"Ostensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... representative institutions, is the most suitable form of polity for the earliest stages of any community, not excepting a city community like those of ancient Greece; where, accordingly, the government of kings, under some real, but no ostensible or constitutional control by public opinion, did historically precede by an unknown and probably great duration all free institutions, and gave place at last, during a considerable lapse of time, to oligarchies ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... distinguished as yourself in the use of such Instruments should be enrolled as a Member of this Craft." In his reply, accepting the Freedom of the Company, Airy wrote thus: "I shall much value the association with a body whose ostensible title bears so close a relation to the official engagements which have long occupied me. I have had extensive experience both in arranging and in using optical and mathematical instruments, and feel that my own pursuits are closely connected with the original employments of the Company." The ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... that the very operation of a plan of economy which tends to exonerate the civil list of expensive establishments may in some sort defeat the capital end we have in view,—the independence of Parliament; and that, in removing the public and ostensible means of influence, we may increase the fund of private corruption. I have thought of some methods to prevent an abuse of surplus cash under discretionary application,—I mean the heads of secret service, special service, various ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... crowded one; where, besides the Sunday School Teachers, and Parents of the children, nearly all the Clergymen of the place were present. When the more ostensible business of the meeting had been concluded, the writer consulted privately with two or three of the clergymen, and asked, whether they, knowing the general sentiments of the persons composing the meeting, would think it improper that one of the three children who had shewn themselves ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... attributes of her friend. . . . But Margaret Annesley continued to greet the monster Kabuli from time to time. Having great means and worldly goods and riotous health, he had nothing to discuss but his soul—which few beside Margaret would have found ostensible. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... of a cause celebre to the commonplace of a purely commercial transaction—the economical transportation of a medical college "subject." It was this very uncertainty that fascinated our imaginations and so allowed the sober judgment to be deposed. Our ostensible argument was that the police would be sure to make a mess of the affair. If that idiot, Detective Brownson, took hold of it, the goddess Justice might throw up her hands as well as close her eyes. And inwardly we desired to cherish our ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... communities. The deeper we penetrate into the workings of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular authority. I do not assert that the ostensible end, or even that the secret aim, of American parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or democracy in the country, but I affirm that aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... daring stroke to appeal to the Council for an endorsement of the principle in verse 19, but the appeal was unanswerable; for this tribunal had no other ostensible reason for existence than to enforce obedience to the law of God, and to Peter's dilemma only one reply was possible. But it rested on a bold assumption, which was calculated to irritate the court; namely, that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the Cologne professors and purported to be from his former students and admirers. In these letters the writers take pains to exhibit the most shocking ignorance and stupidity. They narrate their scandalous doings with the ostensible purpose of obtaining advice as to the best way to get out of their scrapes. They vituperate the humanists in comically bad Latin, which is perhaps the best part of the joke.[269] In this way those who later opposed Luther and his reforms were held up to ridicule ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... to my resignation of St. Mary's, which was the second of the steps which I took in 1843. The ostensible, direct, and sufficient cause of my doing so was the persevering attack of the Bishops on Tract 90. I alluded to it in the letter which I have inserted above, addressed to one of the most influential among them. A series ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... divided, and twenty of them taking the [68] prisoners, the plunder and some horses which they had stolen, set off by the way of Jackson's river, for the Ohio; the remainder started towards Cedar creek, with the ostensible view of committing farther depredations. But Matthews and the Maxwells had sounded the alarm, and the whole settlement were soon collected at Paul's stockade fort, at the Big spring near to Springfield. Here the women ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... enters into our views with a facility and readiness which were capital. He thinks that nothing can be more magnificent or excellent; but two points immediately occurred: First, the difficulty of his leaving Edinburgh without any ostensible purpose; and, secondly, the losing caste in society by so doing. He is fully aware that he may end by making his situation as important as any in the empire, but the ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... be more hurt by what the silence of her companions implied—a suspicion that the discovery of Somerset's depravity was wounding her heart—than by the wound itself. The ostensible ease with which she drew them into a bye conversation had perhaps the defect of proving too much: though her tacit contention that no love was in question was not incredible on the supposition that affronted pride alone caused her embarrassment. The chief symptom of her heart being really ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... wish I had not seen the house; that I had passed it by; that I had not come through the window; that I were safely out of it again. I became, on a sudden, aware, that something was with me in the room. There was nothing, ostensible, to lead me to such a conviction; it may be that my faculties were unnaturally keen; but, all at once, I knew that there was something there. What was more, I had a horrible persuasion that, though unseeing, I was seen; that my every movement ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... names had been looked upon as synonymous; but, for the future, Court and Administration were to be considered as things totally distinct. By this operation, two systems of Administration were to be formed: one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible, to perform the official and executory duties of Government. The latter were alone to be responsible; whilst the real advisers, who enjoyed all the power, were effectually ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fell under the imperial displeasure. A letter seized in the post, and expressive of atheistical sentiments (possibly but a transient vagary of his youth) was the ostensible cause of his banishment from Odessa to his paternal estate of Mikhailovskoe in the province of Pskoff. Some, however, aver that personal pique on the part of Count Vorontsoff, the Governor of Odessa, played a part in the transaction. Be this as it may, the consequences were serious for the poet, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... philosophical pity. For in the Frenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood of Lafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans, he yet, detesting, sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled yokels, uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of comical posturing in ostensible un-Latin lech, vainglorious and spying—children into whose hands has fallen Zola, children adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for those things out of life that, groped for, are lost—that may come only as life comes, naturally, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Once I saw ostensible 'possum at a French restaurant in New York. It was advertised as Opossum, Southern style, and it was chopped up fine and cooked in a sort of casserole effect, with green peas and carrots and various other things ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... and Colonel Lennox has been boyish acquaintances, and a sort of superficial, intimacy was soon established between them, which served as the ostensible cause of his frequent visits at Beech Park. But to Mary, who was more alive to the difference of their characters and sentiments than any other member of the family, this appeared very improbable, and she could not help suspecting that love for the sister, rather than ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... exercised the right to determine from the circumstances whether the ostensible was the real destination. They have held that the shipment of articles of contraband to a neutral port "to order," from which, as a matter of fact, cargoes had been transshipped to the enemy, is corroborative evidence that the cargo ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... the survivors learned from savages who had been witnesses of the grim tragedy. Other expeditions were sent northward from time to time, but without success either in finding copper or in finding a passage westward through the Arctic, which always remained at least an ostensible object of the search. ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... be perceived, was the ostensible motive for this visit to the Continent, but the real one, in all probability, was his long-cherished desire to see foreign parts. This, however, he would not acknowledge even to himself, but sought to reconcile ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... The natives explained, that, although Allorron had been the ostensible sheik for a great length of time, the true sheik by actual descent was a chief named Morbe; but as his cattle had been carried off by the Loquia, he had lost his property, and also his influence among the people. In those savage countries the possession of property ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the morning with the ostensible purpose of gathering chestnuts, or autumn leaves, or persimmons, or exploring some run or branch. It is, say, the last of October or the first of November. The air is not balmy, but tart and pungent, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... we are at present concerned, however, had other purposes than the killing of deer. The latter ostensible object concealed more secret designs, and to these we may confine our attention. It was now near the end of August, 1715. At the beginning of that month, the Earl of Mar, in company with General Hamilton and Colonel Hay, had embarked at Gravesend, on the Thames, all in disguise ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the finest broadcloth, the coats of which were lined with red silk, and the vests of embroidered white. These men walked with a sort of arrogant importance. We later found that they were members of that dreaded organization known as The Hounds, whose ostensible purpose was to perform volunteer police duty, but whose real effort was toward the increase of their own power. These people all surged back and forth good-naturedly, and shouted at each other, and disappeared with great ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... men marched in the van and rear of the royal party; some of them destined to reinforce the garrisons of the conquered country, others to work upon the fortifications, and others again to level the roads. It was a continued series of fetes, banquets, and triumphs, the ostensible honours being chiefly for Madame de Montespan; the real object of this famous journey, well-nigh unparalleled for its lavish and luxurious ostentation, was known only to Henrietta of England, who enjoyed in secret her own importance, and this gave a new zest to the pleasures ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Hitherto these names had been looked upon as synonymous; but for the future, court and administration were to be considered as things totally distinct. By this operation, two systems of administration were to be formed; one which should be in the real secret and confidence; the other merely ostensible to perform the official and executory duties of government. The latter were alone to be responsible; whilst the real advisers, who enjoyed all the power, were effectually removed from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him in order to go to Yport, six or seven miles from Etretat, where, for prudence's sake, he had told his men to meet him, and where he chartered twelve fishing smacks, with the ostensible object of taking soundings ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... individual whom she loved, and simply because it was indispensable that she should love somebody. It was not even difficult to give her a lover by setting an eligible suitor to pay her court with an ostensible political motive; but as soon as she accepted him, she loved him solely and faithfully, and she owned to Mdme. de Rhodes and myself that, through caprice, she said, she had never really loved those whom she esteemed the most, with the exception ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... fortnight Sarah came several times to the "King's Head." She came in about nine in the evening, and stayed for half-an-hour or more. The ostensible object of her visit was to see Esther, but she declined to come into the private bar, where they would have chatted comfortably, and remained in the public bar listening to the men's conversation, listening ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... was her ostensible reason; but, I think, she objects to me personally—in addition to having other and grander ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 1710 there was printed in London the most elegant edition that has ever appeared of these letters, which the editor, Mich. Mattaire, gravely represents as the productions of their ostensible authors." ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... ... by my house ... watchin' with me...." went on the ambushed victim in a summarizing of ostensible services, "what made ye discomfort yoreself, ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the goldsmith, was a matter of common report, and glorious would be the fortune of him who could secure its reversion. This Ramiro wished to win; indeed, there was no ostensible reason why he should not do so, since Brant was undoubtedly a heretic, and, therefore, legitimate game for any honourable servant of the Church and King. Yet there were lions in the path, two large and formidable lions, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House. The only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard. I set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible. I told the landlord I was ...
— Options • O. Henry
... mingled up with the more daring spirits, producing a more complicated and varied class of crime than before. The steam-boats were soon crowded by a description of people who were termed gamblers, as such was their ostensible profession, although they were ready for any crime which might offer an advantage to them, [see note 1] and the increase of commerce and constant inpouring of populations daily offer to them some ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... but this author, here as always, misrepresents me. Gibbon is exhibiting and developing the deep-seated causes of the spread of Christianity before Constantine, and he by no means exhausts the subject. I am comparing the ostensible and notorious facts concerning the outward conquest of Christianity with those of other religions. To account for the early growth of any religion, Christian, Mussulman, or Mormonite, is ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of the feudal relation, long before the humbler men had risen from the condition of status to that of contract, when fixed pay in the ordinary sense was unknown, and where the relation between servant and master was one of ostensible voluntary service and voluntary support, was for life, and in its best aspect was a relation of mutual dependence and kindness. Then the spasmodic payment was, as tips are now, essential to the upper ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... living. Austerities had brought him to the last stage of weakness; and he was sinking under the malady of which he was soon to die. But it was believed that the words of such a man, pleading for the Church, would sway the mind of the King. The ostensible purpose of the Legate's journey was to break off the match with Navarre, and to bring France into the Holy League. He gained neither object. When he was summoned back to Rome it was understood in France that he had ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... out in the pursuit, always interesting and alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings, but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season, they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... little too close to be funny. Since the Celebrity had lost his nerve and betaken himself to the place of concealment Mr. Cooke had prepared for him, the whole composition of the affair was changed. Before, if McCann had arrested the ostensible Mr. Allen, my word, added to fifty dollars from my client, would probably have been sufficient. Should he be found now, no district attorney on the face of the earth could induce the chief to believe that he was any other than the real criminal; nor would any bribe ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... most remarkable thing of all is the way in which Balzac in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion (for if Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he avows his orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in practice), has almost entirely escaped the sentimentality plus unorthodoxy of similar work in the eighteenth ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... that they must not have the young man alone; this would partake too much of the nature of encouragement. So two or three other persons were invited; but Morris Townsend, though he was by no means the ostensible, was the real, occasion of the feast. There is every reason to suppose that he desired to make a good impression; and if he fell short of this result, it was not for want of a good deal of intelligent effort. The Doctor talked to ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... The ostensible object of the mission had reference, as far as I could learn, to a portion of the Terai (a district lying upon the northern frontier of British India) which formerly belonged to Nepaul, and which was annexed by the ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... were at the head of the Roman Church during its revolution, the five who followed next after Clement lived only forty-two years, whilst their five successors lived fifty-nine years. Thus, there is at least some ostensible ground for the inquiry whether any arrangement was made, about the time of Hyginus, which may account for ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Mrs. Cameron's private opinion, while Helen, after a few moments, began to feel far more at ease with Mrs. Cameron than she had done in the dining-room with Esther, waiting on her, and the cross Phillips stalking once through the room for no ostensible purpose except to get ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... entertained concerning this subject, and astronomers wished to have their sentiments regarding certain natural phenomena, either realized or controverted. Besides, a more important object was concealed under these ostensible reasons, namely, whether the establishment of permanent colonies in the most remote parts of Greenland was practicable. A proposal was therefore promulgated through the Greenland fleet, for seven seamen to offer to remain a winter in St. Maurice's Island, and ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... trammel you with instructions; I will state, however, that if Smith holds out, without even an ostensible government to receive orders from or to report to, he and his men are not entitled to the considerations due to an acknowledged belligerent. Theirs are the conditions of outlaws, making war against the only Government having an existence over the territory ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the daughter of Clotel, in the capacity of a servant in her own father's house, where she had been taken by her mistress for the ostensible purpose of plunging her husband into the depths of humiliation. At first the young girl was treated with great severity; but after finding that Horatio Green had lost all feeling for his child, Mrs. Green's own heart became touched for the offspring of her husband, ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... to the purpose, being entirely surrounded by unoccupied land. For what ostensible purpose Ferrara has leased it, he could not conjecture, nor did he concern himself with the matter. The purpose for which actually he had leased the place was sufficiently evident to the man who had suffered so much at the hands ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... Noirs secretly encouraged that report. I'll tell you why. They gave me a chamber lamp inclosed in an intense blue, shade, that cast a strange, unearthly light around. Their ostensible reason was to insure my safety from fire. Their real reason was that this light might be seen from without in what was reputed to be an uninhabited portion of the house, and give color to its bad reputation among the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... extensively occupied by wheat, barley, oats, maize, and the vegetables and fruits of southern Europe; but the following extract from the official returns in 1803, the fifteenth year after the establishment of the colony, will show its progress in a more ostensible manner. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... of the place. A half a dozen card games were in progress, and at three of the tables couples were playing checkers. By this time Phil had read all the news and was beginning on the advertisements in order to have some ostensible purpose in remaining where he knew nobody. Another half hour passed, and then he decided to get up and watch one of the checker games that ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... could be sent to the Atlantic. It was hardly possible to believe that the defective Spanish-Philippine squadron could have accomplished the voyage to the Antilles, in time of war, with every neutral port en route closed against it. In any case, so far as the ostensible motive of the Spanish-American War was concerned, American operations in the Philippines might have ended with the Battle of Cavite. The Tagalog rebels were neither seeking nor desiring a change of masters, but the state of war ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... shop you'll see a white cottage. There's a young lady stopping there to-night, a stranger, a traveller. The old lady who lives there has taken her in at my request. See that the young lady gets this envelope. It's no great matter, merely a pass through our lines; but it's your ostensible business till ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... of art; Your hero raves, your heroine cries, All stab, and every body dies. In short, your tragedy would be The very thing to hear and see: And for a piece of publication, If I decline on this occasion, It is not that I am not sensible To merits in themselves ostensible, 20 But—and I grieve to speak it—plays Are drugs—mere drugs, Sir—now-a-days. I had a heavy loss by Manuel—[76] Too lucky if it prove not annual,— And Sotheby, with his Orestes,[77] (Which, by the way, the old Bore's best is), Has lain so very long on hand, That I despair of all demand; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Waverley himself is the least interesting part of the book. Everybody who has read 'Guy Mannering' remembers Dandie Dinmont and Meg Merrilies and Pleydell and Dominie Sampson; but how many people could explain the ostensible story—the love affair of Vanbeest Brown and Julia Mannering? We can see how Scott put the story together. He was pouring out the most vivid and interesting recollections of the borderers whom he knew so well, of the old ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... lips, particularly the lower one, the tongue, the skin, and the glandular parts about the neck and arm-pits; the stomach, the liver, the lungs, and the brain, may also become affected with this terrible malady. Sometimes it commences without any ostensible cause, and the attention of the patient is frequently directed to the case by mere accident; at other times, blows, bruises, or continued pressure upon a part, may often be traced as the exciting cause. ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... The ostensible aim, however, of the founders of the Congo Free State was, not the exploitation of the Upper Nile district, the making of railways and the exportation of great quantities of ivory and rubber from Congoland, but the civilising and uplifting of Central Africa. The General Act of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... known to manage the household. She was certainly beautiful. That accounted for her satisfactorily. But it would have been a surprise, not only to other people but to Katharine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one. Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... insisted upon Lady Mary Vivian's making Glistonbury her head-quarters. Vivian objected: Lady Glistonbury's illness was an ostensible and, he hoped, would be a sufficient excuse for declining the invitation. But Lord Glistonbury persisted: "Lady Glistonbury, he was sure, would wish it—nothing would be more agreeable to her." His lordship's looks appealed to Lady Sarah, but Lady Sarah was silent; and, when her father ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... not the least able of the three, a pale, dark-haired Romeoish youth with burning eyes, whom Cowperwood had encountered doing some little work for Laughlin, and who was engaged to work on the West Side with old Laughlin as ostensible organizer and the sprightly De Soto Sippens as practical adviser. Stimson was no mooning Romeo, however, but an eager, incisive soul, born very poor, eager to advance himself. Cowperwood detected that pliability of intellect which, while it might spell ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... further example of resourcefulness, with a complete change of key, is "The Adventures of Harry Richmond." The ostensible business of the book is to depict the growth from boyhood to manhood and through sundry experiences of love, with the resulting effect upon his character, of the young man whose name gives it title. It may be noted that a favorite task with Meredith is this, to trace the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... schooner craft, who informed us that they had searched every accessible spot where a man could walk dry-shod upon, from Guayabos to the Isle of Mangles; that they had destroyed several old and deserted piratical nests, and hung two or three ostensible fishermen by way of wholesome warning to their allies the pirates; but that was all; and from what they had learned, there did not seem to have been an established retreat in that maze of cays and reefs ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... The ostensible basis of the disagreement which in a few months after the accession of Mr. Johnson to the Presidency began to develop between himself and the Republican leaders in Congress, was the plan of reconstruction put in operation by him during the recess of ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... remind you that we came here upon a perfectly definite mission, entrusted to us at the meeting of the Zoological Institute in London. That mission was to test the truth of Professor Challenger's statements. Those statements, as I am bound to admit, we are now in a position to endorse. Our ostensible work is therefore done. As to the detail which remains to be worked out upon this plateau, it is so enormous that only a large expedition, with a very special equipment, could hope to cope with it. Should we attempt to do so ourselves, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Austro-Hungary, whose assassination was the ostensible cause of this devastating war—what kind of man was he? Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as I could judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of human life which his death has occasioned. Not long before his ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... everything into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind and bloody band of sans-culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail, of this system was a miserable pageant, as its ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses of an hired, frantic, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... reporting, neither callous nor emotional. Good reporting, too; carefully detailed. There had been one or two inclusions of inferential matter in the guise of description, but that was to be looked for and discounted. And she had remembered, at the end, to include her ostensible ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... tread stole he on his evil way, With light tread hath Vengeance stole on after him. 245 Unseen she stands already, dark behind him— But one step more—he shudders in her grasp! Thou hast seen Questenberg with me. As yet Thou know'st but his ostensible commission; He brought with him a private one, my son! 250 And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... jostle of his own. This had represented his first blow-out, as he called it, with his patrons; his first successful attempt—though there was little other success about it—to bring them to a consideration of his impossible position. As the ostensible eve of a costly journey the moment had struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the presentation of an ultimatum. Ridiculous as it sounded, he had never yet been able to compass an uninterrupted private interview with ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron. In a central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young man's heart. There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... then, when they were left only four in the chamber, without the interruption of domestics, and the successive bustle occasioned by the discussion and removal of the morning meal, became apparently sensible, that his friend and ostensible patron Albert ought not altogether to be suffered to drop to leeward in the conversation, while he was himself successfully engaging the attention of those members of his family to whom he had become so recently known. He went behind his chair, therefore, and, leaning on the back, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Manning that he is Mr. Hartsell, or whoever he pleases, a real estate dealer from the East, and that his ostensible business in Westville is to invest in farm lands. Buying in run-down or undrained farms at a low price and putting them in good condition, that's a profitable business these days. Besides, since you are an agent for farm lands, that will explain ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... proceedings. The convention was called to give effect to the principles and policy of the Philadelphia convention, and Republicans who approved those principles concurred in the call. But how did this give that convention the right to commit them in favour of measures alien from its ostensible purpose, and at war with their entire political action? It is utterly preposterous to suppose that they can cooeperate with the Democratic party in the accomplishment of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the town, and not the least excited and interested of the observers was John McGuire's mother. When the news came of the second table's being added to the equipment of the place, she hurried over to Susan's kitchen without delay— though with the latest poem of her son's as the ostensible excuse. ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... laugh. There was no ostensible reason why she should laugh; there was nothing about Jack's make-up to cause it. Indeed, she thought he had never looked so handsome, even if his hair were plastered to his temples under his water-soaked hat and his ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... supper, which in spite of Dolly's very ostensible effort at exuberance, was rather silent, for Charles-Norton, with a man's detestation of "scenes," still felt somewhat embarrassed at the happenings of the morning, she drew up the Morris chair to the lamp, sat Charles-Norton in it, and ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... from the pig-tails. About the same time the Countess sailed over from Lisbon on a visit to her sister Harriet (in reality, it was whispered in the Cogglesby saloons, on a diplomatic mission from the Court of Lisbon; but that could not be made ostensible). The Countess narrowly examined Evan, whose steady advance in his profession both her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is from it, and as yet one only: Reichenbach, "from certain causes thereto moving Us ( aus gewissen Uns dazu bewegenden Grunden )," gets a formal Letter of Recall. Ostensible Letter, dated Berlin, 13th May, and signed Friedrich Wilhelm; which the English may read for their comfort. Only that along with this, of the same date and signature, intended for Reichenbach's comfort, the same Leather Bag brings a Private ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... possible heightening of poetic imagery, the chief events of the period of revolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus in having historical facts as ostensible subject. Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats of arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms, though suggestive of something that transcends any human warfare, are yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane." But this is not the ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... it controls the outlet of a river stretching up into a rich and fertile country eighteen hundred miles, on the other it projects into the Chinese Sea at a point nearly midway between Singapore and Hong Kong, and so secures to its possessor a just influence in that commercial highway. The ostensible cause of the war in this region was the murder of a French missionary. If this was ever the real cause, it long since gave way to a settled purpose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... noted. The home life of the family depicted, and also Mrs. Hawthorne's energy of geniality. A sketch of Mr. Bennoch, and a letter from him. Lord Houghton and others try to bring Hawthorne to society by letter. The family go to London for the ostensible purpose of enjoying society, but Hawthorne is obliged to spend part of the time in Liverpool. Mrs. Hawthorne writes to him of London and Henry Bright, who is there, and speaks of Miss ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... characteristic; every one of them too a record of the state of some other charmed, not less than charming party—even when the letter- writer's expression of the interest, the amusement, the play of fancy, of taste, of whatever sort of appreciation or reaction for his own spirit, is the ostensible note. This is what I mean in especial by the constancy with which, and the cost at which, perhaps not less, for others, the poetic sensibility was maintained and guaranteed. It was as genuine as if he had been a bard perched on an eminence with a harp, and yet it was arranged for, as we may say, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... and not far from Fort Gibson.[35] The fortifications erected there received the name of Cantonment Davis and upon them, in spite of Pike's decidedly moderate estimate in the beginning, the Confederacy was said by a contemporary to have spent "upwards of a million dollars."[36] In view of the ostensible object of the very formation of the department and of Pike's appointment to its command, the defence of Indian Territory, and, in view of the existing location of enemy troops, challenging that defence, the selection of the site was a reasonably wise one; but, as subsequent pages will ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Soviet-sponsored Communist domination. After failing in the Korean War (1950-53) to conquer the US-backed republic in the southern portion by force, North Korea, under its founder President KIM Il Sung, adopted a policy of ostensible diplomatic and economic "self-reliance" as a check against excessive Soviet or Communist Chinese influence. It molded political, economic, and military policies around the core ideological objective of ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the Miller's visit to the Tower of Glendearg was like the purpose of those embassies which potentates send to each other's courts, partly ostensible, partly politic. In outward show, Hob came to visit his friends of the Halidome, and share the festivity common among country folk, after the barn-yard has been filled, and to renew old intimacies by new conviviality. But in very truth he ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... intimacy between our family and Mrs. Long's was to be preserved unaltered. This it would have been impossible for me to do if Mrs. Long had not herself recognized the necessity of it, for her own full enjoyment of John's society. But it was a hard thing; my aunt, the ostensible head of our house, was a quiet woman who had nothing whatever to do with society, and who felt in the outset a great shrinking from the brilliant Mrs. Long. I had never been on intimate terms with her, so ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Grey; and Sheridan, who concealed the intelligence from Lord Grey, can hardly be supposed, any more than Lord Moira, to have acted in a manner which he did not expect to be agreeable to the Prince. But, in Canning's opinion, this question of the household was only the ostensible pretext, and not the real cause, of those two lords rejecting the Regent's offers; the real cause being, as he believed, that the Prince himself had already named Lord Wellesley as Prime-minister, and that they were ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... certainly scanty. No definition of his duties was ever given by the commander-in-chief. He appears as it were the latter's unacknowledged representative ashore, a plenipotentiary without credentials. "What my situation is," he writes to a relative, "is not to be described. I am everything, yet nothing ostensible; enjoying the confidence of Lord Hood and Colonel Villettes, and the captains landed with the seamen obeying my orders." A fortnight later he writes to Hood: "Your Lordship knows exactly the situation I am in here. With Colonel ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... I. You said: 'Bow your heads in ostensible humility, but never forget that the Bourbons have robbed you of your inheritance. Never forget that if you are poor, it is because on some idle pretext of a conspiracy that never could be proved, Louis XIV. sequestered ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... to insist on his demands—in defiance of the opposition of the whole of Europe, and with the danger of a War that may devastate the world, do betray a distinct tendency, and because the grave consequences of the War must appear much more momentous than the original ostensible cause of it, which at first appeared only as the request for a key to the back door ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... Raoul, "her fall is a very serious one, and without any ostensible injury, the physician fears she will be ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of April (1787), the ostensible object for which Burns had come to Edinburgh was attained, and the second edition of his poems appeared in a handsome octavo volume. The publisher was Creech, then chief of his trade in Scotland. The volume was published by subscription, "for the sole benefit of the author," and the subscribers ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... justify Miss Blake's prophecy, just ten days later, Hilliard did come again. It was a Sunday and Sheila had packed her lunch and gone off on "Nigger Baby" for the day. The ostensible object of her ride was a visit to the source of Hidden Creek. Really she was climbing away from a hurt. She felt Hilliard's wordless departure and prolonged absence keenly. She had not—to put it euphemistically—many ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... its being, not to any direct action of the French people, but to the success of a Parliamentary revolution, chiefly organised by M. Gambetta. The ostensible object of this revolution was to prevent the restoration of the French Monarchy. The real object of it was to take the life of the executive authority in France. M. Gambetta fell by the way, but the evil he did lives ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... his own preface to the 'Hume' volume Huxley expresses himself forcibly thus,—equally antagonistic as was his wont to both ostensible friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off what he considered ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... quickly. The stations are short, being rarely above five or six miles, and one is therefore constantly changing horses. Arrived at a station, it either happens that there is really no horse to be had, or that this is an ostensible excuse. The traveller is told that the horse has to be fetched from the mountain, and that he can be served in one and a half or two hours. Thus he rides one hour, and waits two. It is also necessary to keep the tariff, as every trifle, the saddle, the carriage, ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... letter to Mr Thomas Rookwood followed this interview. It was equally short in its ostensible length, and piously acknowledged the receipt of two bands, two handkerchiefs, one pair of socks, and a Bible. Beneath came the important postscript "Your last letter I could not read; the pen did not cast incke. Mr Catesby did me much wrong, and hath confessed that he asked me the question ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... there is really almost no guessing left to do, the authoress seeming principally concerned to ensure a smooth passage for one's prophecies. Thus, while the unknown son of a secret marriage, happening by good luck to thrash the ostensible claimant to the title and heroine, gets that successful start in the early pages that is so necessary to his happiness in the last, and the lady never really looks like straying far into disconcerting opinions of her own, even the rival himself obliges us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... conventional customs are carefully enforced at our many parties and festivities, and while the dancing classes are as highly prized for the opportunity they afford for enforcing standards as for their ostensible aim, the residents at Hull-House, in their efforts to provide opportunities for clean recreation, receive the most valued help from the experienced wisdom of the older women of the neighborhood. Bowen Hall is constantly used for dancing parties with soft drinks ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... he had seen them pass, but his face showed the ostensible integrity of a jam-thief, who for once finds himself innocent when missing jam ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... susceptible audible credible combustible eligible intelligible irascible inexhaustible reversible plausible permissible accessible digestible responsible admissible fallible flexible incorrigible irresistible ostensible tangible contemptible divisible discernible corruptible ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... righteousness. It needs less the priest, too often with his back to the future and too often the pliant tool of the organisation whose chief concern is, and ever has been, the preservation of itself under the ostensible purpose of the preservation of the truth once delivered, the same that Jesus with his keen powers of penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high moral guide and as an inspirer to high and unself-centred endeavour, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... I not go in without an ostensible errand? For this reason: there are dissenters everywhere, and I could not tell but I might be going into the shop of a dissenter. Now, though, I confess, nothing would have pleased me better than that all the dissenters should return to their old home in the Church, I could not endure the suspicion ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... all Paris, would give me such a fee for such an affair?" Claparon said to him, with a false show of naivete. "You can sleep in peace; my ostensible purchaser is one of those men of honor who are too stupid to have ideas of your kind; he is a retired government employee; give him the money to make the purchase and he'll ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... hear of it, and in that case the Egyptian army might pursue and capture Moses. Such a contingency was not to be contemplated, and accordingly Moses began to make reservations. It must be remembered that all these ostensible conversations with the "Lord" went on in public; that is to say, Moses proffered his advice to the Lord aloud, and then retailed his version of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... and ostensible aim of the book, however, has been kept steadily in view; which is to furnish the best possible exercises for practice in Rhetorical reading. To this end, the greatest variety of style and sentiment has been sought. There is scarcely a tone or modulation, of which the human voice is capable, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... seeker of trout from my boyhood, and on all the expeditions in which this fish has been the ostensible purpose I have brought home more game than my creel showed. In fact, in my mature years I find I got more of nature into me, more of the woods, the wild, nearer to bird and beast, while threading my native ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... strengthening the hands of British sympathizers in the Union, and inducing them to resolve themselves into little coteries or societies—such as was hurriedly formed not long since under the influence and guidance of Mr. H——, of Buffalo, for the ostensible purpose of aiding destitute Canadians, but with the real design of keeping an eye upon Fenianism, and disclosing, as far as the members could divine, all its intentions, hopes and prospects, to the British government. Occasionally ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... of naval prisoners of war, and, to our great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... of her fellow-passengers whom she was unwilling to lose sight of; and Mr. Brandon was not at Barragong, but in Adelaide, so, on the whole, she thought it would be preferable to stay. She gave as her ostensible reason for the choice, her wish to be with Mrs. Phillips during her brother's necessary absence. Mr. Phillips stayed with his wife till she presented him with a second son, and then, as she was doing very well, he left her in the care of ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the war, Steiner, whilst still a Theosophist, started a society of his own, the Anthroposophical Society, a name borrowed from the work of the XVIIth century Rosicrucian, Thomas Vaughan, "Anthroposophica Magica." The ostensible leader of Rosicrucianism in Germany was Dr. Franz Hartmann, founder of the "Order of the Esoteric Rose Croix." Although in some way connected with Engel's Illuminati and more definitely with the Theosophical Society, Hartmann was believed to be ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... logical conclusion does not lie in the fact that ideal impulses are recognized, but in this, that there is no further examination into the more remote causes of their activity. The philosophy of history, on the contrary, particularly as it was treated by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and even the real motives of the men who figure in history, are by no means the final causes of historical events, that behind these events stand other moving forces which must be discovered; but it seeks these forces not in history itself, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... described in more apt phraseology in the police news of the Dumfries Chronicle (October 3, 1909), thus: "It appears that the prisoner had returned to his domicile at the usual hour, and, after partaking of a hearty meal, had seated himself on his oaken settle, for the ostensible purpose of reading the Bible. It was while so occupied that his arrest was effected." With the trifling exception that Burns omits all mention of the arrest, for which, however, the whole tenor of the poem gives ample warrant, the ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... religion. Yes; people, quite matter-of-fact, worldly people, are perpetually sacrificing to ideals. And what is more, quite superior, virtuous people, religious in the best sense of the word, are apt to have, besides the ostensible and perhaps rather obsolete one of churches and meeting-houses, another cultus, esoteric, unspoken but acted upon, of which the priests and casuists ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... and it was generally understood that he was a "fence" of a sort, making a speciality of, and catering to, a certain extensive and vicious class of thieves, the wharf rats, who infested the city's shipping—his ostensible business of a ship-chandler enabling him to handle and dispose of that class of stolen property with ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... circumstance of his being governed by one leading idea, and to his incapability of taking enlarged and comprehensive views of political affairs, such as embrace not only the complex relations of the present, but the ostensible probabilities of the future. His judgment, instead of being determined by profound habits of reflection, an extensive knowledge of history, and accurate acquaintance with human nature, seems to ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... to no other caste fellowship, ministered to by no priests, without any ostensible calling or profession, totally ignorant of everything but their hereditary crime, and with no settled place of residence whatever; they wander as they please over the land, assuming any disguise they may need, and for ever preying upon the people. When they are not engaged in ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and Nattie hastily rose and walked to the window, for no ostensible purpose, and Clem said, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... well as a judicial or poetic type of mind; and to such there is no object too trifling, no fact too remote, not directly or indirectly to minister to the unwritten history which vaguely shapes itself to his intelligence. In his reading and travel it is by no means to the ostensible monuments and trophies of the past that his observation and inquiry are confined: the Letters of Madame de Sevigne give him authentic hints for the social tendencies of France and their influence upon politics, as the blood-stains at Holyrood identify the place of Rizzio's murder; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... we retired to make room for others. There was a silent expression on the countenances of the attendant croupiers, and also on many of the faces of the habitues of the place, which showed that, although this refined and intellectual enjoyment was the ostensible reason of their presence, the real and more appreciated ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... organisation of New York City, whose ostensible objects, on its formation in 1805, were charity and reform of the franchise; its growth was rapid, and from the first it exercised, under a central committee and chairman, known as the "Boss," remarkable political influence on the Democratic side. Since the gigantic frauds practised ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... might regain her strength. There seemed to be no organic trouble. The local physician had been consulted, and said that nothing whatever was the matter, yet had gone away with a grave face after prescribing a simple tonic. The fact was that life was flickering low, as it sometimes does, with no ostensible reason which science could grasp. Evelyn was beyond science. She was assailed in that citadel of spirit which overlooks science from the heights of eternity. No physician but fate ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... held under the walls of the citadel, whose garrison assembled to look on. During the progress of the review the French general, on pretence that he had been ordered from the city, rode with his staff on to the drawbridge with the ostensible purpose of bidding farewell to the Spanish commander. While the Spaniards curiously watched the manoeuvres of the troops others of the French quietly gathered on the drawbridge. At a signal this was seized, a rush took place, and the citadel of Barcelona was added ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... the ostensible mistresses of poets have no existence; and a slight occasion is sufficient to give birth to one. Racan and Malherbe were one day conversing on their amours; that is, of selecting a lady who should be the object of their verses. Racan named one, and Malherbe another. It happening that both ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... source of knowledge, morals, and education, exceedingly dry and unproductive to every person except the master, who was enabled by his honest industry to make a provision for his family absolutely surprising, when we consider the moderate nature of his ostensible income. It was, in fact, like a well dried up, to which scarcely any one ever thinks of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... to escape from the ill-nature of gossip, and you must own that my niece incurs the chance of its notice if she be seen walking alone in these by-paths with a man of your age and position, and whose sojourn in the neighbourhood, without any ostensible object or motive, has already begun to excite conjecture. I do not for a moment assume that you regard my niece in any other light than that of an artless child, whose originality of tastes or fancy may serve to amuse you; and still less do I suppose that she is in danger of misrepresenting ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... magistrates would trouble to enquire into the affair, and all the gentry of Lower Normandy had declared for the family of Combray, which was, moreover, connected with all the nobility in the district. Such were the ostensible reasons which the three confederates put forth, their real reason was only a question of money. They imagined that Mme. Acquet had the free disposal of the treasure buried at the Buquets, which amounted to more than 40,000 ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... frequent visitors to Bateman's shop was Thomas Britton, 'the small-coal man,' who died in September, 1714. His knowledge of books, of music and chemistry was certainly extraordinary, having regard to his ostensible occupation. His collection of manuscripts and printed music and musical instruments was very large. Lord Somers gave L500 for his collection of pamphlets, and Sir Hans Sloane was also a purchaser of many curious articles. He was ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Harlowe; and I finally determined—after a conference with Mr. Ferret, who, having acted for the first Mrs. Harlowe, I naturally conjectured must know something of her history and connections—to take for the present no ostensible steps in the matter. Mr. Ferret, like myself, was persuaded that the sham resuscitation of his first wife was a mere trick, to enable Harlowe to rid himself of the presence of a woman he no longer cared for. "I will take an opportunity," said Mr. Ferret, "of quietly questioning Richards: he must ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... authority a scheme, the advocates for which are not likely to form a numerous sect; but they apply, though not with equal, yet with considerable weight to the project of a council, whose concurrence is made constitutionally necessary to the operations of the ostensible Executive. An artful cabal in that council would be able to distract and to enervate the whole system of administration. If no such cabal should exist, the mere diversity of views and opinions would alone be sufficient to tincture the exercise ...
— The Federalist Papers
... office, and the royal person, they loudly and sincerely professed the strongest attachment. But to Clarendon they owed no allegiance; and they fell on him as furiously as their predecessors had fallen on Strafford. The minister's virtues and vices alike contributed to his ruin. He was the ostensible head of the administration, and was therefore held responsible even for those acts which he had strongly, but vainly, opposed in Council. He was regarded by the Puritans, and by all who pitied them, as an implacable bigot, a second Laud, with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... home looked like a florist's advertisement, but when leafy June came a bunch of Norway oats and a hill of corn were trying to climb the strings nailed up for the use of my non-resident vines. I have planted with song and laughter the seeds of the ostensible pansy and carnation, only in tears to reap the bachelor's button and the glistening foliage of the sorghum plant. I have planted in faith and a deep, warm soil, with pleasing hope in my heart and a dark-red picture on the outside of the package, only to ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... greater pleasure," responded Evatt, warmly, "but in confidence to ye, as a friend of government, I dare to say that my search for a farm is only the ostensible reason for my travels. I am executing an important and delicate mission for our government, and having already journeyed through the colonies to the northward, I must still travel through those of the south. 'T is therefore quite impossible for me to tarry more than the night. I should, in fact, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... it was evident that no real friendship could long continue between Prussia and Austria, and that these two great robbers would surely fall out over the division of the plunder; making it the ostensible cause for dispute, which was in reality their rivalry for the leadership in Germany. In June, the Prussians crossed the Eyder, and took possession of Holstein, appointed a supreme president over the two duchies which passed ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks |
