"Aristocracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by properly judged competition or examination with a free chance to all, are, in principle, selective yet democratic in the best sense, that of "equality of opportunity." When the governing few are not the best fitted for the work, a so-called aristocracy is of course not an aristocracy (government by the best) at all, but merely an oligarchy. When officers chosen by vote are not well fitted then such a government is not ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... from one of the curiously embroidered silken covers appertaining to those glorious escutcheons which, in England and elsewhere, are customarily hung up, in some conspicuous place, upon the dwellings of departed aristocracy. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... between civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and the value to the world of the Graeco-Roman civilization. I have ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism, rejected every species of political aristocracy, and represented the English constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as its type. I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and defended American democracy, which I define to ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... warlike Egyptians were divided into two classes, earth-tillers and artisans. Among earth-tillers there must have been owners of small bits of laud, but generally earth-tillers were tenants on lands belonging to the pharaohs, the priests, and the aristocracy. The artisans, the people who made clothing, furniture, vessels, and tools, were independent; those who worked at great edifices formed, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... had no sense of deference to what is known as good blood, Bucky had too much horse sense to resent the careless, half-indifferent greeting which these two young sprouts of aristocracy bestowed on the rest of the party. He understood that it was the natural product of their education and of ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... there into the possession of a rich and educated Senator, P. Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was educated and manumitted, taking from him the name of Publius Terentius the African. 'Asmall literary circle of the Roman aristocracy admitted young Terence to their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... towers and minarets and steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in a Kansas town. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Eunomians, Macedonians, &c. He tells the Macedonians, who deified the Father and the Son without the Holy Ghost, that they might as well be styled Tritheists as Ditheists. Gregory himself was almost a Tritheist; and his monarchy of heaven resembles a well-regulated aristocracy.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... particular partiality, whose approbation would have been one of the highest objects of my ambition,—this hurts me. It is said the Marriage Act is aristocratic. I am accused, I am told abroad, of being a man of aristocratic principles. If by aristocracy they mean the peers, I have no vulgar admiration, nor any vulgar antipathy towards them; I hold their order in cold and decent respect. I hold them to be of an absolute necessity in the Constitution; but ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Rodney drew his descent from the landed gentry of England, and had relatives among the aristocracy. The name was originally Rodeney. We are told by his son-in-law and biographer that the Duke of Chandos, a connection by marriage, obtained the command of the Royal yacht for the admiral's father, Henry Rodney. In one of the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... who are on top—the people who, by force of success, or ability, or money, are most prominent in the community, associate together, and the world gives a certain prominence to their doings. Here, where fortunes have been made so rapidly, and we have no formal aristocracy, money undoubtedly plays a conspicuous part in giving access to what is known as society. But it is only an entering wedge. Money supplies the means to cultivate manners and the right way of looking at things, and good society represents the best manners and, on the whole, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... an Equilateral from the ranks of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while they do little or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges, serve as almost useful ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... as on clatt'ring wheel Loath'd Aristocracy careers along; The distant track quick vibrates to the eye, And white and dazzling undulates with heat, Where scorching to the unwary traveller's touch, 5 The stone fence flings its narrow slip of shade; Or, where the worn sides of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... simple and friendly, that Dulac's weapons were quite snatched from his hands. A crowd of the men he was sent to organize was looking on—a girl was looking on. He felt the situation demanded he should show he was quite as capable of courtesy as this young sprig of the aristocracy, for he knew comparisons ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... far simplified these relations that the problem can be solved. Since the establishment of the great industry, at least since the peace of Europe in 1815, it has been no longer a secret to anyone in England that the whole political fight has been for supremacy between two classes, the landed aristocracy and the middle-class. In France, with the return of the Bourbons, the same fact was perceived; the writers of history, from Thierry to Guizot, Mignet, and Thiers in particular, pronounce it as a key to an understanding of French history, especially since the Middle Ages. And ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... naming the hotels ( mansions) of the great noblemen, Julia names the hotels ( inns) of the time. She thus shows where the countess had studied the aristocracy. ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... "Between the aristocracy on the one side and the kings on the other, avarice and wrath, O monarch, are the causes that produce enmity.[328] One of these parties (viz., the king,) yields to avarice. As a consequence, wrath takes possession of the other (the aristocracy). Each intent upon weakening ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... be very able though," the girl objected. "It isn't often, is it, that our aristocracy distinguish themselves? And d'you know that he is a Fellow of the Royal Society entirely on the strength of his original research into the subject of modern ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... predominates, then Spanish with a slight admixture of the Negro element, whilst amongst the rising generation many fair-haired children can claim paternity amongst the numerous German and English workmen that have been employed at the mines. The store-keepers form the aristocracy of the village. They are indolent; lounging about, or lying smoking in their hammocks the greater part of the day, but generally civil and polite. They are particular in their dress, and may often be seen in faultless European costume, silk umbrella in hand, in twos ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... soon are counted, and these are sent out into all the lands to preach the gospel, each to speak in his own tongue, for religion was from this time on no longer to be hid behind the veil of an unintelligible language. And it is not only the aristocracy of wealth that attaches itself to the new teacher and embraces his doctrines with enthusiasm. The next converts are a thousand Brahman priests, who constituted a religious body under the leadership of three ascetic Brahmans. It is ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... at that traditional prerogative of the popular house, the control of the purse. Carleton had urged that in every township a sixth of the land should be reserved to enable His Majesty "to reward such of His provincial Servants as may merit the Royal favour" and "to create and strengthen an Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this Continent, where all Governments are feeble and the general condition of things tends to a wild Democracy." Grenville saw further possibilities in this suggestion. ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... Revolution found in Madame Dupin an unalarmed observer. As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general personal alienation of the aristocracy from the German woman, as they called Marie Antoinette. She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... as he called the mob. He looked for such authority and what seemed to him the example of history, and especially to the example of England. He knew how powerful both at home and abroad was the governing machine which the English aristocracy had established after the revolution of 1689; and he realized more fully than most men of that age, or indeed of this, that its strength lay in a small but very national governing class wielding the people as an instrument. Such a class he wished to create in America, to connect ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... theory of government might well hold his breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Jacques, betwixt poverty and democracy, was in bad odor with the prudent and respectable part of society, it was not easy for him to bring witnesses to character, or prove an unexceptionable alibi. As for the Bellefonds and De Chaulieus, and the aristocracy in general, they entertained no doubt of his guilt; and finally, the magistrates coming to the same opinion, Jacques Rollet was committed for trial, and as a testimony of good will, Antoine de Chaulieu was selected by the injured family ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... justice and thereby incriminate himself. His visit to Sir Anthony was actuated by sheer malignity. Without doubt, he counted on his story being believed. But he knew enough of the hated and envied aristocracy to feel assured that Sir Anthony would not subject his beloved dead to such ghastly disinterment as a public denunciation of Boyce would necessitate. He desired to throw an asphyxiating bomb into the midst of our private circle. He reckoned on ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... a rupture between the victors; the contempt which they entertained for each other and with only too good grounds in either case; the inconvenient number of respectable and influential men in the ranks of the aristocracy and the intellectual and moral inferiority of almost all who took part in the matter—altogether produced among the opponents of Caesar a reluctant and refractory co-operation, which formed the saddest contrast to the harmonious and compact ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that stormy shout. It is the scream of oppressed humanity against its oppressor, presaging a more than quid pro quo; and it fitly prefigured the sight of that long file of tumbrils bearing to the Place de la Revolution the fairest scions of French aristocracy. On the other hand, 'God Save the King,' in its original, has one or two lines as grotesque as 'Yankee Doodle' itself; yet we have paraphrased it in 'America,' and made it a hymn meet for all our churches. But the 'Star-spangled Banner' combines dignity and ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... civil State, as you have made it; a State which, at first, was despotism, then monarchy, then aristocracy, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians. Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Louis Cohen. Fanny married Salomon Hyman Cohen Wessels, of Amsterdam, a gentleman who was well known at that time for his philanthropy, and whose family, at the period of Napoleon I., was held in great esteem among the aristocracy ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... amusement, or of the primitive simplicity which is associated with that epithet. The French are not a pastoral people, although they are not less so than the English; neither are the suburbs of a metropolis rural life. They are too near the pride of human art for pastoral pleasures, and no aristocracy is more infested with little tyrants than the neighbourhood of great cities, the oppressors being too timid to trust themselves far out of the verge of public haunts, in the midst of which they would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... ever be remembered that it is the direct influence of commerce to make the interval between the richest and the poorest man wider and more unconquerable. Let it be remembered that it is a foe to everything of real worth and excellence in the human character. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. Is it impossible to realize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... The aristocracy of Canton is not one of wealth, but of intellectual honors; many of the Chinamen who are seen wearing horn-rimmed spectacles are either of a literary turn of mind or are ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... those cocktails that heathen feller-me-lad's always trying to poison me with, eh, Miss Diana," chuckled the old manufacturer, who worshipped the cloth of aristocracy, and even reverenced ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... over, and then think for yourself, you will find out why. It is not good for little boys to be told everything, and never to be forced to use their own wits. They would learn, then, no more than they do at Dr. Dulcimer's famous suburban establishment for the idler members of the youthful aristocracy, where the masters learn the lessons and the boys hear them—which saves a great deal ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... Epigram John Harington Epigram John Byrom Epigram Richard Garnett Epigram Thomas Moore Epigram Unknown Epigram Samuel Taylor Coleridge Epigram John Dryden Epigram Thomas Hood Written on a Looking-glass Unknown An Epitaph George John Cayley On the Aristocracy of Harvard John Collins Bossidy On the Democracy of Yale Frederick Scheetz Jones A General Summary ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... civil and foreign wars by which they were so unhappily distinguished, the arts flourished, and the spread of political liberty became apparent; although it is equally certain that they were at the same time fatal alike to the aristocracy and to the magistrature; and that they rapidly paved the way to the absolutism of Louis XIV, to the shameless saturnalia of the Regency, and to the dishonouring and degrading excesses of Louis XV, who may justly be said to have prepared by his licentiousness ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... and was fitted up with all the elegance wealth could command. The grounds were handsomely laid out, the gardens cultivated to the extreme of art, and in short, it bore more resemblance to the residences we meet on the other side of the water which are occupied by the proud aristocracy of England than the mansion ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... Charleston eye could never penetrate. Politically, the City by the Sea led the van in the hosts of Democracy; ethically, she remained far in the rear with the Divine Right of Kings and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Aristocracy. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... vegetables we call common; it is the ones we can do without which are the aristocrats. The potatoes and cabbages and onions are really important, but I am proudest of my young peas and my peppers and cucumbers and tomatoes, and that's the way of the world, isn't it? If there was only an aristocracy things would stop, but the common folk could go on alone until the ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... see in this place the glorious liberty of a republic, or more properly, an aristocracy, the common people being here as arrant slaves as the French; but the old nobles pay little respect to the doge, who is but two years in his office, and whose wife, at that very time, assumes no rank above another noble lady. 'Tis true, the family of Andrea ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... maharajah rules over the most extensive kingdom of any native prince. He is a Rajput, which is the aristocracy of the Mahrattas. He is the most powerful of the Indian rulers, and one of the most hospitable. I was formerly in his service, and he considers himself under some slight obligations to me. He is an independent prince in the same sense that other rulers are in this country. There is ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... over; and it's the natural game for mankind to play at. They who's up a bit is all for keeping down them who is down; and they who is down is so very soft through being down, that they've not spirit to force themselves up. Now I saw that very early in life. There is always going on a battle between aristocracy and democracy. Aristocracy likes to keep itself to itself; and democracy is just of the same opinion, only wishes to ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... waterway that was our only link with the men and nations we had left behind. The settlements were contiguous in body, but even my twenty-four hours' acquaintance had shown me that they were leagues apart in mind. There were a French fort, a Jesuit convent, a village of Ottawas, and, barred by the aristocracy of a palisade, a village of Hurons. The scale of precedence was plain to read. The huts of the savages were wattled, interlaced of poles and bark; the French buildings were of wood, but roofed with rough ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... living in a state of utter destitution as compared to the enormous revenues enjoyed by the dead-and-gone members of the Champdoce family; and what pained him more was to see rise up by the side of the old aristocracy a new race which had attached itself to commerce and entered into business transactions. As he gazed upon the new order of things, the man whose pride of birth and position almost amounted to insanity, conceived the project to which ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... acquiescence of the world? The first is annihilated by a word proclaiming universal liberation; the second is blockaded in his ports, surrounded by a wall of fire, suffocated and strangled, and dragged helpless and insensible from his imaginary throne. A proud and desperate aristocracy, rich and powerful, and correspondingly confident, undertake to measure strength with the democratic millions whom they despise. These Northern people, scorned and detested, have ideas—grand and magnificent as well as practical ideas, nurtured by universal education and unlimited freedom ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dispassionate view of such matters, and when he has reached his conclusion based upon everyday, commonplace morality, he is not apt to be shaken even by an imposing array of names, fortified by an enthusiastic excess of grandiloquent adjectives. The aristocracy of brains has no monopoly of truth, which is often best grasped by the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... over the stove, pale, dark-visaged, with the subdued manners and voice which mark the aristocracy of servitude. My employer's confidence in him must be immense, for while he watched over me I was practically in ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Christianity must needs be democracy. We are democrats because we are Christians, because we believe in the essential dignity of man. On the contrary, the political outcome of paganism must needs be despotism and aristocracy. We believe in despotism and aristocracy because we believe in the natural inequality of man, because we believe in force and pride and self-assertion, in the power of the strong to oppress the weak. Nietzsche is against the oppressed and for the oppressor; for the Superman ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... centuries. Its strange history has been the basis of novels, romances, dramas and poetry, by writers in every country and clime. Its form of government was, in the days of the Doges, a republic governed by an aristocracy, and its wealth was the product of commerce conducted by great merchants whose enterprise extended to every part ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... vast portion of the real estate of the country was held by the Church in mortmain; that forty-nine noble families owned all the rest; that all great estates were held in tail; and that the property of the aristocracy and the clergy was completely exempt from taxation. Thus the accumulation and the diffusion of capital were alike prevented; and the few possessors of property wasted it in unproductive expenditure. Hence the fundamental error of Spanish political ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the laboring millions. The authors of the system drew their ideas of political economy from what they had witnessed in Europe, and particularly in Great Britain. They had viewed the enormous wealth concentrated in few hands and had seen the splendor of the overgrown establishments of an aristocracy which was upheld by the restrictive policy. They forgot to look down upon the poorer classes of the English population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... empire. And these descendants fled, fled not before any foe, but before their own guilty consciences; abandoning the city of their fathers when not a sword had flashed against her gates! The war had been of their making; to send Caesar into outlawry the aristocracy had laboured ten long years. And now the noble lords were exiles, wanderers among the nations. To Capua they went, to find small comfort there, and thence to join Pompeius in further flight beyond the seas to Greece. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Dan. "I may come to be a society novelist; if so, inside knowledge of the aristocracy will give me decided advantage over the majority of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... reaction in the southern mind to enable its leaders of thought to look beyond themselves into the needs of the man far down. There is in progress, therefore, a reshaping of public opinion, in fact a peaceful revolution in a land cursed by slavery and handicapped by aristocracy. The tendency to maltreat the negroes without cause, the custom of arresting them for petty offenses and the institution of lynching have all been somewhat checked by this change in the attitude of the southern white man towards the negro. The check in the movement ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... last year in the House of Lords was the man after their own hearts, and they were quite willing to depose the Duke from his leadership of the party, and put themselves under the guidance of Lyndhurst. When we recollect who and what Lyndhurst was and is, it is curious to see the aristocracy of England adopting him for their chief; scarcely an Englishman (for his father was an American painter[5]), a lawyer of fortune, in the sense in which, we say a soldier of fortune, without any fixed principles, and only conspicuous for his extraordinary ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... American Republicanism, unless it be a profound sentiment of the heart. When my brother-in-law returned from his position as minister to Naples, I could see that he had learned to look upon the common people as a rabble, and to sympathize only with the aristocracy. Cassius M. Clay at St. Petersburg learned to sympathize with the Russians, but he returned with no impairment ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... his habitual haunt, he took his perch at all times on its loftiest branches, as far as possible away from popular contact; and, upon most occasions, adopted a sort of baronial view of liberty, as rather a question lying between the Throne and the Aristocracy, than one in which the people had a right to any efficient voice or agency. Accordingly, the question of Parliamentary Reform, from the first moment of its agitation, found in him a most ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... appear often by the side of the "apostles," although they were distinct from them. Their authority, however, was equal to that of the apostles. Here two groups constituted, in the nascent Church, a sort of aristocracy founded solely on the more or less intimate relations that their members had had with the Master. These were the men whom Paul denominated "the pillars" of the Church at Jerusalem. For the rest, we ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... assumption—The British constitution was "the wisest system of legislation that ever did, or perhaps ever will, exist". It provided a balance in government between the crown, the nobility, and the commons, or as Mason suggests, it blended the three forms of government, "monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (each) possessed of their distinct powers, checked, tempered, and improved each other.... The honour of the monarchy tempered the Impetuousity of democracy, the moderation of aristocracy checked ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... to the knowing. "They speak of themselves drearily as 'deux pauvres malheureux' with this villa still on their hands, and here they are almost 'touching June,' as they put it. They also gave me to understand that only the finest flowers of the aristocracy had had the honor of dwelling in this villa. They have been able, I should say, more or less successfully to deflower this 'fine fleur' of some of their gold. But they are very meek just now—they were willing to listen ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... authorize any man to call himself so; and this, I trust, I have demonstrated in the most valuable of my works, the Treatise on Tyranny and the Dialogue with my friends at Siena. The aristocratical part of me, if part of me it must be called, hangs loose and keeps off insects. I see no aristocracy in the children of sharpers from behind the counter, nor, placing the matter in the most favourable point of view, in the descendants of free citizens who accepted from any vile enslaver—French, Spanish, German, or priest, or monk (represented with a piece of buffoonery, like ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... to womanhood in the slums and on the pavements of Paris, and tall, handsome and as superbly grown as a dunghill plant, she avenges the beggars and outcasts of whom she is the ultimate product. With her the rottenness that is allowed to ferment among the populace is carried upward and rots the aristocracy. She becomes a blind power of nature, a leaven of destruction, and unwittingly she corrupts and disorganizes all Paris, churning it between her snow-white thighs as milk is monthly churned by housewives. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... explained here, with much care and caution, that the mother of Ab moved in the best and most exclusive circles of the time. She belonged to the aristocracy and, it may be added, regarding this fine lady personally, that she had the weakness of paying much attention to her dress. She was what might properly be called a leader of society, though society was at the time ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... the lower city, with its marvellous Town Hall, it was always the upper portion of Brussels she beheld when she thought of the capital. She had felt that she belonged to this quarter, where all who had any claim to aristocracy lived; here, near the palace and the beautiful leafy trees, her future home had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... monarchy, or a mixed monarchy, or a mere democracy as vulgarly understood, or any other of the make-shift constitutions of the past, but something worthy of being called a Free and Equal Commonwealth, and yet conserving what was genuine and natural in rank or aristocracy. The basis must be a systematic classification of the community in accordance with facts and needs, and the arrangements such as to give full liberty to all, while distributing power among all in such ways ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... see the duke, on the recovery of a large portion of his estates, enjoying the elegant retreat at Twickenham, feted by the nobility of England, and caressed by the aristocracy ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... It is in no way a "preserve" of the aristocracy, being largely recruited from the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... higher as I have a title. I have tried to flatter myself that it was my polished, dignified manner that won me the extra remuneration; but after your exclamation on my brutality to-night, I am afraid I must fall back on my title. We members of the aristocracy ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... old acquaintances, to be sure, and had many subjects of interest in common. Mr. Wynn the elder, who, perhaps, was imbued with a little of the true Briton's reverence for aristocracy, was pleased to entertain his former neighbour, Lord Scutcheon's son, especially when that young officer himself was endowed with such a frank, genial bearing as rendered him almost ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... me were all of the class of those I have related,—simple, unostentatious. He has been frequently charged with the weakness of undue respect for the aristocracy. I never heard him, during the whole of our intercourse, speak of great people with whom he had been intimate, never a word of the honors accorded to him; and, certainly, he never uttered a sentence of satire or censure or harshness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy, and until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... aristocracy lined the boulevards, this son of fortune would take his physician in his carriage and go through the slums, seeking the sick and suffering. One afternoon, while he stood outside a tenement door, awaiting the return of the doctor ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... the boards of our Parliament House here in a very respectable type of Caucasian man; and all agree that nowhere else in modern Europe is it to be found more true to its original contour than among the high-bred aristocracy of England, especially among the female members of the class. Looking, then, at the entire evidence,—at the admitted fact that the Circassians of the present day are an eminently handsome people,—that ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... associated allies and neutrals will have time to go on to something like dominance and authenticity, then the deference which the spokesmen of these nations are likely to show for the prescriptive rights of dynasty, nobility, bureaucracy, or even of pecuniary aristocracy, in the countries that make up the party of the second part, may be expected to have shrunk appreciably, conceivably even to such precarious dimensions as to involve the virtual neglect or possible downright abrogation of them, in sum ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... considered to be a proof of the superiority of the proletariat. For, with all men economically equal, the beautiful women turned from the anemic intellectual and the sons of aristocracy, to the strong arms of labour. Believing themselves to be the source of all wealth, and by that right vested with sole political power, and now finding themselves preferred by the beautiful women, the labourer would soon have eliminated all other classes from human society. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... of the big, white pillars of Southern aristocracy, had gone through Congress and the Senate of his country to the tune of "Spend and not spare," which left his widow and three younger daughters and a small son dependent ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... Hall was already crowded when we arrived, but seats had been reserved for us in one of the front rows of benches. Many eyes were turned on us as we made our way to our places, for Aunt Phoebe was looked up to as one of the cornerstones of aristocracy in Bishopsthorpe, and I fancied that I caught an expression of relief on the faces of some of those present, who, until the entertainment had been sanctioned by her presence, had probably felt doubtful ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... this former squire of Bracken-end in Woodhall, we have an individual belonging to a family of knightly rank, his friends being members of some of our oldest county aristocracy, and his transactions connected with such Lords paramount as the Baron Willoughby of Knaith and Lord Clinton of Tattershall. I may add that the family is now represented by Lord Sherard of Leitrim, in the Peerage of Ireland, who is connected by marriage with the Reeves of Leadenham, the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... social calls in wealthy Chinese homes, is the thought of entertaining the aristocracy in one's ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... with a difficulty which, even for the most zealous aspirant to place and power, robs the honors and emoluments of office of more than half their charm. Neither Liberal nor Conservative will care to incur the displeasure of the Queen and the implacable wrath of the English aristocracy—both Whig and Tory—by consenting to the political divorcement of Ireland, and to what would be regarded as the disruption of the empire. For it is felt, not without good reason, that the indirect and ultimate consequences ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... typical Socialist point of view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds, but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes, or an aristocracy. In other words, I am a democrat. I believe that crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process, a real aristocracy—an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and noble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... a ground-swell moves the weeds in a cave. Travelling-carriages of all kinds and colours climbed and descended the road that led towards the seaside borough. Some contained those personages of the King's suite who had not kept pace with him in his journey from Windsor; others were the coaches of aristocracy, big and little, whom news of the King's arrival drew thither for their own pleasure: so that the highway, as seen from the hills about Overcombe, appeared like an ant-walk—a constant succession of dark spots creeping along its surface at nearly uniform ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... phantom coursers having apparently a supreme contempt for whipcord, he gives up the reins to a professional charioteer, and commences his perambulations. His first visit is to the Chiaja, the favourite promenade of the aristocracy and of foreigners; his second to the Toledo, the street of shops and loungers; his third to the Forcella, frequented by lawyers and their clients. He makes a chapter, and a long one too, out of each street; but not in the way usually adopted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... with Whig traditions, for in spite of the stones, intellectual and political, that have been thrown at them, salvation is of the Whigs. When I speak thus of the Whigs I do not, of course, mean Whiggism of the Whig aristocracy as represented by modern Tory historians, or by the parasitic sycophants of a militant Proletariat. I mean true Whig principles—the principles of Halifax, of Somers, of Locke, of Addison, and of Steele—the principles of the Bill of Rights and ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... did not contain a more cunning, mean, selfish, foolish, disreputable old man. That blood-red hand of Sir Pitt Crawley's would be in anybody's pocket except his own; and it is with grief and pain, that, as admirers of the British aristocracy, we find ourselves obliged to admit the existence of so many ill qualities in a person whose name is ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... years' absence from home, because father and son had met in South Africa during the war, and were together in Cannes and Paris subsequently. His difficulty was to explain this freak journey satisfactorily. The Earl of Fairholme held feudal views anent the place occupied in the world by the British aristocracy. His own hot youth was crowded with episodes that Medenham might regard with disdain, yet he would be shocked out of his well-fed cynicism by the notion that his son was gallivanting round the country as the chauffeur of an ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... Very soon after the return of the Peacockes there was a grand dinner-party at the palace, to which the Doctor and his wife were invited. It was not a clerical dinner-party, and so the honour was the greater. The aristocracy of the neighbourhood were there, including Lady Anne Clifford, who was devoted, with almost repentant affection, to her old friend. And Lady Margaret Momson was there, the only clergyman's wife besides his own, who declared to him with unblushing ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... rest of the fashionable world in this respect. I felt for my part that I respected them. They were in daily communication with a duke! They were not the rose, but they had lived beside it. There is an odor in the English aristocracy which intoxicates plebeians. I am sure that any commoner in England, though he would die rather than confess it, would have a respect for those great big ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... protectorship; caliphate, pashalic^, electorate; presidency, presidentship^; administration; proconsul, consulship; prefecture; seneschalship; magistrature^, magistracy. monarchy; kinghood^, kingship; royalty, regality; aristarchy^, aristocracy; oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, demagogy; commonwealth; dominion; heteronomy; republic, republicanism; socialism; collectivism; mob law, mobocracy^, ochlocracy^; vox populi, imperium in imperio [Lat.]; bureaucracy; beadledom^, bumbledom^; stratocracy; military power, military government, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Within ten days of the wedding his body was laid beside his father in the Temple Church at London. In October, 1232, died Randolph of Blundeville, the last representative of the male stock of the old line of the Earls of Chester, and long the foremost champion of the feudal aristocracy against Hubert. The contest between them had been fought with such chivalry that the last public act of the old earl was to protect the fallen justiciar from the violence of his foes. For more than fifty years Randolph had ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Caucasian and often Semitic physiognomy seen in the aristocratic type of Japanese, the Yamato were mainly of Caucasic, perhaps Iranian, origin. These were the warriors, the conquerors of Japan, and afterwards the aristocracy, modified to some extent by mingling with a Mongoloid rank and file, and by a considerable addition of Ainu." He remarks that a white skin was the ideal of the Yamato, as is proved ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Paddington—I like a hansom cab, it goes so fast—and then down to Windsor by the train in a carriage full of such smart people, some of whom I knew quite well by name, though not to speak to. The slang aristocracy, as they are called, muster in great force at Ascot. Nor could anything be more delightful than the drive through Windsor Forest up to the Course—such a neat phaeton and pair, and John and I like a regular Darby and Joan sitting side by side. Somehow that drive through Windsor Forest made me ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... and the flow of soul'; and to us, who are acquainted with Captain Brown's sad want of relish for 'the pure wells of English undefiled,' it may be matter for congratulation that he has had the opportunity of improving his taste by holding converse with an elegant and refined member of the British aristocracy. But from some mundane ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Belgian capital, and, in the matter of restaurants, there is a marked contrast between the two cities. Here the latter-day Lucullus will have to seek in queer nooks and out-of-the-way corners to discover the best kitchens and the cellars where the wines are of the finest crus. The aristocracy of Belgium mostly dines en famille and the restaurants that cater for the middle classes are the most patronised. There are, however, several establishments which provide for more refined tastes, but they will not be found upon the big boulevards ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... was under "the illusion of a possibly regenerated aristocracy." He sends Tancred, the hero, the heir of a ducal house, to Palestine to find the inspiration to a true religious belief, and details his adventures with a power of sarcasm that is seldom equaled. In certain scenes in this novel the author ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... his rue—whether for lady fair or for towering prospects stricken down—with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little with his new associates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence. He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with the best—a nonchalant ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... representatives of the high financial society, and a few members of the aristocracy, were invited to Danglars' house to witness the signing of the marriage contract of the only daughter of the house with the Italian, Count Andrea Cavalcanti, of the princely house of Cavalcanti. At five o'clock, when the guests arrived, they found all the rooms in the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere |
