest simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified Apparition, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... bread and milk. It was just simply, innocently, and gloriously funny; and it has long been my belief that the time at which it is best that a reader should make acquaintance with our rather indelicate old classics is the time of innocence, when no grossness of suggestion has a meaning, though the mind is fully open to the reception of all the reader's own experience teaches him ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Paul, the athletes were evidently abstemious, for he wrote "every man who striveth in the games is temperate in all things," but in Rome, at most periods of their history this class of men was notorious for grossness and brutality. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... coming short of that ideal. Naturalness is the sign and the test of perfect love. It is the sign of it, for, when love can show itself natural and true, one may conclude that it is purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities, and have them without seeking, as a second nature. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... spared the spectacle, at least, of those who eat and drink too much. We can switch off a bore at once. We can retire when we are fatigued, without leaving a blank space before the others. And all this without saying anything of the higher spiritual and intellectual effect—freed from material grossness of appetite and show—which the dinner party thus attains. But you are surely joking! You, an American, and not know it! Why, it comes from Boston. Haven't you read that book, 'Jumping a ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... your faith—your canting trash about your love for the Saviour! I might have known that one of your kind could not rise above the grossness in you. I hope you will be as miserable and as unhappy as I am.... I hope that ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... court of Charles II. were, to the utmost, profligate and abandoned: yet in what colours have they been drawn by Hamilton? The elegance of his pencil has rendered them more seductive and dangerous, than if it had more faithfully copied the originals. From such a mingled mass of grossness of language, and of conduct, one would have turned away with disgust and abhorrence; but Hamilton was, to use the words of his admirer, Lord Orford, "superior to the indelicacy of the court," whose vices he ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... feeding on it as they go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... transparency, that but little light can they receive; as is the Earth. Thus the Goodness of God is received in sundrywise by the sundry substances, that is, in one way by the Angels, who are without grossness of matter, as if transparent through their purity of form; and otherwise by the human Soul, which although on one side it may be free from matter, on another side it is impeded: even as the man who is all in the water but his head, of whom one ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... of the zeal to live and drink deeply of life, and glorious as much of his work is, and wonderful as it all is, the excessive use of curves and rounded forms in his later work robs it of much of its power and offends us by its grossness. His best work is full ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... massive man. His suit of blue serge displayed his statuesque proportions to full advantage, and Paul's all-embracing glance did not fail to take note of the delicacy of hand and foot which redeemed the great frame from any suggestion of grossness. The stranger's head was bare, for he held in one gloved hand a hard black felt hat, flat topped and narrow of brim; and his small head, with close tight curls, set upon a neck like that of a gladiator, was markedly Neronian. The hue of this virile curling ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... breeding and sobriety. But, more particularly, there was the dinner itself set out of huge hampers on white cloths that appealed to the natural primitive man simply and honestly, without a single pretense of delicacy to hide the real grossness of the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... of Hanover, afterward Queen of Prussia, has left us some curious notes about the Czar, then twenty-seven years of age. He astonished her by the vivacity of his mind and the promptitude and point of his answers, not less than by the grossness of his manners, his bad habits at table, his wild timidity, like that of a badly brought-up child, his grimaces, and a frightful twitching which at times convulsed his whole face. Peter had then a beautiful brown skin, with great piercing eyes, but his features ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... leaning against an old and solitary chestnut-tree, which commanded the whole scene. The village was a little in the rear, and the smoke from its few chimneys rose slowly to the silent and deep skies, not wholly unlike the human wishes, which, though they spring from the grossness and the fumes of earth, purify themselves as they ascend to heaven. And from the village (when other sounds, which I shall note presently, were for an instant still) came the whoop of children, mellowed by distance into a confused yet ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wipe me with their feet. They would spoil Pretty Pierre." This he said with a grim kind of humour and scorn, refined in its suppressed force. Fastidious as he was in appearance, Pierre was not vain. He had been created with a sense of refinement that reduced the grossness of his life; but he did not trade on it; he simply accepted it and lived it naturally after his kind. He was not good at heart, and he never pretended to be so. He continued: "No, I have not much love; but Val, well, I think of him some. His tongue ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... course, is the great question. Mr. Beecher says: Religion is the slow, laborious, self-conducted EDUCATION of the whole man, from grossness to refinement, from sickliness to health, from ignorance to knowledge, from selfishness to justice, from justice to nobleness, from cowardice to valor. In treating this topic, whatever he may pray or read or assent to, he preaches cause and effect, and nothing else. Regeneration he does ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... rapiunt coelum, or in the fervent sentence of the author of the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... Russell, but he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant morality—moralizing rather—his provincialism, and the grossness of his method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure thought nor pure feeling—nothing but a point of view which is now perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... sure, times and manners have altered. While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Moliere. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. But still, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple, but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts! How many cowards whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beard of Hercules, and frowning Mars; Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk? ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... me what does the ringing of the bells to the thunder. Yes wery much; for its known that the thunder is partly occasioned by the thickness, grossness, impuritude, crassitude of the circumambient air wt which the thunder feides itselfe as its matter. Now Im sure if we can dissipate and discusse this thickness of the air which occasiones the thunder, we are wery fair for extinguishing the thunder itselfe according to the Axioma, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... contrary, prepared with ardor for the fight. Their enthusiasm was intense. Those barbarians, with their half-nakedness, their grossness, their ferocity, their ignorance, and their impiety, were revolting. They committed murder and devastation like dolts. They left their dead on the field, without burial. They engaged in battle without consulting priest or augur. It was not only their ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Again earnestly expostulates with him in the lady's favour. Remembers and applauds the part she bore in the conversation at his collation. The frothy wit of libertines how despicable. Censures the folly, the weakness, the grossness, the unpermanency of sensual love. Calls some of his contrivances trite, stale, and poor. Beseeches him to remove her from the vile house. How many dreadful stories could the horrid Sinclair tell the sex! Serious reflections on the dying state ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... say you, we would not have woman exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... told about the author of one of the finest books in French literature,—"Pantagruel." Aretino, the friend of Titian, and the Voltaire of his century, has, in our day, a reputation the exact opposite of his works and of his character; a reputation which he owes to a grossness of wit in keeping with the writings of his age, when broad farce was held in honor, and queens and cardinals wrote tales which would be called, in these days, licentious. One might go on ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... strings are veiled with the tender reed tone of a group of oboe d' amore, the soprano becomes an alto whose notes are, as it were, surrounded with a nimbus by being doubled in the upper octave by a flute; and the aria becomes worthy of its new purpose, not by losing a grossness which it never possessed, but by gaining the richness which distinguishes the perfect work ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... her exalted rank, nor a sense of the high responsibility attached to the character of a guardian, with which circumstances invested him, had proved sufficient to restrain him from freedoms of behaviour towards her, which no reasonable allowance for the comparative grossness of the age can reduce within the limits of propriety or decorum. We learn that, on some occasions at least, she endeavoured to repel his presumption by such expedients as her youthful inexperience suggested; but her governess and attendants, gained over or intimidated, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!—nothing for the common sensations excited by the senses. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... to apologize for the grossness of our favorite authors sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and not they; and the excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks us while we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no such extenuations. No man can read the "Faery Queen" and be ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... nation, the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... my hands in their muck, to settle down and live my life according to their bourgeois standards, to have grossness of soft flesh replace able sinews, to submerge mentality in favor of a specious craftiness of mind which passes in the "city" for brains—well, I'm on the road. And, oh, girl, girl, I wish ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... on the Magi's altars glowed Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed The immortal purity that without rest Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One Whose spirit on the altar of the world Burns ceaselessly,—where, if all vice be hurled, It shall be purged with fire that shall atone,— Christ's love the flame, man's sin ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... of this wild neighborhood interested Darwin very greatly, and he describes them with care. In this connection a charming trait of Darwin's character comes beautifully in evidence. The absolute purity of his mind, his utter freedom from grossness, shows clearly in his account of the first really semi-civilized people ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... company. These critics, who turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness which accompanied the Romans' vetus comedia. For representing it they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the enormity of the position in all its grossness. And my excuse for these pages must be this: that though the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some interest. And then, again, there are certain psychological ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... and delighted our predecessors, are, nevertheless, but ill adapted in their original form for general perusal. Among these may be reckoned some works of fiction, the excellencies of which are often obscured by a grossness of style not uncommon at the time when they were composed, but which justly excludes them from family-reading in the present day. Such works would be acceptable if freed from objectionable passages; and in undertaking to ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... twelvemonth. The Court was as shameless as it was profuse. If the Court of Elizabeth was as immoral as that of her successor, its immorality had been shrouded by a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil shrouded the degrading grossness of the Court of James. James was no drunkard, but he was a hard drinker, and with the people at large his hard drinking passed for drunkenness. When the Danish king visited England actors in a masque performed at Court were seen rolling intoxicated at his feet. The suit of Lady Essex ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the adjective by which I can best describe Doctor Florret and all his attributes. He was a large man, but not too large—just the size one would select for the head-master of an important middle-class school; stout, not fat, suggesting comfort, not grossness. His hands were white and well shaped. On the left he wore a fine diamond ring, but it shone rather than sparkled. He spoke of commonplace things in a voice that lent dignity even to the weather. His face, which was clean-shaven, radiated benignity ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... credit of the Singhalese, it must be said, that in their compositions, however satirical or familiar they may be, their verses are entirely free from the licentiousness which disfigures similar productions in India; and that if deficient in imagination and grace, they are equally exempt from grossness and indelicacy. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to—"Pardon me for mentioning in your presence a name contemptible or gross (as Jew)." Thus, for further elucidation to the enquirer after the peculiarities of language, Kie 'tkillem ma el Kaba hashak asseedi,—"He is talking with a prostitute—your pardon, Sir, for the grossness of the expression." ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... meanwhile, her very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. It was merely passion, she felt, for she recognised that there was a strain of grossness in him. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... and in the realization of ideals which until now have seemed but the imagination of idle dreamers. Asia, as an anonymous writer has recently put it, is growing crude, vulgar, and materialistic; Europe, on the other hand, is growing to loathe its own past grossness. "London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories—postures, complacent and obtuse, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... for the Maintenance of your Health, by preventing Infirmities and Grossness of Humours, you compose your Kennel; consult first your own Ability for this Exercise; and if you think you are able to foot it away, then the Biggest and slowest Dogs you can get are best; which ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... and panegyrist had nothing more to say for him, it could not be uncharitable to conclude that the pretended saint was as bold a sinner as ever paid infamous courtship to religion, and as such was studiously to be avoided. I turned my attention from him to Tomkins. There was no grossness about him, no brutality, no abominable vice. In the hour of my defeat and desertion, he had extended to me his sympathy, and, more in sorrow than in anger, I am convinced he voted for my expulsion from the church when he found that his vote, and twenty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... leisure (in train, steamer, and trap), is that altogether delectable volume Gil Blas. It would be worth learning French to be able to read the book in the original. The characters are non-moral reprobates who lie, rob, and drink with the most unaffected sincerity. Vice loses all its grossness, and becomes intensely entertaining. The tone of the confessions is at once subtle and naive, tragic and trivial, comic and pathetic. The humour is absolutely colossal: many English books, alleged to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... dramatic: the sprightliest scene, I should say, ever played out on the stage of Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable grossness. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... unfortunately regarded all his lordship's relations as the natural enemies of her son; whom she seems, unaccountably, to have considered as the rightful heir of her husband's honours. This improvident young man, however, far from conciliating his father-in-law's esteem, had insulted him with more grossness than his lordship ever experienced from any other person; and, consequently, estranged himself, as much as possible, from his heart. Had any other human being acted exactly in the same manner, it is not improbable that his life might have paid the forfeiture. What a source was this, too, for ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... up in these parts into a hot and virulent skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party, - a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to appreciate the value of the poet's help, and not sufficient taste to moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their surprise when HOLY WILLIE was put into their hand; like the amorous lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His satires began to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, "read him into fame;" he himself was soon welcome ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but, among men following the profession of the press, a change of politics is an infringement of the point of honor, and a man must FIGHT as well as apostatize. A very curious table might be made, signalizing the difference of the moral standard between us and the French. Why is the grossness and indelicacy, publicly permitted in England, unknown in France, where private morality is certainly at a lower ebb? Why is the point of private honor now more rigidly maintained among the French? Why is it, as it should be, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh which was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the grossness and brutality of much which most boys of his age have already learnt to take for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And more especially did he loathe the last picture presented to him on the outskirts of the common. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... set right. Now, I doubt this. I believe the cause which brought the first marriage to such painful disaster was not dependent only on the evident unsuitability of the partners to live with one another; the grossness of the man and the believed refinement of the woman need not necessarily have failed in finding happiness in union. No, the cause of failure was deeper, within themselves, dependent on the blind egoism ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... radiated upon the world about him. These times were the opportunity he found for the display of his abounding energies. They were healthy times, healthy for mind and body. To watch his activities was to marvel that he still retained the grossness of figure he ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... asperity of literary controversy, drawn from his own and Salmasius's writings. If to some the subject has appeared exceptionable, to me, I confess, it seems useful, and I shall therefore add some other particulars; for this topic has many branches. Of the following specimens the grossness and malignity are extreme; yet they were employed by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom. From cottage chimneys, smoke went streaming up high, high, as if the earth had lost its grossness, being so fair, and must not be oppressed by heavy vapour. The crust of ice on the else rippling brook was so transparent, and so thin in texture, that the lively water might of its own free will have ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... me, an occasion to abase myself—" He broke off, conscious of a grossness of allusion that seemed, on a closer approach, the real obstacle to full expression. But the moments were flying, and for his self-esteem's sake he must find some way of making her share ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his theory of language. He ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... crown, and revealing the father of spirits in an aureole of golden fire. Between earth and heaven, amid choirs of angelic children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of Christ, who was Mary and is now a goddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies, but far above the grossness and the incapacities of earth. Her womanhood is so complete that those for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is lost, may hail ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... like the Egyptian princess's. She was small and delicately made, with warm colouring and large, dark hostile eyes. There was a delicacy, almost a beauty in all her form, and at the same time a certain attractive grossness of spirit, that made a little spark leap instantly alight ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... monosyllabic and tonic dialects like the Chinese) who still survive in every one of the provinces south of the Yang-tsz Kiang; but the ruling caste, whose administrative centre lay to the north of these tribes, though affected by the grossness of their barbarous surroundings, were manifestly more or less orthodox Chinese in origin and sympathy, and, even at this early period (771 B.C.), possessed a considerable culture, a knowledge of Chinese script, and a general capacity to live a settled economical existence. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of our nation ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... rude system of cutting into the stone ceased to be practised and relief carving became general, grossness of idea seems to have survived in many rural parishes. One specimen is to be seen in the churchyard of Stanstead in Kent, and is, ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... information of importance concerning contemporary manners. Their heroes and heroines differ from each other only in the intensity or the circumstances of their love. The best in narrative interest, and the most attractive in tone, is the "Lucky Mistake." It is without the grossness characteristic of Mrs. Behn's works, and gives quite a pretty account of the loves of a young French nobleman and an unusually modest young woman named Atlante. Mrs. Behn's notion of love is contained in ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... your country and in mine as well as in this, a certain portion of every class of society is less moral than the rest? In some countries immorality is more refined indeed; and when manners lose their grossness, they are stripped apparently of half their vice. But suppose the fact, that women, even the unmarried, are less pure here than in Europe, remember that with us, besides the mother, there is the nurse of the family, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... hands, the kingdom of Christ, and so they became worldly and not true Christians. Then human inventions and novelties, both in doctrine and worship, crowded fast into the church; a door opened thereunto, by the grossness and carnality that appeared then among the generality of Christians, who had long since left the guidance of God's meek and heavenly spirit, and given themselves up to superstition, will-worship, and voluntary humility. And as superstition is blind, so it is heady and ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... body loses its grossness after use of certain PRANAYAMAS. Then it will levitate or hop about like a leaping frog. Even saints who do not practice a formal yoga {FN7-4} have been known to levitate during a state ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... practically infinite distance, this must needs be a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners will not only be tolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will be understood perfectly and universally that on earth are understood only by a scattered few; baseness of bearing, grossness of manner, will be the distinctive mark of no section of the community whatever. The coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist here. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so many half-educated people on earth recluse and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to become like ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... wicked conspiracy to save his life. Having thus tried every avenue to destruction, and failed in all, he felt like a man doomed to live for ever. Henceforward he shrunk and shrivelled by slow degrees, until in the course of time he became so attenuated, that the grossness of human vision could ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is turn'd heathen, a very renegado; for there is no Christian, that means to be sav'd by believing rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness. He's in ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... religion? I don't mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks did, a ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... 'Eloisa' alone is sufficient to convict him of gross licentiousness." Thus, out it comes at last. Mr. Bowles does accuse Pope of "gross licentiousness," and grounds the charge upon a poem. The licentiousness is a "grand peut-etre," according to the turn of the times being. The grossness I deny. On the contrary, I do believe that such a subject never was, nor ever could be, treated by any poet with so much delicacy, mingled with, at the same time, such true and intense passion. Is the "Atys" of Catullus licentious? ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... be found free from that grossness which is unavoidable in a strictly literal translation of the original into English; and which has rendered the splendid translations of Sir R. Burton and Mr. J. Payne quite unsuitable as the basis of a popular edition, though at the same time stamping ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon. |
