"Unpolished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been busy watering his flowers and mowing his lawn. He had worked really hard, and when the evening began to close in he thought he would go into the tea-house and have a rest. On each side of the curly-legged tea-table of unpolished wood stood a wicker arm-chair. Into one of these chairs Mr. Jenkins-Smith sank with a sigh of content. Then he lighted his pipe, stretched out his short legs, and, gazing at his beautifully trimmed garden, prepared to enjoy a delicious hour of well-earned repose. Things were going well with him; ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... King of Scotland, and Constantine, the usurper of that crown, wherein both the generals were killed. About two miles higher up the river, on the Bathgate road, is a circular mound of earth (of great antiquity, surrounded with large unpolished stones, at a considerable distance from each other, evidently intended in memory of some remarkable event). The whole intermediate space, from the human bones dug up, and graves of unpolished stones discovered below the surface, seems to have been the scene ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... and I am now at Les Eyzies, in the valley of the Vzre: a paradise of exceptional richness to the scientific bone and flint grubber on account of the very marked predilection shown for it by the men of the Stone Age, polished and unpolished. It is about five in the morning, and the woods along the cliffs are just beginning to catch the pale fire of the rising sun. Just outside my open window are about twenty chickens in the charge of two mother hens, and as they have not been long awake, they do their utmost ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... rough hoe-blades (easily mistaken for palaeolithic implements; they are, however, much flatter); polished serpentine or jasper celts; lentoid (lentil-shaped), amygdaloid (almond-shaped), and discoid beads of cornelian, crystal, obsidian, &c., unpolished; nails of translucent quartz and obsidian (obviously imitations of metal types); hard grey pottery sickles, pottery cones of various sizes, and pottery objects like gigantic nails bent up at the ends; pottery painted with designs in black, usually geometrical (see illustration XIV, Fig. 1), but ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... to spring from that gigantic continent whose streams are mighty rivers and whose lakes are seas; but, valueless as these, when embosomed in their native woods, were the treasures of the old man's mind, unawakened as they were by education, and unpolished even by contact with the open world, yet still, amid the crust contracted in the life he had led, rays of the inward diamond glittered forth. The wilderness had always been his dwelling—in the land he had left, his early days had been passed in hunting the red deer or ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... the ladies opposite in curtsies as profound, if less exquisitely graceful. Off came the hats of the gentlemen; the bows were of the lowest; snuffboxes were drawn out, handkerchiefs of fine holland flourished; the welcoming speeches were hearty and not unpolished. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... starch all taken out of 'em," their occupant confounded, and themselves for sale. "Abe's" old "boss" said he was "astonished," and so he had good reason to be, but everybody could see it without his saying so. His "style" couldn't win among the true and shrewd, though unpolished "boys" in coarse garments. They saw ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... originally cast, must have been among the gentle, the refined, and the luxurious, and that she was now, for the first time, exposed to discomfort, hardship, and suffering, among companions, who, however kind and courteous of conduct, were unpolished in their habits, conversation, and feelings, and, in every other respect, unfitted to ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the surface, noting by the feel whether or not it takes hold and also looking with a lens to see if a scratch has been made. Do not mistake a line of steel, left on a slightly rough surface, for a true scratch. Frequently on an unpolished girdle of real gem material the file will leave a streak of steel. Similarly when using test minerals in accordance with what follows do not mistake a streak of powder from the yielding test material, for a true scratch in the material being tested. The safe way is to wipe the spot ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... answers: "Who can tell?" When, "during what geological periods did this nascent race flourish?" the same impressive voice replies: "In prehistoric ages, the duration of which no one can now determine." Yet it must have been Sanskrit, however barbarous and unpolished, since "the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans and Kelts" were living within "the same precincts" with that nascent race, and the testimony borne by language has enabled the philologist to trace the "language ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and little attention was devoted to them, the time being in a great degree engrossed with lessons in needle-work, which was performed with much skill. The nuns had no very regular parts assigned them in the management of the schools. They were rather rough and unpolished in their manners, often exclaiming, "c'est un menti" (that's a lie), and "mon Dieu" (my God), on the most trivial occasions. Their writing was quite poor, and it was not uncommon for them to put a capital letter in the middle of a word. The ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... mother-in-law called her "meat-ball face." She had a hoarse voice, and altogether she might have given me the impression of being drunk had there not been something pleasing in her hoarseness as well as in that droll face of hers. That she was American-born was clear from the way she spoke her unpolished English. Was Nodelman the henpecked husband that his mother advertised him to be? I wondered whether the frequency with which his wife used his first name could be accepted ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in doing that," observed Blanche Farrow dryly. "Our ancestors lived less comfortably than we do now, Miss Brabazon. Instead of beautiful old Persian carpets, there must have been rushes on all the floors. And as for the furniture of those days—it was probably all made of plain, hard, unpolished wood." ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... empty-headed fop's. One could put into it neither heart nor soul: I hated it. The play—a mere trifle—ran chiefly on the efforts of a brace of rivals to gain the hand of a fair coquette. One lover was called the "Ours," a good and gallant but unpolished man, a sort of diamond in the rough; the other was a butterfly, a talker, and a traitor: and I was to be the butterfly, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of 'em rose from obscurity,' says Andy, 'and they'll live in it till the town gets to using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and don't go too far from the saloons and keep making ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... emotions of his heart. His eye, eagle-like in its unflinching brightness, flashed forth the lightnings of the fiery and haughty spirit within. Language, direct in its unstudied simplicity, graphic and vigorous, and glowing with the thoughts and images of a luminous though unpolished mind, flowed from his lips majestic and resistless. Added to all was that awakening voice whose echoes had so long resounded through thy great North-west. Now it rang out, stern, abrupt, imperious, like the call of a trumpet to battle; now softened ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... almost perfection in its way; but there was something of that ostentatious simplicity whereby the parvenu endeavours sometimes to escape from the vulgar glitter of his wealth. The chairs and tables were of unpolished oak, and of a rustic fashion. There were no pictures, but the walls of the dining-room were covered with majolica panels of a pale gray ground, whereon sported groups of shepherds and shepherdesses after Boucher, painted on the earthenware with the airiest brush in delicate ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... antiquity, to whatever country belonging, of apparent asperity to the present times, would do well in laying aside unfounded prejudices; that the age to which Miss Macgilligan so frequently alluded, was one of the most ignorant barbarism; and the unpolished females of that day unequal to a comparison with those of the present, as much so, as the savage squaws of America with the finished beauties of an ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... form their estimate of the literary qualifications of the ministers of Scotland, in the seventeenth century, from the grotesque "Pockmanty Sermon" of the Rev. James Row, minister at Monnivaird and Strowan, from Hobbes's Behemoth, from the unpolished, unauthenticated(43) discourses of some of the field preachers, or from that collection of profanity and obscenity ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... upon the unpolished walnut table had no shade or globe upon it, and it glared with all the brilliancy of clean glass, and much wick and oil. The dining-room was orderly as ever. The map of Palestine, the old Bible, and some newly-acquired commentaries, obtruded themselves painfully ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... certain measure of civility and complaisance. He is fond of, and seeks the patronage of Europeans of position. In manners, the Negros and Panay Visayo is uncouth and brusque, and more conceited, arrogant, self-reliant, ostentatious, and unpolished than his northern neighbour. If remonstrated with for any fault, he is quite disposed to assume a tone of impertinent retort or sullen defiance. The Cebuano is more ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... earth as soon as the vanishing of the glacial period made this earth inhabitable, the Vedic poets were certainly not primitive. If we mean by primitive, people who were without a knowledge of fire, who used unpolished flints, and ate raw flesh, the Vedic poets were not primitive. If we mean by primitive, people who did not cultivate the soil, had no fixed abodes, no kings, no sacrifices, no laws, again, I say, the Vedic poets were not primitive. But if we mean by primitive the people who have been the first ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... material of the national character is to be seen. He always reminds me of the mother-of-pearl shell, rude and unpromising on the outside, but by friction exhibiting a fine interior. However it may be thought a paradox to pronounce the Frenchman unpolished, I hold to my assertion. If the whole of "jeune France" sprang on their feet and clapped their hands to the hilts of their swords, or more probably to their daggers, to avenge the desecration of the only shrine at which nine-tenths of them worship, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the grand simplicity of its narrative, which contrasts with the artificial graces of later Sanscrit poetry. The poetry of Kalidasa, for instance, is ornate and beautiful, and almost scintillates with similes in every verse; the poetry of the Maha-bharara is plain and unpolished, and scarcely stoops to a simile or a figure of speech unless the simile comes naturally to the poet. The great deeds of godlike kings sometimes suggest to the poet the mighty deeds of gods; the rushing of warriors suggests the rushing ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... seems to have been a Japanese warship in whose presence each of the two parties wished to demonstrate how powerful it was. The carabinieri resolved to maintain order, and as an inmate of the seminary made, they said, an unpolished gesture at them from a window they went off and, with some reinforcements, broke into the Slav Reading-Room and damaged it considerably. The Italian officers and men at Zadar went about their duties for some time without permitting ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Lordship to use only powder?" "Powder," cried sir William, "that is an excellent jest. My lord always loads with six small slugs." "Six slugs! ah the bloody minded villain! It is confounded hard that a gentleman cannot pass through life, without being degoute with these unpolished Vandals. Ah, mon cher ami, I will put the affair entirely into your hands: do, pour i'amour de Dieu, bring me out of this scrape as well as you can." "Well my dear Prettyman, I will exert myself on your account; but, upon my soul, I had rather have an affair ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... away until their summits seem to dip in the blue sky; streams, cold and clear, leaping from crag to crag, and rushing down nobody knows whither. Like the country, may we not look to find the people unpolished, rugged and uneven, capable of the noblest heroism or the most infernal villainy—their lives full of lights ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... dispersed as all these people are, they are far more closely drawn together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They live in the mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which surpasses our imagination. Such intercourse and community as they have is only a dawn. We look towards the day, the day of the organized civilized world state. The first clear intimation of that conscious ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... distance we have travelled! Gone is the young dreamer with his world of moonshine, for here roars the Maine lumberjack with all the uncouth vigour and rude natural expressiveness of the living satyr. It is life; primal, uncovered, and unpolished—the ebullient, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... a Socialist after the habit is once firmly established. But while at first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous of whacks, but to ride straight at you and hit ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... ungainly fashion past this person's shop— This person standing at his door— And used base language of an unpolished nature, Calling him Ugly Yellow Bastard, Hop Fiend and Dirty Doper, Eater of Dogs and Cheater at Puckapoo, Son-of-a-Bitch and ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke
... his bigness, his great burly figure and plain face, there was something very pleasant about him. He was rough and unpolished, his dress was careless and of colonial cut; and yet one could not fail to see he was a gentleman. His boyishness and fun would have delighted Dick, who was of the same calibre; only Dick was far cleverer, and had more in ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... thrown over his shoulders, gold bangles on his arms and ankles, a beautifully worked coronet of gold adorned with crimson feathers of the flamingo, two necklaces—one composed of lions' teeth and claws, and the other, and larger, of unpolished stones that seemed to emit a faint glint of ruddy fire—round his neck. He was armed with a sheaf of short, broad-bladed stabbing spears, and was seated on a sort of throne entirely covered with an immense kaross of lions' skin. Behind ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... As they therefore build like children, that build with wood as it comes from the wood or forest, and with stones as they come from the pit, even so do they who pretend to build God a house of unconverted sinners, unhewed, unsquared, unpolished. Wherefore God's workmen, according to God's advice, prepare their work without, and make it fit for themselves in the field, and afterwards build ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stigmatizes the language of the Pelasgic settlements. In corroboration of Mueller's opinion we may also observe, that the "barbarous-tongued" is an epithet applied by Homer to the Carians, and is rightly construed by the ancient critics as denoting a dialect mingled and unpolished, certainly not foreign. Nor when the Agamemnon of Sophocles upbraids Teucer with "his barbarous tongue," [6] would any scholar suppose that Teucer is upbraided with not speaking Greek; he is upbraided with speaking Greek inelegantly and rudely. It is clear that they who continued ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fescennine verses into a kind of regular drama, upon the model of the Greeks. He was followed some time after by Ennius, who, besides dramatic and other compositions, (60) wrote the annals of the Roman Republic in heroic verse. His style, like that of Andronicus, was rough and unpolished, in conformity to the language of those times; but for grandeur of sentiment and energy of expression, he was admired by the greatest poets in the subsequent ages. Other writers of distinguished reputation in the dramatic department ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... all as rude, unpolished and grotesque as most of those above quoted. Some of them are simple, noble and dignified, the undistorted outcome of the higher and better traits of the mountaineer's character. Among such are, "Dogs bark at the moon, but the moon does not therefore fall upon the earth;" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... his little "bunk" and opened it. The stripping of the rough outer packing revealed a suave, unpolished cedar cabinet with two doors and a key that dangled from one of the knobs. Tam opened the case after some consideration and disclosed shelf upon shelf tightly packed with bundles ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... when she resolved to cure Hamilton, as she had lately done her husband, of all his remaining tenderness for Lady Castlemaine. For her it was no difficult undertaking: the conversation of the one was disagreeable, from the unpolished state of her manners, her ill-timed pride, her uneven temper, and extravagant humours Lady Chesterfield, on the contrary, knew how to heighten her charms with all the bewitching attractions in the power of a woman to invent who wishes to ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... of the papers or documents upon which the alteration of writing was suspected. Take a bottle with a wide mouth from ten to eleven centimeters in height, and the opening from five to six centimeters in width. This last is covered by a disk of unpolished glass. Into the bottom of this vessel introduce from twenty to thirty grams of ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... for the Mulgrave Islands. Here was another sacrifice; an innocent child of nature shot down, merely to gratify the most wanton and unprovoked cruelty, which could possibly possess the heart of man. The unpolished savage, a stranger to the more tender sympathies of the human heart, which are cultivated and enjoyed by civilized nations, nurtures in his bosom a flame of revenge, which only the blood of those who have injured him, can damp; and when years have rolled ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stuart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging either them, or the 'Ode to the Rain'. As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines—there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment on the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... and aristocratic men, not specially interested in the welfare of the common people. They were strongly desirous of perpetuating the class distinctions observed in Virginia society. A very marked contrast was apparent between them and the tall, gaunt, coarse-attired, unpolished member ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... describe the outline simply in the air. Speech in its inception was as much expressed by the finger as the tongue; perhaps the fingers talked before the mouth, and in a sense writing preceded language. Uttering the unpolished sound which in their primitive society indicated the mammoth, the savage drew rapidly a figure with his finger, and his companions read his meaning written in the air. To this day it is common for the Italian peasantry ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... AND QUERIES" (which, by the way, I have only recently become acquainted with) I saw the Queries of your correspondent G. P. P. upon the above subject, and having some time ago had occasion to investigate it, I accumulated a mass of notes from various sources,—and these I send you, rough and unpolished as they are, in the hope that in the absence of better information, they may prove to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... people who have no written language go far toward giving their language its leading characteristics. The Grebo people are a well-made, quick, and commanding-looking people. In their intercourse with one another, however, they are unpolished, of sudden temper, and revengeful disposition.[90] Their language is consequently monosyllabic. A great proportion of Grebo words are of the character indicated. A few verbs will illustrate. Kba, carry; la, kill; ya, bring; mu, go; wa, walk; ni, do; and so on. This is true ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, or the soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden in an unpolished diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like power of beholding all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of some mysterious ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... untaught, And self-assisted (save by Heaven), she sought To render each his own, and fairly save What might help others when she found a grave; By prudence taught life's troubled waves to stem, In death her memory shines, a rich, unpolished gem. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Mr. Forster. I had not yet made the personal acquaintance of Forster, and did not dream of the close ties by which we were eventually to be united; but I was drawn to him from the very first by an instinctive feeling of liking and esteem. His blunt speech, his careless dress, his unpolished but genuine manners, all seemed to me to mark him out as that rare creature a thoroughly honest politician; and whilst I sat in the Reporters' Gallery, there was no one after Mr. Gladstone whose speeches delighted me more ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... nothing else, in those ages, than that kind of romantic gallantry to recommend them. Ignorant of letters, arts, and sciences, and every thing that refines human nature, they were, in every thing where gallantry was not concerned, rough and unpolished in their manners and behavior. Their time was spent in drinking, war, gallantry, and idleness. In their hours of relaxation, they were but little in company with their women; and when they were, the indelicacies of the carousal, or the cruelties of ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... German is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into sudden thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or groans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at least from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... old study at home, with its solid oak furniture, its cushioned window-seats, its unfashionable curtains of red moreen; and in the faint sickness of that memory, it seemed to her that she could be more comfortable at a deal table, with a kitchen chair set upon unpolished boards, than in the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... turned over. Glory! Its runners were of the round-spring variety—the very best. They were dull blue and unpolished as yet, of course; but that fact was merely an incentive to much coasting. Another knife filled his heart with joy! for naturally the birthday knife was broken-bladed by now. A large square package proved to contain a model steam engine with a brass boiler and what looked like a lead cylinder; ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... generous instincts that were quite free from vanity. Her natural kindliness gave her the charm of good-breeding, and this settled her in the estimation of Mrs. Lawrence. She might have possessed all the virtues in the calendar, but an inharmonious, unpolished turn or act would have tabooed her. We generally ascribe this grace to life-long culture, or a certain inheritance of blood, but it occasionally springs from ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... proficient in manly exercises. First came the bowmen, who shot at a copper drum. Siddharta had the mark moved to double the distance, but the bow that was given him broke. Another was sent for from the temple—of unpolished steel, so stiff that no one could bend it to get the loop of the string into the groove. To Siddharta, however, this was child's play, and his arrow not only pierced the drum, but afterwards continued its flight ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... excels—finds fault with the social custom by which 'men are excited and provoked by healths and rounds of toasts to fuddle themselves in as indecent a manner as if they were in a tavern or in the most unpolished company.' In connection with this state of affairs it may be interesting to give the prices of different wines at that period: Fine Old Red Port was sold at 17 shillings a dozen, Claret at 12s., Priniac at 17s.; Muscat ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Menenius, an eloquent man, and a favourite with the people, because he was sprung from them, should be sent to negotiate with them. Being admitted into the camp, he is said to have simply related to them the following story in an old-fashioned and unpolished style: "At the time when the parts of the human body did not, as now, all agree together, but the several members had each their own counsel, and their own language, the other parts were indignant that, while everything ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... through the Desert, and at Sebastopol; and says he means to get Ticknor to publish his travels, and the story of his whole adventurous life, on his return home. A free-spoken, confiding, hardy, religious, unpolished, simple, yet world-experienced man; very talkative, and boring me with longer visits than I like. He has brought home, among other curiosities, "a lady's arm," as he calls it, two thousand years old,—a piece of a mummy, of course; also some coins, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... still warming. He saw the glow kindle in her eyes and illumine her sombre face; it was like the leaping of light to the surface. As she stood midway of the entrance, in a frame of unpolished logs, her white and black beauty against the smoky gloom of the interior, the red sunset before her feet, he recalled swiftly an allegorical figure of Night he had once seen in an old engraving. Then, before ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and rich Glanville, possessed of the most various accomplishments, and the most remarkable personal beauty, should be supplanted by a needy spendthrift (as Tyrrell at that time was), of coarse manners, and unpolished mind; with a person not, indeed, unprepossessing, but somewhat touched by time, and never more comparable to Glanville's than that of the Satyr ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... up and said: "I also am fully in accord with what M. Stambulivski has just said. No matter how severe his words may have been in their simple unpolished frankness, which ignores the ordinary formalities of etiquette, they entirely express our unanimous opinion. We all, as representing the opposition, consider the present policy of the Government contrary to the sentiments and interests of the country, because by driving it to make common ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... uttered with rectitude of articulation, and force of emphasis, of which I had entertained no conception previously to my knowledge of him. Notwithstanding the uncouthness of his garb, his manners were not unpolished. All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation. He uttered no sentiment calculated to produce a disadvantageous impression: on the contrary, his observations denoted a mind alive ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... clownish, ill-mannered, insulting, uncouth, bluff, coarse, impertinent, raw, unmannerly, blunt, discourteous, impolite, rude, unpolished, boorish, ill-behaved, impudent, rustic, untaught, brusk, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The atmosphere and customs of frontier life, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... his associates had made (to use a familiar term) a great sensation among the Roman orators, who soon split into two parties,—the one adhering to the rough unpolished manners of their forefathers, the other favouring the artificial graces which distinguished the Grecian rhetoricians. In the former class were Cato and Laelius,[262] both men of cultivated minds, particularly Cato, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... causes above stated, he is aware that his work must not unfrequently appear somewhat disjointed and unconnected, and the style rude and unpolished: he has, nevertheless, permitted the tree to remain where he felled it, having, indeed, subsequently enjoyed too little leisure ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... immense chimney, up which, when the fire was out, of a winter's night you could see the stars; over which of a windy night you could imagine the witches riding by, borne on the deep howling of the blast; the great beam and the gun slung to it; the heavy oaken table, unpolished, greyish oak; the window in the thick wall, set with yellowish glass; the stone floor, and the walls from which the whitewash peeled in flakes; the rude old place was very ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Walter Ashley. He was the son of a country gentleman of moderate fortune, at whose house I had more than once passed a week in the shooting season. Walter was an excellent fellow, and a perfect model of the class to which he belonged. By no means unpolished in his manners, he had yet a sort of plain frankness and bonhomie, which was peculiarly agreeable and prepossessing. He was not a university man, nor had he received an education of the highest order; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... with this viaticum, upon her domestic career, I began to read a Review, which, although conducted by very young men, is excellent. The tone of it is somewhat unpolished, but the spirit is zealous. The article I read was certainly far superior, in point of precision and positiveness, to anything of the sort ever written when I was a young man. The author of the article, Monsieur Paul Meyer, points out every ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... after dinner. Henry thanked her, and her father and mother were pleased to see her eagerness to oblige her brother. The cynical Forester alone refused his sympathy. He looked at the flower-pot with marked disdain. Archibald, who delighted to contrast himself with the unpolished Forester, and who remarked that Flora and her brother were both somewhat surprised at his unsociable silence, slyly said, "There's something in this flower-pot Miss Campbell, which does not suit Mr. Forester's correct taste; I wish he would allow us ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... entirely without consulting me. I have heard that the captain is very rude and unpolished in his manners. To be sure, I have only seen him standing behind your chair; but he has never even asked after my health. I only speak for your interest, as you ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... heartily desired remained your captive but in confidence of your candid disposition am now your humble petitioner to bee so far happified as to be deemed your honouring servant. Let then, I beseech you (worthy, lady) this poor and unpolished character of my due respects and firm affections achieve the happiness of kissing your fairest hands and you shall thereby engage ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... scan the appearance of my new acquaintance. He was rather above the medium height, squarely and somewhat stoutly built, and had an easy and self-possessed, though rough and unpolished manner. His face, or so much of it as was visible from underneath a thick mass of reddish gray hair, denoted a firm, decided character; but there was a manly, open, honest expression about it that won your confidence in a moment. He wore a slouched hat and a suit of the ordinary ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the infancy of their state, were entirely rude and unpolished. They came from shepherds; they were increased from the refuse of the nations around them; and their manners agreed with their original. As they lived wholly on tilling their ground at home, or on ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... that Jacqueline had gone to Italy with an old Yankee and his daughter—he being a man, it was said, who had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by keeping a bar-room in a mining camp in California. This last was no fiction, the cut of Mr. Sparks's beard and his unpolished manners left no doubt on the subject; and she wound up by saying that Madame d'Avrigny, whom no one could accuse of ill-nature, had been grieved at meeting this unhappy girl in very improper company, among which she seemed quite in her ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... The exquisite bed was framed for a canopy, but lacked it; the coral satin recesses of the dressing-table had faded almost colourless; the chintz of the slender chairs had lost its pattern. An oval cheval glass reflected the floor on whose long unpolished surface sprawled two magnificent white bear skins. But with these furnishings the elegance ended, for nowhere in the cottage were to be found such curious, mocking contrasts. The walls, which should have displayed wanton Watteau cherubs, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... horse was never saddled that the Geebungs couldn't ride; But their style of playing polo was irregular and rash — They had mighty little science, but a mighty lot of dash: And they played on mountain ponies that were muscular and strong, Though their coats were quite unpolished, and their manes and tails were long. And they used to train those ponies wheeling cattle in the scrub: They were demons, were the members ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... sky. The Quadrupeds listen'd with sullen displeasure, But the tenants of air were enraged beyond measure. The PEACOCK display'd his bright plumes to the Sun, And, addressing his Mates, thus indignant begun: "Shall we, like domestic, inelegant Fowls, [p 4] As unpolished as Geese, and as stupid as Owls, Sit tamely at home, hum drum with our Spouses, While Crickets and Butterflies open their houses? Shall such mean little insects pretend to the fashion? Cousin Turkey-cock, well may you be in a passion! If I suffer such insolent airs to prevail, May Juno pluck ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... would hasten into his clothes and take a droschky at once for the house of his host. If anything went wrong, however, he sent his sincere regrets and apologies to Ivan, begging him to excuse an unpolished workman for his seeming rudeness, and sending a thousand thanks for ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... rather she had never noticed, that he was a short, thick-set, middle-aged man, that he wore mutton-chop whiskers, and that his lips were overhung by a long dark moustache. His manners were those of an unpolished and somewhat commonplace man. But while she thought of his grey eyes her heart was thrilled with gladness, and as she dreamed of his lonely life of labour and his ultimate hopes of success, all her old sorrows and fears seemed to have evaporated. Then suddenly and ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... contains many excellent and useful things, which - we have no doubt - will be of great benefit to anyone sincerely seeking the truth, we did not wish to deprive you of them. And so that you would be aware of, and find less difficult to excuse, the many things that are still obscure, rough, and unpolished, we wished to ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... parliamentary nominees, except a certain simple, straightforward, firm, though unassuming statement of his opinions; and even this took place but seldom. The recollection of this gentleman confirms the account of Sir Jonah Barrington, that—"His address was unpolished; he spoke occasionally, and never with success; and evinced no promise of that unparalleled celebrity ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers. There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... has it been demonstrated that beri-beri is due to the use of polished rice, which was up to the time of this discovery regarded as far superior to unpolished rice as an article of food, and is still much better liked by the Filipinos than is the unpolished article. Many of these deaths were from beri-beri, and were due to a misguided effort to give the prisoners ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... men who talk but seldom, he had the gift when he chose to speak of reproducing his experiences in vivid though unpolished language. He told her of the days when he had worked on the banks of the Congo with the coolies, a slave in everything but name, when the sun had burned the brains of men to madness, and the palm wine had turned them into howling devils. He told her of the natives of Bekwando, of the days ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way of explication [a style much in use in this school], facere, as it were, replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fashion,—to insert again my haud credo for a deer.... Twice sod simplicity, bis coctus! Oh thou monster ignorance, how deformed ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... for the various branches of mendicancy are languishing, and Yuen Yan can have no secret store of wealth. Do not hesitate to offer a higher wage than you would as an affair of ordinary commerce, for your safety depends upon it. Having secured Yan, teach him quickly the unpolished outlines of your business and then clothing him in robes similar to your own let him take his stand within the shop and withdraw yourself to the inner chamber. None will suspect the artifice, and Yuen Yan is manifestly incapable of betraying ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... having never been printed, being entirely written for the satisfaction of a friend's curiosity, in relation to the original manners and customs of the people of which it treats, and which, being those of savages in the primitive state of unpolished nature, may perhaps, to a philosophical enquirer, afford more amusement and instruction than those of the most refined societies. What man really is, appears at least plainer in the uncultivated savage, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... stop, where Thames' translucent wave Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave, Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil, And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill, Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow, And latent metals innocently glow, Approach! Great Nature studiously behold, And eye the mine without a wish for gold Approach—but awful! Lo, the Egerian grot, Where, nobly pensive, ST JOHN sat and thought, Where British sighs from dying ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... their card-tables. An officer, who had been removed from the Portuguese settlements in India to serve in Brazil, suspected that these stones were diamonds, and sent a few to Portugal. The jewellers of Lisbon, having never seen a diamond in its unpolished state, laughed at the idea of such rude pebbles being of any value, and so the inquiry was for some time dropped. But the Dutch consul at Lisbon managed to procure one of the stones, and sent it to Holland, then almost the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... author had expended much thought and care. He was the type of the hardy and bold adventurer, rough and unpolished, perhaps, but of true and sterling metal, who, by dint of his vigorous common sense and honest, energetic nature, should at once clear and lighten whatever in the atmosphere of the story was obscure and sombre; and, by the salutary contrast of his fresh and rugged character with ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... little episode made the disappointed applicant inveterate against the Government, for he commenced, soon afterwards, the publication of an Opposition paper, in which be exhibited the rude ability of an unpolished and half-educated man. [Footnote: C. Lindsey's 'Life of W. Lyon Mackenzie,' Vol. ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... for God and her master to conquer and understand. Her flesh was cold and colourless,—there were no surface tints on it,—it warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,—out of her heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It had been cut from the head of a man, who, unconscious, simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... high renown, Saw his unlettered sire Still by the old log fire, Saw the unpolished dame— And the dunghill from which ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... champion of the oppressed, and the punisher of vice. With many defects, Cato was morally and intellectually one of the greatest men Rome ever produced. He had the ability and the determination to excel in everything which he undertook. His style is rude, unpolished, ungraceful, because to him polish was superficial, and, therefore, unreal. His statements, however, were clear, his illustrations striking; the words with which he enriched his native tongue were full of meaning; his wit was keen and lively, and his arguments went straight ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Indicated by the Early Cultures.—It is convenient to divide the early culture of man, based upon his development in art into the Paleolithic, or unpolished, and the Neolithic, or polished, Stone Ages.[2] The former is again divided into the Eolithic, Lower Paleolithic, and the Upper Paleolithic. In considering these divisions of relative time cultures, it must be remembered that the only way we ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... from the regulation—he wore a blue forage cap with short, heavy visor of unpolished leather shadowing the bridge of his nose; his dark blue jacket was shell-cut; over it he wore a slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... immense power and sublime expression, gave to the rude, unpolished poetry of these psalms a magic and an effect which the most exalted Puritans rarely found in the songs of their brethren, and which they were forced to ornament with all the resources of their imagination. Felton believed he heard the singing of the angel who consoled the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which he was a master, but in Greek and Hebrew. He had read a great deal of divinity, and almost all the historians ancient and modern: So that he had great materials. He had with these an extraordinary memory, and a copious but unpolished expression. He was a man, as the Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding. He was haughty beyond expression, abject to those he saw he must stoop to, but imperious to all others. He had a violence of passion that carried him often to fits like madness, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... critics stupid enough to say that Balzac knew nothing of the art of painting young girls; they make use of the inelegant, unpolished word rate to qualify his portraits of this genre. To be sure, Balzac's triumph is, we admit, in his portraits of mothers or passionate women who know life. Certain authors, without counting George Sand, have given us sketches ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... they oblige us to be, and in order to defend ourselves it is just that nobody should shirk, that all should obey. Discipline does not quarrel with Revolution. Remember the armies of the first Republic—all citizens, Generals as well as soldiers, but Hoche, Kleber and the others were rough-hewn, unpolished benefactors who knew how to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the work which he had begun, but his friends completed the task from his own manuscript. About this, in the next place, and about our own version, we shall say a few words. The work, being founded on a sort of geometrical system, is unpolished and devoid of literary style; so it seems rather rugged. But that is easily forgiven in consideration of the excellence of the matter. He requested me himself, only a few days before his death, to translate it into Latin while he should correct it; and I willingly turned my attention and studies ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... These were bold innovations in a state in which tradition was still so powerful; but they could scarcely have been of serious danger to Julia, if her passionate temperament had not led her to commit a much more serious imprudence. Agrippa, compared to her, was old, a simple, unpolished man of obscure origin who was frequently absent on affairs of state. In the circle which had formed about Julia there were a number of handsome, elegant, pleasing young men; among others one Sempronius Gracchus, a descendant of the famous tribunes. Julia seems toward the ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... not yet been learned, but tools of stone were carefully shaped and polished. To this stage the North American Indian belonged at the time of the discovery of the continent. In the Paleolithic stage, stone implements were chipped to rude shapes and left unpolished. This, the lowest state of human culture, has been outgrown by nearly every savage tribe now on earth. A still earlier stage may once have existed, when man had not learned so much as to shape his weapons to his needs, but used chance pebbles ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... range of all fashionable bathing-places. The climate was atrocious; the neighbourhood was worse; the wine was execrable and was often hard frozen, and eaten like a lozenge, and his only society was that of the barracks, or a few rich but unpolished corn-factors, who speculated in grain and deals on the shores of the Euxine. To write verses from morn to dewy eve was the unfortunate poet's only solace: and he sent so many reams of elegies to Rome, that his friends came at last to vote him a bore, and he was reduced, for want of fitting ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... earth, Pippo was a clever knave in his way, and was quite equal to a display of the higher branches of his art, whenever chance gave him an audience capable of estimating his qualities. On the present occasion he was obliged to address himself both to the polished and to the unpolished; for the proximity of their position, as well as a good-natured readiness to lend themselves to fooleries that were so agreeable to most around them, had brought the more gentle portion of the passengers within ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Italy may be pronounced pretentious and disappointing. It is constructed of various kinds of unpolished marble and terra-cotta panels. A tall archway is flanked by two wings having each two smaller arches, the entablatures of which are enriched, if we must so term it, with gaudy mosaic figures, portraits and heraldic bearings, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... is finished, the fowl is killed, and its blood mixed with rice is placed in nine dishes and one polished coconut shell. From these it is transferred to nine other dishes and one bamboo basket. These are placed in a row, and nine dishes and one unpolished shell are filled with water, and placed opposite. In the center of this double line is a dish, containing the cooked flesh of the rooster, also some rice, and one hundred fathoms of thread, while between the dishes are laid ten half betel-nuts, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... to each other; and as Walter accustomed himself to the ungainly appearance of his companion, he came to the generous conclusion that Seppi had an honest and well-meaning heart in spite of his rough and unpolished ways. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... care nor tutor's art Could plant with pains in his unpolished heart, The best instructor, Love, at once inspired, As barren grounds to fruitfulness are fired. Love taught him shame, and shame with love at strife Soon taught the sweet ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... glass shows that the surface of unpolished glass is formed by a layer of crystals, or of sand, with the faces projecting out in all directions and at all angles. The result is, that a beam of light from the eye strikes one or more of these faces and is diverted ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... grains are prepared for use as food, they have two coverings. One is a coarse husk that is thrashed off and leaves the grain in the form of unpolished rice and the other, a thin, brown coating resembling bran. This thin coating, which is very difficult to remove, is called, after its removal, rice polishings. At one time, so much was said about the harmful ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... exchanged with him in life the friendly nod; hands that were calloused with the axe and shovel, and Judge Temple's aged slave in narrow home—all sleeping beneath the same sward and glancing shadows are not less honored now than is the plain, unpolished slab of stone, bearing two dates,—of birth and entrance into the life eternal of James ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... be laughed at in those times, they think themselves now sufficiently entitled to laugh at ours. Learning I never saw in any of them; and wit no more than they could remember. In short, they were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolished age, and more unlucky to live to a refined one. They have lasted beyond their own, and are cast behind ours; and, not contented to have known little at the age of twenty, they boast of their ignorance ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... a short table of the contents. This is the only liberty he has taken with the original Memoirs, the translation itself being as near as the present improved state of our language could be brought to approach the unpolished strength and masculine vigour of the French of the age of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... large, with rafters across the ceiling. At one end was a huge fireplace and rugs were scattered over a smooth but unpolished floor. Betty rose from an easy chair as he entered. She had been reading. John saw that she ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! Pooh! and Bah! for all holy men. I give spurnings to them all for fools, knaves, ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... still speaking in French: for, though he could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so barbarous and unpolished a tongue. "By my faith, sirs," he continued, half turning in his saddle to address his escort, "unless my woodcraft is sadly at fault, it is a stag of six tines and the finest that we have roused this journey. A golden ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first saw Maupassant when the Contes de la Bcasse and Bel Ami were published were somewhat astonished at his appearance. He was solidly built, rather short and had a resolute, determined air, rather unpolished and without those distinguishing marks of intellect and social position. But his hands were delicate and supple, and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... in a humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable from such places in Italy. It was marked by a monument distinctly unique in a European country. It was a huge unpolished boulder, over which creeping green vines ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... their solid matter and strong reasonings; and let them despise all those graces and ornaments which engage the senses and captivate the heart; they will find (though they will possibly wonder why) that their rough, unpolished matter, and their unadorned, coarse, but strong arguments, will neither please nor persuade; but, on the contrary, will tire out attention, and excite disgust. We are so made, we love to be pleased better than to be informed; information is, in a certain ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... certain degree of authority. He had founded, under Danton, the Cordeliers club, the club of coups de main, as the Jacobins was the club of radical theories; and he convulsed it to its very centre, by his eloquence untaught and unpolished. He compared himself to the peasant of the Danube. Always more ready to strike than to speak, Legendre's gesture crushed before he spoke. He was the mace of Danton. Huguenin, one of those men who roll from profession to profession, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... heroic type. Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... plaster, and coloured in so lively a manner, that it has an enchanting effect. The garden is suitable to the house, where arbours, fountains, and walks, are thrown together in an agreeable confusion. There is no ornament wanting, except that of statues. Thus, you see, Sir, these people are not so unpolished as we represent them. 'Tis true, their magnificence is of a very different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion, they have a right notion of life. They consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... of a tasty leg, deliciously cooked, and sat in a very unpolished way listening to the curious cries, when, raising his eyes, they encountered Brazier's, who ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... me to say that I took a distinctive dislike to him from the moment he arrived? On the contrary, I had every reason to be predisposed toward him; and, indeed, was rather agreeably surprised than otherwise—he was not nearly so uncouth and unpolished as, somehow, I had pictured his life would have made him. Do you understand, Jimmie? He was kind, sympathetic; and, in an apathetic way, I liked him. I say 'apathetic' because I think that best describes my own attitude toward every ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... awkwardness. Of course, much must be placed, in both cases, to the account of clumsy instruments; but the instrument of speech differs from others in this: it is fashioned by, as well as for, its use; and a rude, unpolished language is, therefore, an index, in two ways, of the want of eloquence among the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... its length and width, while the stunted vaultings of its darkly-frescoed ceiling produced an impression of heaviness rather than of space. Bookcases, dwarfed as were all the other furnishings, lined the walls to within about two feet of the spring of the said vaulting. Made of red cedar and unpolished, the cornices and uprights of them were carved with arabesques in high relief. An antique, Persian carpet, sombre in colouring and of great value, covered the greater portion of the pale pink and gray mosaic pavement of the floor. Thick, rusty-red, Genoa-velvet ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Roman arts, they destroyed the monuments of them, with an industry not inferior to that with which their posterity have since studied to preserve or to recover them. The convulsions occasioned by the settlement of so many unpolished tribes in the empire; the frequent as well as violent revolutions in every kingdom which they established; together with the interior defects in the form of government which they introduced, banished security and leisure. They prevented the growth ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... "Panna") see vols. vi. 15, i. ix. 325, and in latter correct, "Euritic," a misprint for "dioritic." I still cannot believe diamond-cutting to be an Indian art, and I must hold that it was known to the ancients. It could not have been an unpolished stone, that "Adamas notissimus" which according to Juvenal (vi. 156) Agrippa gave to his sister. Maundeville (A.D. 1322) has a long account of the mineral, "so hard that no man can polish it," and called Hamese ("Almas?"). ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... money!' he once said. Thus, one day a young friend was met by him and taken back to dinner, 'quite in a quiet way, just to meet a very old friend of mine, a man of great talent, and most charming companion.' When they arrived they found 'the old friend' already installed, and presenting a somewhat unpolished appearance, which the young man explained to himself by supposing him to be a genius of somewhat low extraction. His habits at dinner, the eager look, the free use of his knife, and so forth, were all accounted for ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... carriage, had a box at the opera, and on opera nights had receptions after the performances. The wheel of fortune had turned, and she was now in the ascendant. Lord Wellington was among her admirers. But the brusque, unpolished duke disgusted the refined French lady by his boast to her, "I have given Napoleon ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... overlooked. The polished gentleman of sentimental fiction has so long served as the type of smooth and conscienceless depravity that urbanity of demeanor inspires distrust in ruder minds. On the other hand, the blunt, unpolished hero of melodrama and romantic fiction has lifted brusqueness and pushfulness to a pedestal not wholly merited. Consequently, the kinship between conduct that keeps us within the law and conduct that makes civilized life worthy to be called such, deserves to be noted ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... is in the right, on the contrary, to show that when correctness, nay, when perfection is demanded, he can still shine, and be himself, whatever fetters are imposed on him. But I will say no more on this head; for I am neither so unpolished as to tell you to your face how much I admire you, nor, though I have taken the liberty to vindicate Shakspeare against your criticisms, am I vain enough to think myself an adversary worthy of you. I am much more proud of receiving laws from you, than of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... stage. Chance and jollity first found out those verses which they called Saturnian and Fescennine; or rather human nature, which is inclined to poetry, first produced them rude and barbarous and unpolished, as all other operations of the soul are in their beginnings before they are cultivated with art and study. However, in occasions of merriment, they were first practised; and this rough-cast, unhewn poetry was instead of stage-plays for the space of a hundred ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... tried to employ in the service of public affairs opinions and rules of living, as rough, new, unpolished or unpolluted, as they were either born with me, or brought away from my education, and wherewith I serve my own turn, if not so commodiously, at least securely, in my own particular concerns: a scholastic and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... poetry is and has been the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite company—to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on my head—I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that character, at least ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... who was not quite so unpolished as the commodore, and had certain notions that seemed to approach the ideas of common life, made a less uncouth appearance; but then he was a wit, and though of a very peculiar genius, partook largely of that disposition which is common ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... difficulty indeed, yet nevertheless I bore it. And then I bade him at least take a myrtle-wreath and recite to me some portion of Aeschylus; and then he immediately said, "Shall I consider Aeschylus the first among the poets, full of empty sound, unpolished, bombastic, using rugged words?" And hereupon you can't think how my heart panted. But, nevertheless, I restrained my passion, and said, "At least recite some passage of the more modern poets, of whatever kind these clever things be." And he immediately sang a passage of Euripides, how a brother, ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... dependent on physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive creature, whether he be a mediaeval saint, or she a militant suffragette, or they both be simply ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... this time found a new friend in the son of a small farmer named Turnill. The two youths read together, Turnill assisting Clare with books and writing materials. He now began to "snatch a fearful joy" by scribbling on scraps of paper his unpolished rhymes. "When he was fourteen or fifteen," to use his mother's own words, "he would show me a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one side and scrawled all over on the other, and he would say, 'Mother, this is worth silver and gold,' and I used to say to him, 'Ay, boy, it looks as if it wur,' ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... ruf: a contemptuous reference to the alliterative poetry which was at that time very popular, in preference even, it would seem, to rhyme, in the northern parts of the country, where the language was much more barbarous and unpolished ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... towns, but I do not think that their religion is the same as ours; our traders say that their language can be understood by them, although more rough and unpolished. I have heard my father say that he considered that all the country lying east of the Nile, and of its eastern branch that rises in Abyssinia and is called the Tacazze, belongs to ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... uncouth to look upon: thy face is unshaven, thy shirt dirty, and lo! thy overalls smell of paint and grease; thy speech is ungrammatical, and thy manners unpolished—but give us the grasp of thy honest hand, and the warm feelings of thy generous heart, fifty, yes a million times sooner than the mean heart and niggard hand of the selfish cur that calls ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... and unpolished people had guided themselves so far on in their journey of life, by a religious sense of duty and desire to do right. Ten thousand weaknesses and absurdities might have been detected in the breasts of both; ten thousand vanities additional, possibly, in the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... contemporaneously criticized by Antipater, are considered under STOICS. He is said to have composed seven hundred and fifty treatises, fragments alone of which survive. Their style, we are told, was unpolished and arid in the extreme, while the argument was lucid ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various |
