"Dereliction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dereliction of their antipathy to the sea, and intercourse with foreigners, the Egyptians can scarcely be regarded as a nation distinguished for their maritime and commercial enterprises; and they certainly by no means, either ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... her extravagance. Some cutting little sarcasms of Molly Gaverick's had likewise annoyed her, and she fretted under the miserable sense of her inadequacy to the demands of a world she despised and yet hankered after. Then Sir Luke had been tiresomely pertinacious over some small dereliction on Bridget's part from the canons of Government House etiquette, which he had requested should not be repeated. Rosamond Tallant had been tiresome also and had made her feel that even here she was no more than a dependent who must conform to the wills of her official superiors. Joan Gildea might ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... with respect to property abandoned at sea (see WRECK), but it is also applied in other senses; for example, land gained from the sea by receding of the water is termed dereliction. Land gained gradually and slowly by dereliction belongs to the owner of the adjoining land, but in the case of sudden or considerable dereliction the land belongs to the Crown. This technical use of the term "dereliction" is to be distinguished from the more general ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... complimentary way by Monsieur de la Tourelle. One day I said to my father that I did not want to be married, that I would rather go back to the dear old mill; but he seemed to feel this speech of mine as a dereliction of duty as great as if I had committed perjury; as if, after the ceremony of betrothal, no one had any right over me but my future husband. And yet he asked me some solemn questions; but my answers were not such as to do me ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... "Can't feed you, old man!" and then, before he knew it, he was telling the sympathetic German of the Smithsonian's dereliction. ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... were all together, then straggled apart; Mrs. Simonson being the first dereliction, as she was not quite equal to climbing as fast as the young people. Thus it came about that Nattie found herself alone with Clem, and suddenly stopping, with ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... perhaps serve to clear up some unaccountable mistakes or omissions which appear in that series of volumes, written at long intervals, and by different hands. Mr. Fuseli has alluded to them in utter astonishment; and cannot account for Vasari's "incredible dereliction of reminiscence, which prompted him to transfer what he had rightly ascribed to Giorgione in one edition to the elder Parma in the subsequent ones." Again: "Vasari's memory was either so treacherous, or his rapidity in writing so inconsiderate, that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... him, and his subsequent career was not one to be contemplated with admiration. Richardson, again, was appointed Clerk of the Peace for the Niagara District. Sir Peregrine Maitland could not pretend to overlook the dereliction of his confidential clerk, Captain Lyons, who was accordingly dismissed from that position. But this was not the end of the story. Many readers are doubtless familiar with Halifax's remark when Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, was removed from the post of First Lord of the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... one of its trenches, opened her parasol, removed her duster, hid it under a bowlder, and with a few shivers and cat-like strokes of her soft hands not only obliterated all material traces of the stolen cream of Carquinez Woods, but assumed a feline demureness quite inconsistent with any moral dereliction. Unfortunately, she forgot to remove at the same time a certain ring from her third finger, which she had put on with her duster and had worn at no other time. With this slight exception, the benignant ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the summit of St. Sofia at Constantinople. But Britain's ironclads, Austria's legions, and German diplomacy barred the way in the very hour of triumph; and Russia drew back. To the Slav enthusiasts of Moscow even the Treaty of San Stefano had seemed a dereliction of a sacred duty; that of Berlin seemed the most cowardly of betrayals. As the Princess Radziwill confesses in her Recollections—that event made ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the natural consequences of cowardice,—nitro-glycerine and fire-balls! Let the upper classes speak the truth about themselves boldly, and they will know how to defend themselves fearlessly. It is equivocation in principle, and dereliction from duty, which melt at last into tears in ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... returned to the former state Oberst V. Oxholm arrived to displace General v. Scholten as governor. The latter was tried by a Commission and condemned for dereliction of duty by the influence of the slave-holding class whom he had angered because of his favorable attitude towards the Negroes. Upon appealing to the Supreme Court, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... her hard-earned shilling, that she had spoiled her own fortunes, and that she would, ere night, be called upon to abdicate her stool behind the counter in favour of that humble customer; and yet so it was. Mr Benjamin could not forgive her dereliction from honesty; and the more he had trusted her, the greater was the shock to his confidence. Moreover, his short-sighted views of human nature, and his incapacity for comprehending its infinite shades and varieties, caused him to extend his ill opinion farther than the delinquent merited. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... do?" says the judge, darting a glance sidewise at Caroline. "What you ask of me is a dereliction of duty, and I am a magistrate before ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... general dereliction of churchly care for the people of the Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main responsibility for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal hindrances, by earnest Christians of various names, whom the established clergy vainly affected to ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... my various pen-and-ink skirmishes, I have sometimes half-resolved to avoid controversy. The resolution would have been unwise; for silence, on many occasions, would be a dereliction of those duties which we owe ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... then, of such punctilious rigidity, it is no wonder that his master could not accept Mrs. Marston's simple excuse for Uncle Simon's dereliction, "that the old man needed rest." For the time being, the good lady might have her way, as all good ladies should, but as for him, he chose to watch ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... this, the implied charge is published to the world that I am seeking to excite "dissension among the churches," and "opposition to the constituted authority of Synod."[1] It would therefore be great dereliction of duty to return to my field of labor, allowing my own views, and the views of my co-laborers, to be thus mistaken in the Church, and such serious charges against our course unanswered. I am not aware that any censorship of the press has been authorized by General Synod. Surely if ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage
... a luxuriousness that had cost his mother and his father-in-law half a fortune! Long seasons of separation from his wife and his children—and without amusements, to avoid spending money lest the folks at home suspect him of dereliction in public—and private—duty! What a dog's life his eight years as deputy had been! Indigestion from the countless gallons of sugared water drunk at the Congressional bar; callouses on his feet from endless promenades ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to this, Jonas Marshall has been as true to his second pledge, even in thought, as the needle to the pole. So dreadful seems the idea of its violation, that the bare recollection of his former dereliction, makes him tremble. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... except the fact that I had not, in my utter helplessness, even tried to get Miss Gage any other partners. But in the larger interest of the present situation, Mrs. March seemed to have lost the sense of my dereliction in this respect. She merely asked, "And it was after you went back to the parlour, just before you came home, that you wrote those names on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Such a state of things could not last. W—— must change the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W——, the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High-street to the back of ***** ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... transcribes unmoved the great poet's account of his own state of mind, after the physicians had warned him that if he persisted in using his remaining eye for his pamphlet, he would lose that too. 'The choice lay before me,' says Milton, 'between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight: in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary. I could not but obey that inward monitor, I knew not what, that spake to me from heaven. I considered ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... like the Americans. The Americans conceive of the executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in that people interfering with itself. The French, the Swiss, and all nations who breathe the full atmosphere of the nineteenth century, think so too. The material necessities of this age require a strong executive; a nation destitute of it cannot be clean, or healthy, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! he may not count it and a kind heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering it, and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... and the illness of most of the officers, with the absence of any safe anchorage in this part of Oceania, decided him to make for Guam, where he thought a little rest might possibly be obtained. This was a very grave dereliction from the instructions which ordered him to survey Torres Straits, but the fact of forty sailors being hors de combat and on the sick-list, will suffice to prove how foolish it would have been to make so ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... their country, their houses, their fortunes, their professional situation, their all, and are now in foreign lands, struggling under the most grievous distresses. Whatever appearances may menace, nobody fears that they can be finally abandoned. Such a dereliction could not be without a strong imputation on the public and private honor of sovereignty itself, nor without an irreparable injury to its interests. It would give occasion to represent monarchs as natural enemies to each other, and that they never support or countenance any subjects of a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cruelly punished. In consequence of their unwarrantable interference, slaves that were, previous to such interference, pious, contented and happy, have become discontented, impertinent and perverse, and have been too often cruelly punished for their dereliction of duty. Ah! well do I recollect the time when the months of Southern clergyman were closed, when rigid laws were enacted—when so many restrictions were thrown around slaveholders. I then saw, and deplored the evil, and hoped, but hoped in vain, that Northern men would desist from a ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... Charleton went to a choice gathering of spirits at the post-office; and Douglas, feeling particularly lonely and unsettled, rode up the south trail after three of Charleton's young mules which had strayed. He felt somehow that, with the dereliction of Charleton, the last hold he had on reality ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... party that draws a large measure of its strength from the South till disaster from material issues compel. With the Republican party (as of a Christmas morning) "everything is lovely and the goose hangs high;" but discomfiture, sometimes laggard, is ever attendant on dereliction of duty. This usurpation, which should have been throttled when a babe, has now become a giant seated in its castle, compelling deference and acquiescence to an anomaly, reaching beyond the Negro in its menace ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... customary to kiboko, or flog, men of the gunbearer class. They respect themselves and their calling, and would never stand that sort of punishment. When one blunders, a sarcastic scolding is generally sufficient; a more serious fault may be punished on the spot by the white man's fist; or a really bad dereliction may cause the man's instant degradation from the post. With this in mind we had called the council of ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the act for establishing a general post office, which raised a revenue on the carriage of letters, was not thought a dereliction of this principle; because that regulation was not considered as a tax, but as a compensation for a service rendered, which every person might accept or decline. And all the duties on trade were understood to be imposed, rather with a view to prevent ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... While he depends upon his memory, and can draw from his repositories of knowledge, he utters weighty sentences, and gives useful counsel; but as the mind in its enfeebled state cannot be kept long busy and intent, the old man is subject to sudden dereliction of his faculties, he loses the order of his ideas, and entangles himself in his own thoughts, till he recovers the leading principle, and falls again into his former train. This idea of dotage encroaching upon wisdom, will ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the Child's Capacity be forthwith examined and [he] sent to some Mechanick Way of Life, without respect to his Birth, if Nature designed him for nothing higher: let him go before he has innocently suffered, and is debased into a Dereliction of Mind for being what it is no Guilt to be, a plain Man. I would not here be supposed to have said, that our learned Men of either Robe who have been whipped at School, are not still Men of noble and liberal Minds; but I am sure ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... state of dereliction and despair did the General Election of 1895 surprise them. The Parnellites had their old organisation—the National League—and the Anti-Parnellites had established in opposition to this the National Federation, so that Ireland had a sufficiency of Leagues but no concrete programme beyond ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... to Montmorency seemed to disconcert Madam d'Epinay; probably she did not expect it. My melancholy situation, the severity of the season, the general dereliction of me by my friends, all made her and Grimm believe, that by driving me to the last extremity, they should oblige me to implore mercy, and thus, by vile meanness, render myself contemptible, to be suffered to remain in an ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... my God who dwells with me; if I could accustom my mind to spiritual tranquillity and cease to wander in a maze of thoughts, cares, and affections; if I could be at leisure from the external things and creatures of this world, and chiefly from myself; if, in short, I might "come into a plenary dereliction of myself," I should at once "begin to see and know of the most present habitation of God in me and so I should eat of the Tree of Life in the midst of the Paradise, which Paradise I myself am, and be a Guest of God."[32] Adam, who was "the Protoplast" ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... productions have a somewhat different character. They are a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles. They are classical and courtly. They are polished in style, without being gaudy; dignified in subject, without affectation. They seem to have been composed not in a cottage at Grasmere, but among the half-inspired groves and stately ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... negligence, heedlessness, remissness, incaution, nonchalance, inadvertence, laxity, improvidence, inattention, dereliction, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... not permanent. Again the anguish swept over His spirit in another foaming breaker, and again He sought solitude, and again He found tranquillity—and again returned to find the disciples asleep. 'They knew not what to answer Him' in extenuation of their renewed dereliction. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Act was therefore passed to ensure the more effectual prevention of this crime, and once again the Revenue officers were exhorted to perform their duty to its fullest extent, and were threatened with punishment in case of any dereliction in this respect, while rewards were held out as an inducement to zealous action. Under this new Act powers were given to the Army, Navy, Marines, and Militia to work in concert with each other for the purpose of preventing smuggling, for seizing smuggled goods, and all implements, ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... as country may be, under certain conditions, Home, I am well aware. For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own. And yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home, and as a training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a home in the country and a home in London. All those educating influences which count for ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... I was moved to pity Perkins, torn asunder between two dreadful alternatives, the one of leaving the trousers there and committing a dereliction of duty, the other of removing them stealthily and committing an indelicacy. I was also moved to pity myself, lying supine under his speechless contempt. I resolved to spare us both, to get out of bed and put things right. I stretched out a hand for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... the night before the attack, the posting of the militia in advance of the main army, and the utter lack of scouts and runners, were all bad enough, but on the other hand, the delay and confusion in the quartermaster's department, the dereliction of the contractors, and the want of discipline among the militia and the levies, were all matters of extenuation. To win was hopeless. To unjustly denounce an old and worthy veteran of the Revolution, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... about to take this seat the witch Kundrie, a messenger of the Holy Grail, appeared in the hall. She vehemently denounced him, related how sorely he had failed in his duty, and cursed him, as the gate keeper had done, for his lack of sympathy. Thus reminded of his dereliction, Parzival immediately left the hall, to renew the quest which had already lasted for many months. He was closely followed by Gawain, one of Arthur's knights, who thought that Parzival had been too ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... in the court, before the windows of the parlour, a well-known voice. 'I aver to you, my worthy friend,' said the speaker, 'that it is a total dereliction of military discipline; and were you not as it were a tyro, your purpose would deserve strong reprobation. For a prisoner of war is on no account to be coerced with fetters, or debinded in ergastulo, as would have been the case had you put this gentleman into the pit of the peel-house ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... in all her relations with her friend, and of course it was not simple so soon as she began to keep things back. She could at any rate keep back as little as possible, and she felt as if she were making up for a dereliction when she answered Olive's inquiry ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... had regarded her honor as lightly as Germany and felt that the matter of self-preservation would excuse any moral dereliction, she would have imitated the example of Luxemburg, also invaded, and permitted free passage to the German army without essential loss of her material prosperity, but with a fatal sacrifice to ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... before, without the Council) "withdraw his protection and interference altogether," on or about the month of August, 1782, and did signify his resolution, through the Resident, Middleton, to the Nabob Vizier. But the said Hastings asserts that "the consequence of this his own second dereliction of the prince of Furruckabad was an aggravated renewal of the severities exercised against his government, and the reappointment of a sezauwil, with powers delegated or assumed, to the utter ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... then questioned me as to the authenticity of my letter to Sir J. Malcolm. I acknowledged it was substantially correct, and declared I could not have entertained any other sentiments without a dereliction of duty. He expressed disapprobation, considering the letter as evincing a determination to control the independence of judges. The Duke replied—then Lord Melville—then Lord Holland—I last. I declared that, as my father's son, I was the ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... Richard, then, there was no other person in the world. There was that that fenced him from all living. Our Saviour Christ upon the rood spoke to His Blessed Mother before His dereliction, but not again afterwards. There was no more that He might say to her, or to His ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... quite superb coolness for the French diplomatist to ask for British protection for ships on ostensible grounds of research, had their secret purpose been exactly opposite to the profession; and the British Minister would have been guilty of grave dereliction of duty had he not assured himself that ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... the charges brought against me afterwards was founded on "my having bribed my escort, and spent the whole night at the house of a notorious Secessionist." The poor sergeant was reduced to the ranks for dereliction of duty; and I the more regret this, because his ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... expenses; contracts are made or to be made, mails carried, postmasters appointed and paid. This is doubtless a very proper and necessary thing, one which the government could not have omitted without a plain dereliction of duty. The honor and interest of the nation required that as soon as the title to the country was settled, our citizens who were resident there, and those who shall go to settle there, should enjoy the benefits of the mail. And as it was the nation's business to establish the mail, it was ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... I going to do about it?" Cappy echoed. "Why, I'm going to send a judge and a jury aboard the Quickstep, try this Finn, Kjellin, and if he's guilty of dereliction of duty I'll bet you a plug hat to one small five-cent bag of smoking tobacco I'll know all about it inside ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... listening children remained breathless as I paused. I had meant this to be the end of my tale, but I saw at once that no excuse would be held valid for such a shameful dereliction of duty. ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... advantages offered by the cheapness of the Continent to large families with narrow incomes; but that the opulent should abandon their country, their natural station, and their duties, simply to drink champagne at a lower rate, and have cheaper dancing-masters, we must always regard as a scandalous dereliction of the services which every man of wealth and rank owes to his tenantry, his neighbours, and his nation. Of course, we except the traveller for curiosity; the man of science, whose object is to enlarge his knowledge; and even the man of rank, who desires ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of dereliction and depression, I have bequeathed to posterity the following table; which, if time shall verify my conjectures, will show that the variation was once known; and that mankind had once within their reach an easy method of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... sentence likewise commuted, and I tried to reach the President with communications asking the same leniency for Hicks. So certain was I that Lincoln had or would reprieve Hicks that I failed to have him shot on the day named. Some officious persons reported my dereliction to Meade, who thereupon (with some censure) ordered me to shoot Hicks on the next day, and to report in person the fact of the shooting. This order I was obliged to obey. The brigade was drawn up ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... much too far from his post, for he had marched several leagues along the highway from Brussels to Waterloo. The captain would certainly have called him to order long ago for this dereliction of duty but for the fact that the inquisitive private had been of great strategic importance. He represented, as he stood there, the whole of Wellington's reserve; and now that the battle was over the reserve ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... Parnassus the rank reprobation of character, the utter dereliction of all principle, in a profligate junto which has not only outraged virtue, but violated common decency; which, spurning even hypocrisy as paltry iniquity below their daring;—to unmask their flagitiousness to the broadest day—to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... is an occasion for the interposition of municipal authority. In spite of the jealousy (proper within certain limits) with which governmental interference with private property is regarded in this country, it is a manifest dereliction of duty on the part of our city authorities not to exercise a strict supervision over these houses. The interests which are chiefly affected by their condition are not private, but public interests. There are legal means for abating nuisances; and there is no reason why houses which affect the health ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various |
