"Plebeian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marble balustraded stairway that ascended with chaste dignity to Mrs. De Peyster's noble front door. Swiftly they surveyed the scene. Not a policeman was in sight: no one save, across the way on Washington Square benches, a few plebeian lovers enjoying the soft calm of a May ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... a freezing silence and swept out of the garage with a mien that proclaimed her belief that her brother and father were too vulgar and plebeian for her. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... 'Oh, plebeian notion!' said Johnnie, tossing his handsome head, 'he will propose keeping pigs next! What do you say to it, my Emperor? is not your royal mind duly horrified?' The Emperor, as his brother called him, in allusion to his imperial namesake, by no means showed the disgust expected of him: ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... waiting for a train at Exeter, and she then resolved not to permit herself to grieve about their grief, because it could do them no good and it would seriously worry and annoy Roland. And Roland was so loving and generous. At his command modistes and milliners turned his plebeian bride into a fashionable, and certainly into a very lovely lady. She had more pretty costumes than she had ever dreamed of; she had walking-hats and dress-hats, and expensive furs, and she grew more ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... passed the mile-stone of criticism; and still others had left the earth and were floating in full azure of intoxication. Of the many wedding parties that sat down to breakfast, we soon made the commonplace discovery that the more plebeian the company, the more certain-orbed appeared to be the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... thrilled with love, and wounded to the core by hatred. He responds to praise, but is depressed by sneers to a degree which the ordinary man is unable to comprehend. Thus his daily life is pierced with a thousand exquisite emotions to which your well-fed plebeian is stranger indeed. He lives on more exalted heights and yet sinks to inconceivably greater depths. Life truly consists more in our wealth of impression than in the length of our days, and therefore the artist lives at greater intensity, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... declared this man worthy to rank high amongst the best of them; but no one knew where he lived, or what he was. He was rarely known to miss a race; and he was conspicuous amongst the crowd in those mysterious purlieus where the plebeian bookmen, who are unworthy to enter the sacred precincts of Tattersall's, mostly do congregate, in utter defiance of the police. No one had ever heard the name of this man; but in default of any more particular ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... say that I was a bit disappointed in him. Oh! he is quite magnificent enough, and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of late years it seems he has taken up with company rather beneath him. First of all, he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion, turning wheels and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling, brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And on top of it all—and this was the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... perhaps vacancy of mind, that gave to his idea, when once the seed of it had lodged in his mind, so much vigour in growth and room for expansion. Think of him, then, at the age of twenty-five as a typical plebeian Genoese, bearing all the characteristic traits of his century and people—the spirit of adventure, the love of gold and of power, a spirit of mysticism, and more than a touch of crafty and elaborate dissimulation, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even amongst the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these; men in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do somewhat gild their infirmities, and their purses ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... closed immediately, yet Eudoxia Pence had a clairvoyant sense of what was going on behind that rather plebeian partition of black walnut and frosted glass. She knew how they must all be hesitating, fumbling, floundering—snared by a problem wholly new and unfamiliar, and readily falling victims to intimidation from the humblest source. The ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... I should take a wrong direction too. In me too the disintegrating forces predominated; I was greatly deficient, for instance, in family feeling. I remember when still quite little hearing my mother complain of my plebeian tendencies; I always kept with the servants, and took their part against my parents. My family looked more askance at me for upholding the rights of our inferiors than they had done at the idiot who tore everything ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... superior force. Only by the growing power of kings was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had obtained ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... she thought of his fastidious overweening pride, his haughty scorn of everything plebeian, his detestation of all that appertained to the ranks of the ill-bred, a keen pang of almost intolerable shame darted through her heart, and a burning tide surged over her cheeks, painting them fiery scarlet. Would ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... M.A., who had an interview with the prophet at Nauvoo, in 1842, thus describes him: "He is a coarse, plebeian, sensual person in aspect, and his countenance exhibits a curious mixture of the knave and the clown. His hands are large and fat, and on one of his fingers he wears a massive gold ring, upon which I saw an inscription. His eyes appear deficient ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... and miles of forest. Then comes dinner—the inevitable, insufferable, interminable German table-d'hote dinner—and then there is the evening to be got through somehow! Now and then I drop in at a theatre, but generally take refuge in some plebeian Lust Garten or Beer Hall, where amid clouds of tobacco-smoke, one may listen to the best part-singing and zitter-playing in Europe. And so my days drag by—who but myself knows how slowly? Truly, Damon, there comes to every one of us, sooner or later, a time when we say of life as Christopher ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and my divinity shrank into nothing. In their woodland ante-chambers plebeian deities were kept lingering. For be it known, that in due time we met with several decayed, broken down demi-gods: magnificos of no mark in Mardi; having no temples wherein to feast personal admirers, or spiritual devotees. They wandered about forlorn and friendless. And oftentimes in their dinnerless ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... some things cleverness cannot reach. What he failed to feel by instinct, he tried to scorn. It was not the patrician scorn, stupid yet not ignoble, for something hardly seen, hardly judged, merely felt as dull and insignificant; it was the corroding plebeian ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... no doubt of it now. The Princess and her escort—the plebeian upstart—were quite near at hand, and, to the dismay of the smokers, apparently were unaware of their presence in the shadows. Chase's heart was boiling with disappointed rage. His idol had fallen, from a tremendous height to a depth which ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... elapsed since the faded paper had been put up, or a stroke of painting executed, in that dispiriting apartment. Meanwhile, all the agencies of travel-stain had been defacing both. An odour of continual meal-times hung about it; likewise of smoke of every grade, from the perfumed havanna to the plebeian pigtail. The little tables were dark with hard work and antiquity; the chair seats polished with innumerable frictions. A creeping old waiter, who seemed to have known better days in a higher-class establishment, came to receive the new-comer's orders; and Robert sat down to wait for his modest ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... in no mood for laughter. The plebeian was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint; this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an insignificant ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... the millionaire, or nabob, or anything else but a modest little man full of joy at getting into the country. His clothing was not distinctive of wealth, his hands were hard and roughened by years of toil, and his necktie had a plebeian trick of sliding under his left ear. Uncle John was just a plain, simple, good-hearted fellow before he acquired riches, and the possession of millions had in no way ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... was all that was needful; that they had neither lust nor leisure for longer instructions. And this saffron bag,—it came down with such a whack, at every round in the argument! You would have thought my father one of the old plebeian combatants in the popular ordeal, who, forbidden to use sword and lance, fought with a sand-bag tied to a flail: a very stunning weapon it was when filled only with sand; but a bag filled with saffron, it was irresistible! Though ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... must certainly mention— 'Tis Mr. McFudgins, who claims our attention. In mould of plebeian he never was cast (His caste was of gentlemen, wealthy and 'fast'). Not noted for morals, nor even sobriety, He always had moved in the 'highest society.' I had seen him so 'high' as to hiccough and stutter, And once I had noticed him low in the gutter; Yet he was a 'very ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... liveliness I little expected to have found in Bavaria. After turning round and round, with a rapidity that is quite inconceivable to an English dancer, the music changes to a slower movement, and then follows a succession of zig-zag minuets, performed by old and young, straight and crooked, noble and plebeian, all at once, from one end of the room to the other. Tallow candles snuffing and stinking, dishes changing, heads scratching, and all sorts of performances going forward at the same moment; the flutes, oboes, and bassoons snorting and grunting with peculiar ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... itself bravely blooms the delicate hepatica, wrapped in fuzzy furs as if to protect its stems and nodding buds from cold. After the plebeian Skunk Cabbage, that ought scarcely to be reckoned among true flowers—and William Hamilton Gibson claimed even before it—it is the first blossom to appear. Winter sunshine, warming the hillsides and edges ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... where even the finest minds are apt to be afflicted by the disease of timidity, and was doubtless a leading cause of the cordial reception which in England the idea of women's political emancipation has long received among politicians. Bebel's book, speedily translated into English, furnished the plebeian complement to Mill's. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... enjoying the discomfiture of his wives, who have been trying for this half-hour from the corn-house steps to reach the same desirable elevation. And ever and anon he crows to answer the tumultuous cackle of the plebeian fowl in the barn-yard, with whom he never mingles, save when a hawk threatens them with common danger; and then, forgetting all his aristocracy, he seeks the same sheltering apple-tree or clump of briars in the fence-corner, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... 8. If a patrician has stolen ox, sheep, ass, pig, or ship, whether from a temple, or a house, he shall pay thirtyfold. If he be a plebeian, he shall return tenfold. If the thief cannot pay, he shall be put ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Incarnation of the Son of God, the Signory was composed of fourteen Magistrates chosen from among the hosiers, butchers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and stonemasons, who together formed a Great Council known as the Mount of the Reformers. They were a plebeian band, rough and hard as the bronze She-Wolf, emblem of their city, which they loved with an affection at once filial and formidable. But the People, which had set them up over the Commonwealth, had suffered ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... from raising the haldi or turmeric. The Teli-Kalars appear to be a mixed group of Kalars who have taken to the oilman's profession, and the Teli-Banias are Telis who have become shopkeepers, and may be expected in the course of time to develop either into a plebeian group of Banias or an aristocratic one of Telis. In Nimar the Gujarati Telis, who have now grown wealthy and prosperous, claim, as already seen, to be Modh Banias, and the same pretension is put forward by their fellow-castemen in Gujarat itself. "The large class ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... fringe of the river, too, dwelt the lordly waterbuck, magnificent and proud as the stags of Landseer; and the tiny steinbuck and duiker, no bigger than jack-rabbits, but perfect little deer for all that. The incredibly plebeian wart-hog rooted about; and down in the bottom lands were leopards. I knocked one off a rock one day. In the river itself dwelt hippopotamuses and crocodiles. One of the latter dragged under a yearling ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some "Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering, rather than ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... afterwards the divisions in the Whig party alienated him from his oldest friend. The Peerage Bill, introduced in February 1719, was attacked, on behalf of the opposition, in a weekly paper called the Plebeian, written by Steele. Addison answered the attack in the Old VVhig, and this belum plusquam civile—as Johnson calls it—was continued, with increased acrimony, through two or three numbers. How Addison, who was dying, felt after this painful controversy ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... merrily, taking account of stock. "Two pounds of steak—the first cut of the sirloin, I think you said?—waiting, expectant of making glad our hearts, on the rocking-chair, potatoes in plebeian lowliness under the table, tomatoes and two pies on your trunk, Charlotte Russes—delicious Charlotte Russes—where? Ah!—on your bonnet-box, in a plate ordinarily used as a card receiver, and sugar, butter, et cetera, and et ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... environed by very plebeian surroundings. Being ignorant of her birth-right, her sympathies were wholly with her associates. Not that as yet they had had any occasion for active development; only the tendencies were there. In a vague, indefinite way she had heard of kings and queens, of lords and ladies, grand personages, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... an authority, assures me that the Honourable Frederic cannot have been a conspirator for the simple reason that he shaved his chin regularly. Be this as it may, to-night he smiled mysteriously as he rose, and winked at his wife in a most plebeian way. I regret to say that both smile and wink ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and reflection. The vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.—If you would see how Shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with Mrs. Quickly. On the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... well-meaning young nobleman of great good looks and small political experience. His ruling characteristic was pride. Shortly before leaving Halifax he had his carriage-horses shot, lest on his departure they should fall into plebeian hands. His hauteur was fortified by his wife, {71} daughter by a morganatic marriage of King William IV. Could such a man carry through a compromise, by which men of opposite views should sit in his Cabinet? In Canada it had taken all the skill and political experience ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... to imitate Luther. He has told us that he wanted courage; he again repeats it: he says that he, a plebeian, trifling as a man, and having but little learning, has nothing in him which could deserve celebrity. And yet he essayed a timid protest in favor of certain Huguenots who had been burned on the public square. "The work," says Prince Masson, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... plebeian thing to do! I'm ashamed of you, dad! They won't stand for that sort of thing in ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... words for "little boat," "little daughter," "little dog." This is probably due to provincial Custom, and may be compared with the fondness shown in some parts of Scotland for words such as "boatie," "lassie" or "lassock," etc. There are several Hebraisms. Some of the Greek words are frankly plebeian, such as a foreigner would pick up without realizing that they were inelegant. There are also some Aramaic words and phrases which the writer inserts with a true artistic sense and then interprets—Boanerges ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... one hand on the cross-bar and waving the other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... brought uneasiness, redness of the face, and a general impression of being all made of hands. They met the four white horses of an ex-harness-maker, and the superb harnesses of an ex-horse-dealer. Behind these came the gayest and most plebeian equipage of all, a party of journeymen carpenters returning from their work in a four-horse wagon. Their only fit compeers were an Italian opera-troupe, who were chatting and gesticulating on the piazza of the great hotel, and planning, amid ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... were accused of this heinous sin; this brilliant passage concluded with a direct allusion to the "very aristocratic trio before him." Mr. Stanley was declared to be no aristocrat; he was pronounced thoroughly plebeian in all his actions and habits. "Like the individual who has now the honour of addressing you, gentlemen, Mr. Stanley is entirely free, in all his habits and opinions, from the hateful stain of aristocracy." He continued, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... evening marriages were by no means unknown.[1243] After 1753 these abuses ceased. But most readers will remember that until a very recent date Church feeling had not restored to their proper honour the publication of banns. They were thought somewhat plebeian; and the high-fashionable and aristocratic method was to celebrate a marriage by special licence in a drawing-room, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and although a much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks." ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... writes in this prezioes style is like a person who dresses himself up to avoid being mistaken for or confounded with the mob; a danger which a gentleman, even in his worst clothes, does not run. Hence just as a plebeian is recognised by a certain display in his dress and his tire a quatre epingles, so is an ordinary writer ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... invited expressly to meet the Wild Irish Girl; so she must bring her Irish harp. M.C.O.' I arrived at New Burlington street without my harp and with a beating heart, and I heard the high-sounding titles of princes and ambassadors and dukes and duchesses announced long before my poor plebeian name puzzled the porter and was bandied from footman to footman. As I ascended the marble stairs with their gilt balustrade, I was agitated by emotions similar to those which drew from a frightened countryman his frank exclamation in the heat of the battle of Vittoria: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... wished to see France powerful, united, and prosperous; but powerful as a monarchy, united under a king, and prosperous for the benefit of the privileged orders,—not for the plebeian people, who toiled for supercilious masters. The people were of no account politically; were as unimportant as slaves,—to be protected in life and property, that they might thrive for the benefit of those ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... wait upon him on the 22nd. This was the last, and not the least imposing, public act of the old Pope, who, six years after his imprisonment and outrage in the Castle of S. Angelo, was now wedding a daughter of his plebeian family to the heir of the French crown. What passed between Michelangelo and his master on this occasion is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of greater difficulty to find a second consul; the laws required that one consul should be a plebeian; and the plebeian nobility had been fearfully thinned by the events of the war. While the senators anxiously deliberated among themselves what fit colleague for Nero could be nominated at the coming comitia, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget that there was a large class excluded ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... softly, and Tom disappeared around the corner of the house, followed by the dogs, who understood from their master's low order, that a secret reconnaissance was to be made, and moved stealthily behind him single file, big Turk first, then Pete Trone, Esq., and last of all plebeian Grip, his tail fairly sweeping the ground in the excess ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... of bloom, like a granite-strewn hill, revealing upon a closer glance unexpected imagination. I once saw him coming through a little pine grove near The Wayside with my father; it was after our return from England. He was so short, sturdy, phlegmatic of exterior, and plebeian, that I was astonished at my father's pleasure in his company, until I noticed a certain gentleness in his manner of stepping, and heard the modulations of his voice, and caught the fragrance of his humility. One or two letters of his already printed ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... elegance, grace, and beauty, the priestess of the senses, which she deifies by refining and cultivating them. I need not tell you of her wit and audacity; you know them but too well. No one could be more dangerous to us than this creature, a patrician in blood, a plebeian in heart, a poet in imagination. Then, too, there would be Prince Djalma, chivalrous, bold, ready for adventure, knowing nothing of civilized life, implacable in his hate as in his affection, a terrible ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... upon by Venus, derived no benefit from all her charms. True, all eyes were cast eagerly upon her, and every mouth spoke her praises; but neither king, royal youth, nor plebeian presented himself to demand her in marriage. Her two elder sisters of moderate charms had now long been married to two royal princes; but Psyche, in her lonely apartment, deplored her solitude, sick of that beauty which, while it procured ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Thenceforward not the Catholic Church, but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Ideal Film Plot," which appeared in a recent issue of Punch, has quoted an "authority" (anonymous) for the approval of his scenario. It is quite evident that this "authority" (so-styled) must belong to the plebeian ranks of the film-world. It cannot reside in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... these laws should be engraved upon ten tables of brass and hung up in the comitium, or place of assembly of the people, where all might read them and learn under what laws they lived. It is probable that the plebeian demand for reform was so great that the decemvirs did not dare ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... banished!) might have termed the very matins of Cupid. Hard and inexorable was the fate that sent thee thither, Piercie Shafton, to waste thy wit upon country wenches, and thy valour upon hob-nailed clowns! But that insult—that affront—had it been offered to me by the lowest plebeian, he must have died for it by my hand, in respect the enormity of the offence doth countervail the inequality of him by whom it is given. I trust I shall find this clownish roisterer not less willing to deal in blows ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Etruscans, survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern customs welling up from below, at least not until the plebeian element won the support of the founders of the empire, and finally overwhelmed the nobility. At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the sexes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... of ancient noblesse, but in low circumstances, was in a coffee-house at Paris, where was Julien, the great manufacturer at the Gobelins, of the fine tapestry, so much distinguished both for the figures and the colours. The chevalier's carriage was very old. Says Julien, with a plebeian insolence, 'I think, sir, you had better have your carriage new painted.' The chevalier looked at him with indignant contempt, and answered, 'Well, sir. you may take it home and DYE it!' All the ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Goldie and Old Duke. So far so good out in the stables. Within the school Nelly was learning the difference between being the daughter of patrician blood come upon misfortune, and cheerfully making the best of things, and some extremely plebeian blood slopped unexpectedly into fortune, and trying to forget its origin. Had not Nelly possessed such loyal old friends as Peggy and Polly, and made such stanch new ones as Rosalie, Natalie, Stella and Marjorie, her position might have been a very trying one. And now only eight days remained ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... it is, in Southern England than in Northern Scotland. Hence, although we find many iron skull-caps, like hats, used by the military in the fifteenth century; and although we find traces of hats even in the plebeian costumes of the middle ages—yet we look upon the Spanish and Italian hat of the sixteenth century, as the more immediate origin of its degenerate successor, the actual chapeau. We need not trace the variations of its form through the seventeenth century, from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... whether relating to Church or State, was to have the widest scope and fullest expression consistent with private rights and public good—-where the largest individuality could be developed and the patrician and plebeian meet on a common level and aspire to the highest honor within the gift ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... sham attempt to fall on his knees before his superior, and the latter affects a slight motion to raise him. A common salutation has its mode prescribed by the court of ceremonies; and any neglect or default in a plebeian towards his superior is punishable by corporal chastisement, and in men in office by degradation or suspension. In making thus the exterior and public manners of the people a concern of the legislature, society in many respects was considerably ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... first only separated into two ranks; the Patrician and Plebeian; but afterwards the Equites or Knights were added; and at a later period, slavery was introduced—making in all, four classes: Patricians, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... some particularly favored mortals. There was no family, aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father had been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a fierce struggle to complete a college education. In the summer-time he had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter's tuition. He had worked as clerk in summer hotels, as a surveyor's ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... self-preservation punished all open attempts to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast; which boasted itself an aristocracy, and was an oligarchy of plebeian ignorance and meanness; which either dulled men's brains or chilled their hearts. In the presence of this system, Harry Dudley lingers long enough to rescue a slave and to die by the furious hand of the master,—a man in whose soul the best ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... plebeian rabble Dare assail my name at Rome, Where my noble spouse, Octavia, Weeps within her widowed home, Seek her; say the gods bear witness— Altars, augurs, circling wings— That her blood, with mine commingled, Yet shall ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... would bring, and of the invidious distinctions that would have to be made: which is the better lot?—to be the third daughter of a nineteenth-century, healthy, ugly, penniless, clever, middle-aged, moral, free-thinking German Baron by a beautiful, rich, stupid, plebeian Spanish dancer, with one child by a previous marriage, and a tendency to consumption; or the second son of a twentieth-century American Duke, unhealthy, uncultured, handsome, chaste, Ritualist, elderly ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... memories of the nectar of his fatherland, shall chant in rhyme the virtues of his national drink. Yet though its merit has inspired neither of the sister graces, poetry and song, to strike the lyre in its honor, it has had, none the less, an important mission to perform. To its plebeian sister beer, as a healthful beverage, wine must yield the palm. As a common drink, suited to human nature's daily need, it has never been surpassed. If it has nerved no hand to deeds of daring, or struck the scintillating sparks of genius from the human brain, it ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Burns spent a few days with his mother at Mossgiel: he had left her an unknown and an almost banished man: he returned in fame and in sunshine, admired by all who aspired to be thought tasteful or refined. He felt offended alike with the patrician stateliness of Edinburgh and the plebeian servility of the husbandmen of Ayrshire; and dreading the influence of the unlucky star which had hitherto ruled his lot, he bought a pocket Milton, he said, for the purpose of studying the intrepid independence and daring magnanimity, and noble ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... farm upon an overseer, having, what to his unhappy victims must have been the ironical name of "Friend Haskall." The mother and child were now separated. The boy was levied to a Virginian named Freeland, who bore the military title of Major, and carried on the plebeian business of a publican. This man was of an extremely brutal disposition, and treated his slaves with most refined cruelty. His favourite punishment, which he facetiously called "Virginian play," was to flog his slaves severely, and then expose ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... when Ida was holding audience in the parlor, telling wonderful tales of her various acquaintances to whose often plebeian names she added the de as she pleased, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... in the county, for a strictly modern house, without a vestige of antiqueness lingering in its halls and with no faint aroma of bygone days pervading its atmosphere, would have been entirely too plebeian to suit the tastes of ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... judgment is matured, and then proceeds to choose his mate; he does not blunder into heroic fooleries in the way of self-abnegation; for, if his choice is judicious, the lady will prevent him from hurting his own prospects. Whether he be aristocrat or plebeian, he knows the worth of money, and he knows how to despise the foolish beings who talk of "dross" and "filthy lucre" and the rest. Mere craving for money he despises; but he knows that the amount of "dross" in a man's possession ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... up from the Monet pier through the village, the party had the innocuous, cheerful, plebeian, only-man-is-vile air of all large parties ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... How she stamped the floor with her dainty foot when I hinted at the fact that my maternal grandfather was neither duke nor lord! How she hushed my 'impertinence,' as she styled it, with such invectives as 'fool, idiot, plebeian'! Heigho! But I felt that it was unmanly in me to provoke mother so, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... the woman on the couch seemed to move. Instead of the filmy draperies torn by his own hand, she wore the habiliments of poverty and looked at him out of a face of plebeian prettiness; a face of dimly confused features. The apparition rose and stood waveringly upright. "You murdered me, too!" it said in a voice of vague simplicity. Eben Tollman tried to scream and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... add, that his interference, on such grounds, was anything but successful. One of the few merits, indeed, of public schools is, that they level, in some degree, these artificial distinctions, and that, however the peer may have his revenge in the world afterwards, the young plebeian is, for once, at least, on something ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... presence of two young gentlemen, whose physiognomies were far from English, and who spoke French with the purest accent of Touraine. Both had coats of arms on their seal-rings, so that no one might be ignorant of their rank as nobles. Fougas was too plebeian to fancy the nobility much; but as he had left a compartment full of Britons, he was happy to ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... elbowing their way through a crowd of dirty emigrants or lowbred homespun fellows in petticoats or breeches in our country, in order to reach a table spread for a hundred or more, I lose sight of their pretensions to gentility and view them as belonging to the plebeian herd. To restore herself to her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, where she may dine decently. . . . After all, the old-fashioned way of five or six miles, with ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... civilisation. The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities of oratory he made up in sturdy common sense. The will-o'-the-wisp ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... myself— could I do it? As well say to the poet who exhausts himself, and whose genius is consuming his health, 'Pause in the midst of the inspiration which carries you away!' No! I could not; I—I! abdicate this royalty which I exercised, and return, ruined, ashamed, mocked, to the state of a plebeian—unknown; give this triumph to my rivals, whom I had until then defied, ruled, crushed! No, no, I could not! not voluntarily, at least. The fatal day came, when, for the first time, my money was ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... going to live in it. Wherein was the object of keeping it open for Belle Todd and himself when more and more he wished for semi-solitude? Noise and crowds and luxuries irritated him. He liked meals such as the one he had ordered, the plebeian joy of taking off tight shoes and putting on disreputable slippers, sitting in an easy-chair with his feet on another, while he read detective stories or adventurous romances with neither sense nor ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised at large, greatly enhanced in value by a profuse edging of manuscript notes from a gifted pen—a phenomenon calculated ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the tooth of an equal—but the rule was not made general. [Footnote: 5 HOBHOUSE, Morals in Evolution, I, chapter iii, Sec 3; New York, 1906.] In state after state it has been found just to treat differently the patrician, the plebeian, the slave, the man, the woman, the priest. In the very state to which Butler belonged, benefit of clergy could be claimed, up to relatively recent times, by those who could read. The educated criminal escaped hanging for offences for which ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... were placed the temple of patrician, and that of plebeian modesty. At the foot of this hill is seen the temple of Vesta, which yet remains whole, though it has been often menaced by the inundations of the Tiber. Not far from thence is the ruin of a prison for debt, where it is said a fine trait of filial piety was displayed, which is ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... she exclaimed, when the Lieutenant was out of hearing, "think of it! A real prince, and my ambition has never risen higher than a paltry count, or some plebeian of that sort. He's mine, Dorothy; ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... Lucy's lips, accompanied with the words, "I wonder who she thinks wants to associate with that plebeian!" ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... it for him at that moment that I had been bred a gentleman, else in another instant his lifeless body would have lain at my feet. A plebeian blade would have made short work with the ruffian, and I confess that my instincts of fair-play were sorely tried. I had before me a man who had sought my life—a deadly foe—a deadly foe to her ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... compliance would have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... while they were literally loaded with ornaments of massive gold, encrusted with gems, upon the hair, neck, and arms. And now, for the first time, Harry had leisure to note—and to strongly disapprove of— the characteristic ornament which was adopted to distinguish the Peruvian noble from his plebeian brother. This consisted of a massive circular disc of gold, wrought into the semblance of a wheel, and measuring in some cases three or four inches in diameter, which was inserted into the cartilage of each ear, which, of course, had previously been pierced and gradually distended ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this—the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never tolerate a daughter-in-law of such origin; would never ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... not allowed to be sung by the Moors after the conquest. (Guerras Civiles de Granada, tom. i. p. 350.) Lord Byron, as the reader recollects, has done this ballad into English. The version has the merit of fidelity. It is not his fault if his Muse appears to little advantage in the plebeian dress of the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... shall sneer? Who dare again to say we trace Our lines to a plebeian race? 330 Roundhead and Cavalier! Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud; Dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud, They flit across the ear: That is best blood that hath most iron in 't. 335 To edge resolve with, pouring without stint For what makes manhood dear. Tell us not of Plantagenets, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... R[a]ma as still further types of the All-god. Thus it is that Vishnuism, whether as Krishnaism or as Ramaism, is to-day a pantheistic religion. But, while R[a]ma is the god of the philosophical sects, and, therefore, is almost entirely a pantheistic god; Krishna, who was always a plebeian, is continually reverting, so to speak, to himself; that is to say, he is more affected by the vulgar, and as the vulgar are more prone, by whatever sectarian name they call themselves, to worship one idol, it happens that Krishna in the eyes of his following is less of a pantheistic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... pledged their revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis. Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... weed to calm their weary brains and bodies, Reuben—ate peanuts. It had been a curious passion of his, from the time when as a boy he was first presented with a penny for his very own, to spend all his spare cash on this peculiar luxury; and the slow munching of this plebeian delicacy had the same soothing effect on him that a good cigar or an old clay pipe had upon his brother-man. But from the day of his marriage all this was changed; the dimes and the nickels bought no more peanuts, but went to ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... Prince or plebeian, Valmond played his part with equal aplomb at the simple home of Elise Malboir and at the Manoir Hilaire, where Madame Chalice received him. His dress had nothing of the bizarre on this occasion. He was in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the same source as the exaggerated statement of Archbishop Des Ursins, that on another occasion Henry promised that his plebeian soldiers should be ennobled and invested with collars of SS. This cannot be taken directly from Des Ursins, whose history of the reign of Charles VI., though written in the fifteenth century, was not published ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... speckled Like a common milking-maid's, Whom the sun hath freckled. Then the Wild-Rose is a flirt; And the trillium Lily, In her spotless gown, 's a prude, Sanctified and silly. By her cap the Columbine, To my mind, 's too merry; Gossips, I would sooner wed Some plebeian Berry. And the shy Anemone— Well, her face shows sorrow; Pale, goodsooth! alive to-day, Dead and gone to-morrow. Then that bold-eyed, buxom wench, Big and blond and lazy,— She's been chosen overmuch!— Sirs, I mean the ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... these, sixty were of the family of Heremon, settled in the northern part of the island; twenty-nine of the posterity of Heber, settled in the south; twenty-four of that of Ir; three issued from Lugaid, the son of Ith. All these were of the race of Miledh; one only was a firbolg, or plebeian, and one ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... after the reception to have a word and several drinks with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he had come forth to find neither coach nor automobile in attendance. There had been nothing for it but the plebeian trolley. Accordingly, when he heard a foreign voice of feminine timbre and felt a light pressure against his knee, he only snorted. What he next felt against his knee was the impact of a half-shove, half-blow, ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with the greatest kindness, and after having good-humouredly told me that I often expressed myself with too much freedom—a fault I was never solicitous to correct—he added: "I regret your absence much. You were very useful to me. You are neither too noble nor too plebeian, neither too aristocratic nor too Jacobinical. You are discreet and laborious. You understand me better than any one else; and, between ourselves be it said, we ought to consider this a sort of Court. Look at Duroc, Bessieres, Maret. However, I am very much inclined ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... broken up by the Parliament, but was buried and saved by the brazier who purchased it, and so reappeared after the Restoration. To the left, the familiar words "Morley's Hotel" designate an edifice about half windows, where the plebeian traveller may sit and contemplate Northumberland House opposite, and the straight-tailed lion of the Percys surmounting the lofty battlement which crowns its broad facade. We could describe and criticize the statue as well as if we stood under it, but other travellers have done ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... with an affectation and imitation of Scripture phraseology—form a vocabulary burlesquing even the Sacred Book itself, and suggesting by their sounds the true character of the Mormon Church—a very essence of plebeian hypocrisy. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... square next my own royal compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... classed in tribes. The nobler ones, who could count up from old Trojan, Latin, or Sabine families, were called Patricians—from pater, a father—because they were fathers of the people; and the other families were called Plebeian, from plebs, the people. The patricians formed the Senate or Council of Government, and rode on horseback in war, while the plebeians fought on foot. They had spears, round shields, and short pointed swords, ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and entitled by his office to the entrance of the senate, at first the especial dignitary of the patricians, was subsequently the choice of the people. The less national and less honored deities were usually served by plebeian ministers; and many embraced the profession, as now the Roman Catholic Christians enter the monastic fraternity, less from the impulse of devotion than the suggestions of a calculating poverty. Thus Calenus, the priest of Isis, was of the lowest origin. His relations, though ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... functions, when in the situation of municipal officer; and the hoary-headed cadman and crack-brained Pedagogue was appointed a necessary evil vehicle for industriously circulating said maniac calumny. Why did not this base Plebeian, anterior to his giving publicity to the tartaric nausea that rankled at his gloomy heart, forward the corroding philippic, and bid defiance to my contradiction? No, no; he knew full well that with his scanty stock of English ammunition ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... irretrievably buried. He walked on—majestic as he had never been before, in the brilliant throne-room of the Tuileries or the mystic vastness of Notre Dame when the Imperial crown sat so ill upon his plebeian head. . . . He walked on—silent, exalted and great—great through ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... pretty sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind where—somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very plebeian?' ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dost thou shake? Dishonour not the vengeance I designed: A queen, and own a base Plebeian mind! Let it drink deep in thy most vital part; Strike home, and do me reason in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... preaching an uncompromising and deadly class struggle. In fact, they are organized upon the basis of a class struggle. "The history of society," they say, "is a history of class struggles. Patrician struggled with plebeian in early Rome; the king and the burghers, with the nobles in the Middle Ages; later on, the king and the nobles with the bourgeoisie; and today the struggle is on between the triumphant bourgeoisie ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... in the course of this sketch, to give a reason why so sounding and aristocratic a name as Grandville has been changed into the plebeian one of Grindwell. I might account for it by adducing similar instances of changes in the names of cities through the bad pronunciation and spelling of foreigners. For instance, the English nickname Livorno Leghorn, the Germans insist on calling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... utmost Hell Many a dark League, reduc't in careful Watch Round thir Metropolis, and now expecting Each hour their great adventurer from the search 440 Of Forrein Worlds: he through the midst unmarkt, In shew plebeian Angel militant Of lowest order, past; and from the dore Of that Plutonian Hall, invisible Ascended his high Throne, which under state Of richest texture spred, at th' upper end Was plac't in regal lustre. Down a while He sate, and round about him saw unseen: At last as from a Cloud his fulgent ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... one might kill. That the tribunes might be always easily found, they were not allowed to go more than one mile beyond the city walls. Their houses were to be open night as well as day, that any plebeian unjustly dealt with might flee thither ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... insolvent debtors may have been unusually numerous; or the maltreatment of some particular debtor, once a respected freeman, in his condition of slavery, may have been brought to act vividly upon the public sympathies; like the case of the old plebeian centurion at Rome—first impoverished by the plunder of the enemy, then reduced to borrow, and lastly adjudged to his creditor as an insolvent—who claimed the protection of the people in the forum, rousing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... search it proved to be no shot-wound, but a mere clour, or bruise, whereof the reason was now apparent, he having been struck by the ball of a golfer (from us concealed by the dunes, or bunkers, of sand) and not by the discharge of my weapon. At this moment a plebeian fellow appeared with his arma campestria, or clubs, cleeks, irons, and the like, under his arm, who, without paying any attention to our situation, struck the ball wherewith he had felled my kinsman in the direction of ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... the temple of Minerva is to the unions of organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association with this temple (aedes). This political side of her activity is the only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... audacious an opinion?" exclaimed Nicephorus; "is it for such as thou to suppose for a moment that the music which the wife and daughter of the Emperor might condescend to make, was intended to afford either matter of pleasure or of criticism to every plebeian barbarian who might hear them? Begone from this place! nor dare, on any pretext, again to appear before mine eyes— under allowance always of our imperial ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the claws being relieved and modelled with the highest care and most artistic finish. The form of the image, in fact, generally resembles more the beautiful green beetle which I have often caught in the mountains around Rome, than his plebeian and utilitarian cousin, the Scarabaeus pilularius. The contour of the stone beneath the Scarabaeus proper is markedly distinguished from the insect portion, and ornamented with a relieved cornice, more or less elaborate according to the general finish of the stone. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... We were standing side by side in the silence of the morning, the dimness fading round us, the air taking a golden tinge. My surroundings were plebeian; my costume was comic; yet ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... social and political institutions are the product of economic forces. In all periods there have been antagonistic economic classes whose relative power is determined by struggles between them. "Freedman and slave," he says, "patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... rendezvous with her faithful attendant. They never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening both were thoughtful. Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts much to heart. She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... of truly fashionable people is, that they never say or do spiteful, or vindictive things; revenge and spite they consider low, plebeian, and vulgar; besides, vindictiveness of any kind disturbs their equanimity, puts them out of their way, and levels them with the people who may have injured or annoyed them; they cannot endure jaundice of body ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... effeminate or painty. The skin of the female's back kneeling is much more carnous. I had small time to pick out praise or blame, for two lord-like Bucks came in, upon whose strictures my presence seemed to impose restraint: I plebeian'd off therefore. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... end of his term. Cincinnatus gave it up at the end of eight days. The dictator was forbidden to dispose of the public funds without the authority of the Senate, or to go out of Italy. He could not even ride on horseback without the permission of the people. He might be a plebeian; Marcius Rutilus, and Publius Philo were dictators. That magistracy was created for very different objects: to organize fetes for saints' days; to drive a sacred nail into the wall of the Temple of Jupiter; on one occasion to appoint the Senate. Republican Rome had eighty-eight dictators. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Why? What is this gulf that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of which you make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord, and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this—she is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... aristocracy; he set to work to create a noblesse, and dukes and counts were fabricated by the dozen. Very soon the strong love of depreciation, that is inherent in every Frenchman, seized upon even the higher plebeian classes, and, discontented as they were at seeing the liberties of the movement of '89 utterly confiscated by a military chief, and antipathetic as they have been, time out of mind, to what are called les traineurs de sabre, the civilians of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... squares. They fortified themselves, however, in the streets and lanes, which they barricadoed. They made fortresses of their houses, and fought desperately from the windows and the roofs, and many a warrior of the highest blood of Granada was laid low by plebeian hands and plebeian weapons in this ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... the rich prostitutes whatever of worth may be in him. A good many artists have maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... common accord, order and right against the spirit of license and revolution, the fatal bias of the age. But, from their very first steps, the different elements of the great royalist party, old or new, aristocratic or plebeian, plunged into discord, equally blind to the weakness with which it infected them all, and thus opening the door to the hopes and efforts of their common enemies, the revolutionists. From thence, and not from the electoral law of 1817, or from its principle, came the ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he informed the seaweed as he lifted the soft grey hat from his bald head and adjusted the enormous pearl pin in the pale pink satin tie; and he sighed stertorously as he complacently patted his knee with a podgy hand, upon the manicured plebeian fingers of which shone two ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... boiling. I had forgotten I was a plebeian, I was remembering I was a man. Cost what it might, I would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... address, so fraught with the pathetick, John remain'd dumb, as a Pythagorean; Seeming to hint, "Roger, you're a plebeian Peripatetick." ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... the purpose of shocking them. These passages, they can easily avoid. This book, however, was written that it might be read: not only read by the Solon, Socrates, Plato, or Seneca of the laity or the profession, but even by the billy-goated dispositioned, vulgar plebeian, who could no more be made to read cold, scientific, ungarnished facts than you can make an unwilling horse drink at the watering-trough. Human weakness and perversity is silly, but it is sillier to ignore that it exists. So, for the sake of boring ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Mont Blanc at his best until we were many miles away; then he lifted his majestic proportions high into the heavens, all white and cold and solemn, and made the rest of the world seem little and plebeian, and cheap ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... several occasions, and when meek admirers had murmured, "How dreadful," she had tossed her head and had said, "But I can't help it, you know, all of my family have had tempers," and as Judy's family was known to be aristocratic and exclusive, her more plebeian friends had envied and had tried to emulate her, generally ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... her (the stupid creature!) up in arms against Kincaid for his treatment of her "bonny lamb,'' without the sense to see whither she was urging her young mistress; blind to the consequences, but "nursing her wrath'' and striding purposefully from Warriston to Holyroodhouse on her strong plebeian legs, not once but several times, in search of Weir! What is known in ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... State!" And always there were some men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... fare. Then at last the meal was over, and she heaved a sigh of relief that all had passed off without catastrophe and with credit to the family. No one had broken the fragile glass, no one had betrayed a plebeian ignorance of the convenances, nor showed ill-bred surprise. They had examined the menu with an understanding air, as though every other name was not as Greek to their ears, and had refrained from any signs of approval more noticeable than pressures of feet ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... gates of the Mythe House; great iron gates, a barrier as proud and impassable as that which in these times the rich shut against the poor, the aristocrat against the plebeian. John, glancing once up at them, ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of these fountain-heads. But the point on which turned the history of the race was, at what period, at what stage of their social progress, they should have their laws put into writing. In the western world the plebeian or popular element in each state successfully assailed the oligarchical monopoly, and a code was nearly universally obtained early in the history of the Commonwealth. But in the East, as I have before mentioned, the ruling aristocracies tended to become religious rather than military or political, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... exposed herself, produce the slightest apparent effect upon her; her step never faltered, her eye never quailed. What a partial thing is fame," he continued, "and how poor a motive to duty! The names of Palafox and Zaragoza are forever wedded. How few remember the old plebeian, Tio Jorge, who counseled and spurred on both governor and populace ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... is another fault in Rousseau that springs from this lack of complete artistic integrity. He is something plebeian: he suffers a slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures. Occasionally there grins through his design, and ever so little disfigures it, a touch of fatuity. He cannot help being glad that he is so simple and so good, nor quite resist telling us about ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... violence than ever after the expulsion of the decem'viri, but finally terminated in the complete triumph of the people. The Roman constitution became essentially democratical; the offices of the state were open to all the citizens; and although the difference between the patrician and plebeian families still subsisted, they soon ceased of themselves to be political parties. From the time that equal rights were granted to all the citizens, Rome advanced rapidly in wealth and power; the subjugation of Italy was effected within the succeeding century, and ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... had come to them in an unexpected manner. They had been credibly informed that an ancestor of plebeian Willowes was once honoured with intermarriage with a scion of the aristocracy who had gone to the dogs. In short, such is the foolishness of distinguished parents, and sometimes of others also, that they wrote that ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... were expiated truly!" croaked an old woman from a booth by the road. "Who does not know that, as Varro says, your patrician magistrates would rather lose a battle than that a plebeian consul should triumph! Varbo, the butcher, dreamed last night that his son's blood was drenching his bed, and when he awoke, it was water from the roof; and Arates, the Greek soothsayer, says that Varbo's son has been slain in ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... however, and Silvia on rare occasions managed to break parole and make adroit escape from surveillance. Then she would speed to the top of the boundary wall that separated the stable precincts from an alluring alley which was the playground of the plebeian progeny of the ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... Dalai Lama! He is the Great Mogul of politicians! And as for letters, science, and talents, he holds them all by patent right! He is such a monopolizer that no man else can get a morsel! If he were not a plebeian, I could most sincerely wish you were married to him; for then, whenever my soul should hunger and thirst after morality, I should know where to come and get a full meal. Though perhaps his not being a gentleman would be no ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... have visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish sculptures, and the ancestral memorials of great families, quite at their wicked and plebeian pleasure. Nevertheless, there are some most exquisite and marvellous specimens of flowers, foliage, and grape-vines, and miracles of stone-work twined about arches, as if the material had been as soft as wax in the cunning sculptor's hands,—the leaves being represented with all their veins, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... a beginning. Try "Blenheim House" (all the houses here either bear ducal, naval, or frankly plebeian names, I observe). Ring: startling effect—grey-mouldy old person, with skeleton hands folded on woollen tippet, glides in a ghastly manner down passage. They really ought to put up a warning to people with nerves, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... vexation and shame. People boast here of the equality of our institutions, and then try their best to break up the social level. In a genuine Aristocracy, where they have endeavored to preserve a gulf-stream of noble blood in the midst of the plebeian Atlantic, and a man holds his distinction by the color of the bark on his family tree, and the kind of sap that circulates through it, there is no danger of any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... trampled on, or sold their vassals at their pleasure or caprice. The bishopric of Liege offered also the same contrast; the domains of the nobility being governed with the utmost harshness, while those prince-prelates lavished on their plebeian vassals privileges which might have been supposed the fruits of generosity, were it not clear that the object was to create an opposition in the lower orders against the turbulent aristocracy, whom they found it impossible to manage single-handed. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the Count of Narbonne, knight of honor of one of the daughters of Louis XV., Minister of War under Louis XVI. The most rigid, the most precise etiquette prevailed in the Imperial residences. The high dignitaries and marshals concealed their plebeian names under pompous titles of princes and dukes. Madame de Mailly, the widow of a marshal of the royal period, had been admitted to the rank and privileges of the wives of the grand officers of the crown, and had figured as a marshal's widow, at the reception of January 1, 1811. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand |
