"Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... BEEF.—It has been all but universally admitted, that the beef of France is greatly inferior in quality to that of England, owing to inferiority of pasturage. M. Curmer, however, one of the latest writers on the culinary art, tells us that this is a vulgar error, and that French beef is far superior to that of England. This is mere vaunting on the part of our neighbours, who seem to want la gloire in everything; and we should not deign to notice it, if it had occurred in a work of small pretensions; but M. Curmer's ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should this little vulgar creature be expected to have more ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... words being often erroneously pronounced by polite people, as well as by the vulgar, their correction, in this place, agreeably to Cobb's Dictionary, it is presumed, will be useful to many. Some of the mispronunciations given ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... do you think now, when you know that I was ten times as bad as you—ten times as foolish and vulgar!" ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... Mrs. Perguson's chair. He was a fellow I had seen before and never liked, a vulgar-featured man, too fat for his years, which may have been some twenty-eight. He played the best hand of all of them, and, as my aunt declared, that was quite enough; for the rest she could keep any man in order. I held back in the gloom of the hall, looking at their busy gaiety, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... a very formidable and perplexing indictment, sparkling with learning and bristling with difficulties. But when these mellifluous mysticisms are once translated into "the vulgar tongue" they prove to be, strange to say, easily within the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... to do to get money?" Waymark exclaimed, when his pipe was well alight. "I'm growing sick of this hand-to-mouth existence. Now if one had a bare competency, what glorious possibilities would open out. The vulgar saying has it that 'time is money;' like most vulgar sayings putting the thing just the wrong way about. 'Money is time,' I prefer to say; it means leisure, and all that follows. Why don't you write a poem on Money, Casti? I almost feel capable of it myself. What can claim ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... Jerusalem, when it was besieged by the Romans, as he had been informed. This information must have been taken from the Romans: for Josephus never recounts the numbers of those that were besieged, only he lets us know, that of the vulgar, carried dead out of the gates, and buried at the public charges, was the like number of 600,000, ch. viii. sect. 7. However, when Cestius Gallus came first to the siege, that sum in Tacitus is no way disagreeable to Josephus's history, though they were become much ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in the druggist's window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, and such doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, nevertheless, springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... had been made, and this among them. We may say that it had been a part of the bargain. Lord Buntingford had objected mildly, being a young man devoted to business, fond of his own order, rather shy, and not given to dancing. But he had allowed his mother to prevail. 'Of course they are vulgar,' the Duchess had said,—'so much so as to be no longer distasteful because of the absurdity of the thing. I dare say he hasn't been very honest. When men make so much money, I don't know how they can have been honest. Of course it's done for a purpose. It's all very well saying that it isn't ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... in Berry's direction, "here we have the Flat-footed Baboon, an animal of diverting but vulgar habits. That between its eyes is its nose. The only other known specimen ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... imagine. It wouldn't be very well bred of anyone, would it, to come out and be introduced in the middle of this very loud, very vulgar quarrel that you are making ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... being an honourable man; but now he was thrown violently out of the path in which he had meant to walk rightly. What he was about to do was necessary, was inevitable, yet in his relation to Kate he was in the position of an immoral man, a betrayer, an adulterer, with a vulgar secret, which he must support by lying and share with servants. And what was the outlook? What would be the end? Here was a situation from which there was no escape. Let there be no false glamour, no disguise, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... rule, that white men who have stayed for ten or twenty years among the Eskimo, return without any real addition to their knowledge of the traditional ideas upon which their social state is based. The white man, whether a missionary or a trader, is firm in his dogmatic opinion that the most vulgar European is better than the most distinguished ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... proprieties of women, has taught Socrates far more than this about the art and mystery of love. She has taught him that love is another aspect of philosophy. The same want in the human soul which is satisfied in the vulgar by the procreation of children, may become the highest aspiration of intellectual desire. As the Christian might speak of hungering and thirsting after righteousness; or of divine loves under the figure of human (compare Eph. ...
— Symposium • Plato
... Caesar for himself and Peter. By so doing, proceeds Frederic, he gave thee (Adrian) an example to follow, and a lesson of the last importance in those words: "Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart." From this sacrilegious irony he passes to vulgar abuse; and tells the pope that his legates had been turned out of Germany, because they were not preachers but thieves, not lovers of peace but heapers of money, not reformers of the world but insatiate seekers of gold. Did Pope Sylvester, he asks, possess any temporal lordship in Constantine's ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... readers of Don Juan have, it must be confessed, been found among those least likely to admire in it what is most admirable—who have been attracted by the very excesses of buffoonery, violations of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which disfigure its pages. Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted "laudari ab illaudatis." But the welcome of the work in other quarters is ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... our individuality, and reduce our souls to one sad dead level of accursed and wicked imitation. Some day we shall have our eyes opened, and then see that a man may break the whole of the Ten Commandments at once, and yet he shall be saved if he be not vulgar, and it is both senseless and vulgar to copy old bindings on to modern books. The only decoration which the copy of Shakespeare could require is a gilt line, or double gilt lines, round the panels of the back. The full gilt back ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... priority entailed another delay lasting till the spring of 1885. These details will partly account for the lateness of my appearing, but there is yet another cause. Professional ambition suggested that literary labours, unpopular with the vulgar and the half educated, are not likely to help a man up the ladder of promotion. But common sense presently suggested to me that, professionally speaking, I was not a success, and, at the same time, that I had no cause to be ashamed of my failure. In our day, when we live under a despotism ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... yes,' Mrs. Kempton said slowly. 'She was a rare woman. I knew her intimately,—better than any one else, I think. I knew all the unhappy circumstances of her life: her horrid, vulgar mother; her poor, dreamy, inefficient father; her poverty, how hard she had to work. You were in love with her. Why didn't ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... being no longer a boy, but near on thirty years of age. And his manners befitted his years; dignified and modest, albeit cheerful and full of a young man's open-minded ardor for everything that was above the vulgar. With him, for certain, if with any man, might I grow to be all I desired to become; and could I but learn to rule my fiery temper, I might hope to follow in the ways of his mother, whom he held above all other women. The great dance, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... else's eyes: she shut mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such like trash; but I got just the same nonsense out of life and experience. (Shaking his head) It was vulgar—VULGAR. I see that now; for you've opened my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to do? Where ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... a gazelle or a young hare, and the baby lips below outlie the hoariest male fox in the Old Jewry. But, to complete the delusion, all my sweethearts and wives are romantic and poetical skin-deep—or they would not attract me—and all turn out vulgar to the core. By their lovers alone can you ever know them. By the men they can't love, and the men they do love, you find these creatures that imitate sentiment so divinely are hard, prosaic, vulgar little things, thinly gilt ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... set down as an asset in the marriage contract. Then there was the family money which he nowadays stole, the money spent on what he ate, the clothes he wore, and the pocket-money he needed—in fact, the perpetual alms which were bestowed upon him, just as they might have been bestowed upon some vulgar swindler, whom one unluckily could not ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Tish says our vulgar lip-osculation is unknown in the Orient and that they rub noses by way of greeting. I think, however, that she is mistaken in this and that the Australians are the nose-rubbers. I recall a returned missionary's telling ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wonderful in color and vigor, which had been named by a Boston experimental florist after Mrs. Lawson, that made Mr. Lawson's name known all over the world. Thirty thousand dollars for a pink! The news was spread broadcast, and printed in the newspapers of all countries as an illustration of the vulgar extravagance and folly ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... something better. A generous education, a well-directed education, should be the birthright of each one of them. Democracy may even intensify natural inequalities. The man who cannot say no to cheap and vulgar temptations falls all the lower in the degree to which he is a free agent. In competition with men alert, loyal, trained and creative, the dullard is condemned to a lifetime of hard labor, through no direct fault of his own. Keep the capable man down ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... these things, such pursuits seem far more noble objects of ambition than any upon which the vulgar herd of busy men lavish prodigal their restless exertions. To diffuse useful information, to further intellectual refinement, sure forerunner of moral improvement,—to hasten the coming of the bright day when the dawn of general knowledge ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... a stout, vulgar, clumsy creature, enveloped in a large shawl of many colours which did not hide her obesity. The old termagant's face seemed all paint and large gold-rimmed spectacles, and peering eyes. This grotesque visage was shaded ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... extravagances, revelling in the paraphernalia of woe, wedded to all the appurtenances of despair. Alas! I must for ever conceal the wretchedness that consumes me. I must weave a veil of dazzling falsehood to hide my grief from vulgar eyes, smoothe my brow, and paint my lips in deceitful smiles—even in solitude I dare not think how lost I am, lest I ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... so far as I can recollect, all you did was to grin in a futile and somewhat vulgar way. Finally, I tried to talk to you about child culture, which is one of the most important problems of our day; a problem which is occupying the attention of statesmen, philanthropists, philosophers, doctors, and teachers of every kind, from kindergarten mistresses ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... himself on his accurate and correct English. I heard the Governor ask this secretary one day where a certain report was. "I placed it in the second business-hole on your Excellency's desk," answered Mr. Wung Ho, who evidently considered it very vulgar to use ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... humanity! Interpreters of God, indeed! We reduce the Deity to vulgar fractions. We place our own little ambitions and inclinations before a shrine, and label them "divine messages." We set up our Delphian tripod, and we are the priest and oracles. We despise the plans of Nature's Ruler and substitute our own. With ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... "I let them get in with me, Charlie," he said in a tone of gentle explanation. "It's vulgar to do any other way. Did I tell you the nickname they gave me—'King'? That was what they called me at ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... (hinting) at sic a thing, Mr. Cocker! Me tak' to coaton! I wad as sune spin the hair frae Sawtan's hurdies. Short fushionless dirt, that canna grow straucht oot o' the halesome yird, like the bonnie lint-bells, but maun stick itsel' upo' a buss!—set it up! Coorse vulgar stuff, 'at naebody wad weir but loup-coonter lads that wad fain luik like gentlemen by means o' the collars and ruffles—an' a' comin' frae the auld loom! They may weel affoord se'enteen hunner linen to set it aff wi' 'at has naething but coaton ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... who is aware how many of what are called 'vulgarisms' in pronunciation are in fact 'archaisms,' will naturally think that the ancient pronunciation of 'spoil,' like the modern vulgar one, was 'spile.' But if he goes to one old black letter—say that printed by John Windet for the assignees of Richard Day in 1593—he will find in the fourth line 'defoile;' and if he goes to another edition he may find 'defoyle;' and he will learn that in speculating on such ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... other extreme. Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town, that is a truly conquered town. I looked for a place like Cairo, containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every side to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts. There may be more of this in the place than pleases those who would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of it than is ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... whole time he presided at his tea-table.' In The Rambler, No. 145, Johnson takes the part of these inferior writers:—'a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who, because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehensions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been long exposed to insult without a defender, and to censure without ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... her usual calm, sad face, "I'm glad that you are singing, though your song is certainly slightly vulgar." ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... conversation upon which he had not something oracular to say; he was wont to maintain his own opinion with a very considerable amount of heat, and so obstinate was he that it was quite impossible to convince him that he was ever in the wrong. He was essentially a vulgar man; but, as might naturally be supposed from what has already been said, he regarded himself as a polished gentleman, and in his efforts to act up to his ideal of this character he often used words of whose meaning he had but a very imperfect ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... his disappointments served to sour his temper and to render him less approachable. The attacks that he directed against the Papacy such as /The Papacy an Institution of the Devil/, and the verses prepared for the vulgar caricatures that he induced Cranach to design (1545) surpassed even his former productions in violence and abusiveness. Tired of attacking the Papacy, he turned his attention once more to the Jews, upon whom he invoked the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... subject steadily declines To be related in high tragic lines. The Thyestean feast no less disdains The vulgar vehicle of comic strains. Each has its place allotted; each is bound To keep it, nor invade its neighbour's ground. Yet Comedy sometimes will raise her note: See Chremes, how he swells his angry throat! And when a tragic ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... called spoonwood, because the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has perpetuated ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... even in an individual, be he who he may and for whatever cause you like. In enthusiasm everything good in a man appears, while the common and vulgar in him sinks away. Any enthusiasm either of groups or societies in which the individual ego loses itself is grand, but the mighty enthusiasm of a powerful people is overwhelming. This was, however, an enthusiasm of a peculiar sort—it ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... regret that such an angel of a woman should even marry. She is in my eye all mind: and were she to meet with a man all mind likewise, why should the charming qualities she is mistress of be endangered? Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of a domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother, unless there were a kind of moral certainty, that minds like hers could be propagated. For why, in short, should not the work of bodies be left ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... canoes, as the Guanches did for shields, its thin forest of 'Dragons.' The Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... fairly be presumed to be better than that of their inferiors: at any rate, it has all those associations in its favour, by means of which, a style can ever appear beautiful or exalted, and is adapted to the purposes of poetry, by having been long consecrated to its use. The language of the vulgar, on the other hand, has all the opposite associations to contend with; and must seem unfit for poetry (if there were no other reason), merely because it has scarcely ever been employed in it. A great genius may indeed overcome these ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the drawing-room, my knees shaking under me at the prospect of committing some solecism in his sight. Lady DeWolfe's husband has been noble only four months, and Parker of course knows it, and perhaps affects even greater hauteur to divert the attention of the vulgar commoner from ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I cannot say. The seat of that species of happiness is in the mind; and there are few data to ascertain the comparative state of the mind at any two periods. Philosophical happiness is to want little. Civil or vulgar happiness is to want much, and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... with his stock of old jokes, very ill-mannered. He laughed at his sculling, and had a great mind to strike him after he saw him waltzing with Jacqueline. But he had to acknowledge the general appreciation felt for the fellow whom he called vulgar. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to be gone, which so sickened Mrs. Morel. As she heard him sousing heartily in cold water, heard the eager scratch of the steel comb on the side of the bowl, as he wetted his hair, she closed her eyes in disgust. As he bent over, lacing his boots, there was a certain vulgar gusto in his movement that divided him from the reserved, watchful rest of the family. He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... it is by this time understood, that my views are to raise the Process of Brewing above the vulgar error that tyrant custom has entailed on it, and by the free exercise of the brewer's abilities, both in a scientific and tradesman-like manner, so as advantageously to preserve flavour and quality, with almost any proportions ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... "I'm pretty liberal, my dear, as you know,—but this is more than I can stand. Look at them!" She drew up her skirts as a woman brushed against her. "I believe in the poor coming to church, and all that, but this is mere vulgar curiosity, the result of all that odious advertising in the newspapers. My pew is filled with them. If I had stayed, I should have fainted. I don't know what to think ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her face in the pillow. Jenny waited, and an anxious look of self began to appear on the vulgar London street face. ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... to leave it and to think how very few eyes can ever feast themselves on its beauty. We came back again into gladness and sunshine, and to the vulgar necessity of eating, which the natives ministered to by presenting us with a substantial meal of stewed fowls and sweet potatoes at the nearest shanty. There must have been something intoxicating in the air, for we rode wildly and recklessly, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... may, and does have the best of it, in the mere physical part of the strife; but in the more moral, if such a word can be used, the quiet ascendency of better manners and ancient recollections is very apt to overshadow the fussy pretensions of the vulgar aspirant, who places his claims altogether on the all-mighty dollar. It is vain to deny it; men ever have done it, and probably ever will defer to the past, in matters of this sort—it being much with us, in this ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... there ever a more consummate mirror of life than the Bible affords? "Shakspeare copied the manners of the world then passing before him, and has more allusions than other poets to the traditions and superstitions of the vulgar." The Bible, perhaps, excels all other books in this sort of description. "Shakspeare was an exact surveyor of the inanimate world." The Bible is full of similar sketches. An excellence of Shakspeare is the individuality of his characters. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sickened as he contemplated the motley mass of humanity that presented itself with such eagerness for the attainment of so degrading an office; and as he listened to their vulgar boastings and brutal language, he blushed to think that such men were ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... and Mazes.} To beginne therefore with that which is most antient and at this day of most vse amongst the vulgar though least respected with great ones, who for the most part are wholy giuen ouer to nouelties: you shall vnderstand that Knots and Mazes were the first that were receiued into admiration, which Knots or Mazes were placed vpon the faces of each seuerall quarter, in this sort: first, about ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them.—Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy.—She who nips off the end of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the sun himself; and Christians but half trust Christ if they do not imitate Him. What selfishness in enjoyment of our 'own things' could live in us if we duly brought ourselves under the influence of that example? How miserably poor and vulgar the appeals by which money is sometimes drawn from grudging owners and tight-buttoned pockets, sound beside that heart-searching and heart-moving one, 'Ye know the grace ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 'there is very little difference in the main features between the ceremonies of the Greek and Romish Churches. Both are intended to attract the senses, to please the vulgar, and to deceive the credulous, and neither can have any effect in changing ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... other places. It was new of course, and had to answer to their dreams; but there would be no fortunes to be made out of it as Pelle was working it. He was a little more precise than was necessary when you were pressed on all sides by vulgar competition. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of the Members of that House believe that Oliver Cromwell, who had stood so long outside, had condescended to alight from his pedestal to shout vulgar abuse and brawling words at King Richard and King Charles, such as "Ha! ha!" and "Ho!"? He trusted not, he believed not; but if, indeed, such a thing could be possible, he trusted that Oliver Cromwell, if ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... crowded history few things had made a greater stir than the coming in of Sir Edwyn's maids. They were married now, but they were still the observed of all observers; to be pointed out to strangers, run after by children, gaped at by the vulgar, bowed to with broad smiles by Burgess, Councilor, and commander, and openly contemned by those dames who had attained to a husband in somewhat more regular fashion. Of the ninety who had arrived two weeks before, the greater number had found husbands in the town itself or in the neighboring hundreds, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... reverent disclaims everything that is cheap, or vulgar, or coarse, or unseemly. He is so essentially fine that the gaudy, the bizarre, and the intemperate, in whatever form, grate upon his sensibilities. He respects himself too much to be lacking in respect to others. He instinctively shrinks away from ugly vulgarization ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... to drink? The muse is dry, And Pegasus doth thirst for Hippocrene, And fain would paint—imbibe the vulgar call— Or hot or cold, or long ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... equal, or do anything more than suggest the idea of them. In proportion to the space over which gradation extends, and to its invisible subtilty, is its grandeur, and in proportion to its narrow limits and violent degrees, its vulgarity. In Correggio, it is morbid and vulgar in spite of its refinement of execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is made the most observable and characteristic part of the picture; whereas natural gradation is forever escaping observation to that degree that the greater part of artists in working ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... tongue out. He knew it was vulgar but it was the only retaliation he had breath for. His clothes were dusty and torn, his nose bloody. He was a frightful object. But he knew that ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on. The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool. We use strong language, but should any of our readers peruse the book, (from which calamity Heaven preserve them,) they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... my dear Major, except that to steal a watch is a vulgar crime—but to plot for a throne is the privilege of Princes. And Princes do ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... it. Such fall is the inherent and inevitable penalty on all absolute copyism; and wherever the copy is made with sincerity, the fall must be endured with patience. It will never be an utter or a degrading fall; that is reserved for those who, like vulgar translators, wilfully quit the hand of their master, and have no ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... and he gains a superficial notoriety. Such was the case with the "Pursuits of Literature," a leaden-footed satire that had as much claim to merit as the statue of Pasquin in the Market-place of Rome, on which vulgar squibs were pasted. Everybody knew the author, and nobody knew him. The first names of the day were foisted into the concern, and when the secret was found out that it belonged to one of the lowest, the book sank to rise no more. Sometimes a pompous, pretending title ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... though," said Faith. "I'll eat the buckwheats, as a vulgar necessity, and then I'll go over the brook and up in the woods behind the Pasture Rocks. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... ages when it was not considered mean and brutal to carry revenge beyond the grave. The executions in London, after the rebellion of 1745, were followed by such a revolting display, useless for any object of salutary terror, and calculated only to excite a vulgar curiosity. Horace Walpole, in a very few words, describes the feelings with which the public crowded to this sight:—"I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads of Temple Bar, where people make ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of the blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads—is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty 'new drop,' and dog-like agony of infliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence. Two of these men behaved calmly enough, but the first of the three died with great terror and reluctance. What was very ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of his tail. "As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don't let me hear ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. With a Proem by Austin Dobson • Lewis Carroll
... if truth must be told, had been neglecting his inner man during the last five minutes in order to peep through the crack of the door, and overhear the conference in the hall between his mother and the stranger, was a vulgar-looking youth of about Jeffrey's age, with a slight cast in his eye, but otherwise not bad-looking. He eyed the new usher as he entered with a mingled expression of suspicion and contempt; and Jeffreys, slow of apprehension though he usually was, knew at a glance that he had not fallen on a ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... This word, as well as the one last-named, is very expressive in the vocabulary of the vulgar. It is applied to lumps of any substances, whether food or otherwise. Such a phrase as this might be heard: "What a dollop of fat you have given me!" "Well," would be the reply, "if you don't like it, clunk it at once." I should be glad to be enlightened as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... says, nor where he is, and with difficulty comes to himself again, after the response given. Moreover, before drinking the water, he abstains for a day and night from food, and partakes of certain mysteries inaccessible to the vulgar; from which it is to be collected that there are two methods by which man may be prepared for the reception of the divine influence: one by the drinking of purgatorial water, endowed by the Deity with a clarifying virtue; the other, by sobriety, solitude, the separation ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... in 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, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful books hovering between poetry and prose. These perversions, according to me, come ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... sectional numbers, is to be explained in this way, or not,—AMMONIUS, at all events, will have had no more to do with either the one or the other, than with our modern division into Chapters and Verses. It is, in short, nothing else but a "vulgar error" to designate the Eusebian Sections as the "Sections of AMMONIUS." The expression cannot be too soon banished from our critical terminology. Whether banished or retained, to reason about the lost work of AMMONIUS from the Sections of ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... Bororo man was angry with another he would not descend to vulgar language, but he generally armed himself with a bony spike of that deadly fish, the raja (Rhinobates batis) or mehro, as it was called in the Bororo language, which he fastened to a wristlet. With it he proceeded in search ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... souls to one another he loves to display upon a background of political life. Then we follow him from the cloudy North into sunny Italy. Shakspeare is one of the intellectual powers of nature; he takes away the veil by which the inward springs of action are hidden from the vulgar eye. The extension of the range of human vision over the mysterious being of things which his works offer constitutes them a great ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... The misconceptions in question have come down to us from remote antiquity; they have not come down singly, separately, clean-cut, clear and well-defined; they have come entangled in the complicated mesh of traditional opinions and creeds that constitute the vulgar "philosophy"—the mental fog—of our time. If we are to perform the duty of examining them we have first of all to draw them forth, to disengage them from our inherited tangle of beliefs and frame them in suitable words; ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... garden. He did not come with the graceful motion, and the easy tread of Roland Gray; but moved wily a pompous stride, swinging his arms almost at right angles with his body. His air you could only describe by the word 'howling'; and he was just the man to immediately catch the attention of a vulgar girl. His hair was as dark as a crow's; and it was as coarse as the bristles of a hog. He was short and rather stout of build; was somewhat 'horsey' in makeup; and had a face rather handsome. But that he was low-bred, there could not be the shadow ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... of the Sun is not for the eyes of the vulgar. Will you let this false Shaman impose on you, O Children of the ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... see that which few do see, that is, that much of the pretended light of this age is darkness and ignorance. I do not speak of errors only that come forth in the garments of new light, but especially of the vulgar knowledge of the truth of religion, which is far adulterated from the true metal and stamp of divine knowledge, by the intermixture of the gross darkness of our affections and conversation, as that other is from the naked truth, and therefore both of them are found light in the balance of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... light on the old woman's face that made me turn my eyes away. Here was a personal revelation that should have satisfied the most exacting, but my vulgar curiosity cried out for further light on ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... from my friends in New York and elsewhere. I thank them, and more than thank them, and you, for being the medium of it. I am alike honored by both. Thanks is a little word, and dollars is called a vulgar one; but two thousand two hundred and sixty-two of the latter, and [322]the sense I have of the former, make up, I feel, no ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... delicate and charming terms, the gratitude of his soul, his ecstasy of mad tenderness, his offer of a devotion that should be eternal; but in order to intimate all these passionate and high-souled thoughts he could find only set phrases, commonplace expressions, vulgar ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... taste of your acquaintance, though no longer then to make me know that I wanted more time to value it, and to enjoy it rightly; and in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts, which I understood afterwards by Mr. H. I would have been bold in our vulgar phrase to mend my draught (for you left me with an extreme thirst) and to have begged your conversation again, joyntly with your said learned Friend, at a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together som good ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... It was simply decorated. The furniture was modern and vulgar. Some chromos and a few hideous paintings representing scenes in Valldemosa and Miramar hung on ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... downhearted and prone to despair, but in war these qualities were concealed by his invariable success in whatever enterprise he undertook; while in political life his retiring manner and his dread of the vulgar demagogues, by whom he was easily put out of countenance, added to his popularity; for the people fear those who treat them with haughtiness, and favour those who respect and fear them. The reason of this is that the greatest ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... such dreams of terror thrill me through! What guest unknown is this who hath entered our dwelling? How high his mien! how brave in heart as in arms! I believe it well, with no vain assurance, his blood is divine. Fear proves the vulgar spirit. Alas, by what destinies is he driven! what wars outgone he chronicled! Were my mind not planted, fixed and immoveable, to ally myself to none in wedlock since my love of old was false to me in the treachery of death; were I not sick to the heart of bridal torch ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... these, but he found it to be impossible. He was too old to reform, and the money habit had such a hold over him that I believe even when he slept he was conscious of his wealth. He was not a coarse, vulgar Dives: he had the instincts of a gentleman; but these were powerless. The consciousness of money showed itself on him like a perspiration; wipe his brows as he might, it ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... itself might have conveyed a homely message, has been smothered under showers of variations, decked out in wearisome arpeggios, and entangled in meaningless scales, until it has reminded one of nothing so much as a vulgar and greatly over-dressed woman: and yet this has been looked upon as music. Technique is indeed necessary, but only as a means to an end. Directly it begins to obscure the meaning, or is developed for its own sake without reference to its task, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... moments of his life Buck had frequently refrained from anathema as a method of relief. Some situations were made vulgar and matter-of-fact by sulphurous ejaculation. It dulled the edge of rancor brutally, as a rock dulls ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... perhaps are tempted to envy the applause which many public speakers get by buffoonery, by rough wit, by coarse personality, by appeal to the vulgar passions. We are apt to think that grave and serious reasonings are lost on the audiences that receive them, half asleep, as if listening to a tedious sermon, and who come to life again when the stump speaker takes the platform. But it will be a great mistake to think that the American ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... scatter all properties and possessions, and, in a word, to involve every thing in total confusion. And yet you hear the smallest portion of what is alleged against it; for such horrible things are circulated amongst the vulgar, that, if they were true, the whole world would justly pronounce it and its abettors worthy of a thousand fires and gibbets. Who, then, will wonder at its becoming the object of public odium, where credit ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... time immemorial, the usufruct of which might fairly be deemed perpetual. Prescriptive right, however, is no barrier to reformers greedy of patronage, whose only thought is to buy cheap popularity by yielding to vulgar prejudices at the expense of their neighbours. It is thus proposed to abolish all metage dues, to deprive the Corporation of their portion of the coal duties, to remove all restrictions upon brokers, and to sanction the establishment of ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... path and laid high off the ground. They got up high on the log and looked back to see if the squaw was coming. When the squaw came up she stopped and they began to plague her and laugh at her. They spoke in English. They talked very vulgar to the squaw. She soon began to cry. When they got tired plaguing her, they jumped off the log and started on their road in a trot, and I ran with them. The squaw stood still till we got most out of sight. They would look back and laugh and sometimes hollow and whoop, ...
— Narrative of the Captivity of William Biggs among the Kickapoo Indians in Illinois in 1788 • William Biggs
... supporting half his tired weight on the frame of these bells, translated by some twentieth-century Tubal Cain to a music so strangely different from the first they had uttered, Dick was absorbed in his rendering of such bars of the vulgar melody as he could remember, when he heard, far behind him, ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Phoebe to have been so much refined by education as to be grated on by the vulgar tone of those nearest to her? It was well for her that she could still put it aside as their way, even while following her own instinct. Mervyn and Juliana had been on cat and dog terms all their lives; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... amuse the Fancy, stirring in it some Wonder, and breeding some Delight thereto. It raiseth Admiration, as signifying a nimble Sagacity of Apprehension, a special Felicity of Invention, a Vivacity of Spirit, and Reach of Wit, more than vulgar; it seeming to argue a rare Quickness of Parts, that one can fetch in remote Conceits applicable; a notable Skill that he can dextrously accommodate them to the Purpose before him; together with a lively Briskness ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... of; the modern vulgar phrase "all along of," or "all along on," best conveys the force of the words in ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Given to my wife to buy to hir nurse a wastcoat with and shoes, etc., 2 dollars. At a collation with Rot. Bell in Pentherer's, 34 shiling. To Mr. Thomas Hay that he might give up the papers, 2 dolars. For Broun's Vulgar errors, 6 shilings 6 p. For the Present State of England, halfe a croun. For the moral state of it, 2 shilings. Then given at the kirk door, halfe ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... was again admired by the people, and that they regretted his loss. To counteract these sentiments, coarse and vulgar caricatures were exposed to the eyes of the populace; and his person and his character became the theme of false and scandalous libels published under the direction of the ministry. No effect was produced. The mob looked at the caricatures with a smile of contempt; and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... cannot be supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies about them. Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court. No more were bergamot or southern-wood, although vegetable in their nature. She considered these two latter as betraying a vulgar taste in the person who chose to gather or wear them. She was sorry to notice sprigs of them in the button-hole of any young man in whom she took an interest, either because he was engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of the Hon. Doyle O'Meagher strikingly proves how slight an influence is exerted in this young republic by social prestige and vulgar wealth, and how inevitably certain are the rewards of virtue, industry, and ability. I am credibly told that Mr. O'Meagher first opened his eyes in a little ten by twelve earth cabin in the County Kerry, Ireland, though I can not profess to have seen the cabin. Being from his earliest ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... Lat. Corvus, one of the prehistoric words) is supposed to be seen abroad earlier than any other bird; and it is entitled "Abu Zajir," father of omens, because lucky when flying towards the right and v.v. It is opposed in poetry to the (white) pigeon, the emblem of union, peace and happiness. The vulgar declare that when Mohammed hid in the cave the crow kept calling to his pursuers, "Ghar! Ghar!" (cavern, cavern): hence the Prophet condemned him to wear eternal-mourning and ever to repeat the traitorous words. This is the old tale ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and Mors Kajak, and tall and mighty in his gorgeous warrior trappings, Carthoris, my son. These three fell upon Dejah Thoris as we entered the apartment, and though the lives and training of royal Martians tend not toward vulgar demonstration, I thought that they would suffocate ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... excess numerically, every continental "noblesse" is already lowered and vitiated in its tone. For in vast bodies, fluctuating eternally, no unity of tone can be maintained, except exactly in those cases where some vulgar prejudice carries away all alike by its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... I tackled the harbor. By day it was quite impossible, all toots and blares, the most frightful discords—but at night its vulgar loudness was toned down sufficiently so that a fellow with artist's ears could really stand listening to its life, especially if I did not go too close but listened from my window. Here with uglier sounds subdued ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... House—and a more lovely and attractive object for his best affections in Miss Quirk—Dora Quirk—the lustre of whose charms and accomplishments there could be no doubt, he thought, would instantly efface the image of that poor, feeble, vulgar creature, Miss Tag-rag; for such old Quirk knew her to be, though he had, in fact, never for a moment set eyes upon her. Mr. Tag-rag looked rather blank at hearing of the grand party there was to be at Alibi House, and that Titmouse ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... meaning. There can be no doubt, he said, that the Scriptures must be regarded as allegories; and he explained to Joseph that he devoted all his intellect to discovering and explaining these allegories, a task demanding extraordinary assiduity, for they lay concealed in what seemed to the vulgar eye mere statements of fact: as if, he added scornfully, God chose the prophets for no better end than a mere relation of facts! He was willing, however, to concede that his manner of treating the Scriptures was not approved ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... I do think so, myself." Carl said it with a spurious society manner. In Gertie's aristocratic presence he desired to keep aloof from all vulgar persons. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... amuse the vulgar," said the baron. "I do not mind admitting to you that I contemplate residing on this spot, and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... bear that Jewiston," remarked Miss Leveredge; "I always thought him very under-bred and vulgar. Why will Harry have any thing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... elements, so that an inner beauty might play through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing attitudes, no asking for admiration,—but a severe and chaste restraint, a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines through them, and, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... he said: "The picture is already boxed and in its lead coffin. No doubt by now it is on its way to Liverpool. I am sorry." But his thoughts, as Philip easily read them, were: "Fancy my letting this vulgar fool into the Tate Street workshop! Even HE would know that old masters are not found in a half-finished state on Chelsea-made frames and canvases. Fancy my letting him see those two half-completed Van Dycks, the new Hals, the half-dozen Corots. He would even ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... lace. When they leave the house they put on drawers of great length, which they turn up into numerous folds over their legs, giving them a very awkward appearance. Besides the haik, which is like that of a man's, a lady wears a linen cloth over her face, to conceal it from the profane vulgar when abroad. Such were the people we saw ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, the net ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... they scruple to use this great power to avenge themselves upon those men that had so antagonized them and hindered their investigation. Robert Beverley they represented to the Privy Council as a man of low education and mean parts, bred a vulgar seaman and utterly unfit for high office.[839] Colonel Edward Hill was the most hated man in Charles City county.[840] Ballard, Bray and some of the other Councillors were rash and fiery, active in opposing the King's orders and unjust to the poor people.[841] The Privy Council was ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... to take literally that which is written in the story of the Creation, nor entertain the same ideas of it as are held by the vulgar. If it were otherwise, our ancient sages would not have taken so much pains to conceal the sense, and to keep before the eyes of the uninstructed the veil of allegory which conceals the truth ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... a sudden determination to go and call on Mme. Rosemilly. But he promptly sat down again. He did not like that woman. Why not? She had too much vulgar and sordid common sense; besides, did she not seem to prefer Jean? Without confessing it to himself too bluntly, this preference had a great deal to do with his low opinion of the widow's intellect; for, though he loved his brother, he could not help thinking him somewhat mediocre and believing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... puzzled over the matter. And the hint that by-and-by the mystery might be unravelled, not only to him, but to the whole world, was far from giving him comfort. Rather than have Lucia's name dragged out for vulgar comment, he would have been content to let her secret remain for ever undiscovered; and besides, this unwelcome revelation promised to come too late, when the Cottage was empty and its dearly loved occupants were gone far away out of his ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... spirit of the redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"—The Tale of the House it might be called—when he affords us realistic glimpses of ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... thing you should think of. An English clergyman is a gentleman; you may have more to bear than you reckon for, when you find yourself with men of rude minds and vulgar manners." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... degrade his own mind by putting forth works avowedly of inferior quality; and will find himself greatly surpassed by writers whose inferior workmanship has nevertheless the indefinable aspect of being the best they can produce. The man of common mind is more directly in sympathy with the vulgar public, and can speak to it more intelligibly, than any one who is condescending to it. If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument. It may be that the interval is too great. It may be that the nature ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... of Abraham, (Gen. xvii.; Acts vii.) and of the Maccabees, (1 Mac. 1.) St. Epiphanius, (Haer. 20.) Whence F. Avala, in his curious work entitled Pietor Christianus, printed at Madrid in 1730, shows that it is a vulgar error of painters who represent Christ circumcised by a priest in the temple. The instrument was sometimes a sharp stone, (Exod. iv. Jos. v.,) but doubtless most frequently of iron or steel. 9. Rom. ii. 29. 10. Deut. x. 16; xxx. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... mother of Love. That he could not well complain of being related to Poverty appears clearly from the frequent bounties which his gratitude records, and from the wealth which he left behind him. By "The Universal Passion" he acquired no vulgar fortune—more than three thousand pounds. A considerable sum had already been swallowed up in the South Sea. For this loss he took the vengeance of an author. His Muse makes poetical use more than once of a ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... in the camp, we went to the railway station to see if we could get places for Wilmington. We found that the line was in the hands of the Southerners, and that although the 'boys in blue' had a vulgar habit of firing into the carriages as they passed, the trains were running each night. But a train running and a non-combatant passenger getting a place in a carriage were widely different things, every available seat being taken up by sick and wounded soldiers. I made a frantic effort ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... cool enough young man wondered whether there might be something more than fantastic about this navigator of strange waters. It was rather odd, at all events, how he kept bobbing up, and what a power he had of quickening—what? A school-boyish sense of the romantic? Or mere vulgar curiosity? For he suddenly found himself aware, Guy Matthews, that what he knew about his visitor was less than ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the Baconian hatred of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might MOVE HIS BONES? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!" {188a} And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... successful voyager. Rivers rolling down golden sand, mountains shining with priceless gems, forests fragrant with rich spices were among the substantial advantages to be expected as the result of the enterprise. "Our quest there," said Peter Martyr, "is not for the vulgar products of Europe." The proverb "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" [Transcribers's note: Everything unknown is taken for magnificent.] was abundantly illustrated. And there was another object, besides gain, which was predominant in the minds of almost all the ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... cover himself with jewellery and adorn himself in naming colours, Margaret thought; and she resented his way of dressing, much more than ever before. Lady Maud had called him exotic, and Margaret could not forget that. By 'exotic' she was sure that her friend meant something like vulgar, though Lady ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... devoured his creations, he was an influence; how profound or how shallow an influence he never attempted to guess. It is the penalty and the safeguard of genius that it computes itself by troy weight in a world that measures by vulgar hundredweights. ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Dictator had formed at the time of the abortive attempt at assassination in St. James's Park. Then a miserable stabber of the class familiar to every South Italian or South American town was hired at a good price to do a vulgar job which, if it only succeeded, would satisfy easily and cheaply the business of those who hired the murderer. The scheme failed, and something more subtle had to be sought. The something more subtle, according to Sarrasin, was found in the rehiring of the same creature to do ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... de la Geographie, p. 369; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, concluding chapters; and for an admirable summary, Draper, Hist. Int. Devel. of Europe, pp. 451-453; also an interesting passage in Sir Thomas Brown's Vulgar and Common Errors, Book I, chap. vi; also a striking passage in Acosta, chap. ii. For general statement as to supplementary proof by measurement of degrees and by pendulum, see Somerville, Phys. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... creature as Alice Bridgenorth had been described, was likely to bear herself under the circumstances in which she was so unexpectedly placed, had upon Buckingham the effect of exciting unusual interest. On his own part, he had none of those feelings of anxiety with which a man, even of the most vulgar mind, comes to the presence of the female whom he wishes to please, far less the more refined sentiments of love, respect, desire, and awe, with which the more refined lover approaches the beloved ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... is supposed to have been born of gentle people," he said to his mother afterwards, "Aunt Marian is the most vulgar old beast I have ever beheld. She has the taste of a female costermonger." Which was entirely true, but it might be added that his own was no better and his points of view and morals wholly coincided with ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... father, knoweth the ways Of the All-Highest? 'Tis not for me to judge Him. Untainted sleep and power of wonder-working He may upon the child's remains bestow; But vulgar rumour must dispassionately And diligently be tested; is it for us, In stormy times of insurrection, To weigh so great a matter? Will men not say That insolently we made of sacred things A worldly instrument? Even now the people Sway senselessly this way ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... in English; the rich post was the reward—and it was an ill thing, a thing the magister dreaded, to refuse the favours of Privy Seal. He consoled himself with the thought that the writing of letters in Latin might wash from his mouth the savour of the play he had written in the vulgar tongue. ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... thought that one a little vulgar. I only made it up to please you, Daisy. Primrose, don't you notice what a lot of poems there are in all the magazines, and of course, somebody must write them. I should not be a bit surprised if I could add to our income by writing poetry, Primrose. ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... celebrated under the name of Titmarsh) into ten years' banishment of infernal misery, tyranny, annoyance; to give over the fresh feelings of the heart of the little Michael Angelo to the discipline of vulgar bullies, who, in order to lead tender young children to the Temple of Learning (as they do in the spelling-books), drive them on with clenched fists and low abuse; if they fainted, revive them with a thump, or assailed them with a curse; if they were miserable, consoled them with a brutal ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this, and other accounts of my travels, to the world; wherein I ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... the adjective. Could it be possible that people looked upon him as one too hopelessly and uninterestingly afflicted for sympathy or companionship, too unimportant and common for even ridicule; or was this but the coarse interpretation of that vulgar girl? ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte |
