"Rusticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... introduces his catalogue with the following just remonstrance:—"Let those who say the church has had no philosophers, nor eloquent and learned men, observe who and what they were who founded, established, and adorned it; let them cease to accuse our faith of rusticity, and confess their mistake." (Jer. Prol. in Lib. de Ser. Eccl.) Of these writers, several, as Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Bardesanes, Hippolitus, Eusebius, were voluminous writers. Christian writers abounded particularly ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... helped to draw to her pastoral tales the attention they deserved, but had not instantly won in all quarters. Theophile Gautier writes playfully of this piece: "The success of Francois le Champi has given all our vaudeville writers an appetite for rusticity. Only let this go on a little, and we shall be inundated by what has humorously been called the 'ruro-drama.' Morvan hats and Berrichon head-dresses will invade the scenes, and no language be spoken ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... wants dignity: yet has the painter contrived to throw into this lovely picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external, which in the living prototype we should term countenance; as if a chastened consciousness of her high destiny and exalted character shone through the natural rusticity of her features, and touched them with a certain grace and dignity, emanating from the mind alone, which only mind could give, and mind perceive. I have seen within the last few days, three copies of this picture, in all of them the charming simplicity ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... Miss Rosey's compliment was, it had its full effect upon her father, who was at times dimly conscious of his hopeless rusticity and its incongruity with his surroundings. "Yes," he said awkwardly, with a slight relaxation of his aggressive attitude; "yes, in course it's more bang-up style, but it don't pay—Rosey—it don't pay. Yer's the Pontiac that oughter be bringin' in, ez rents go, at least three hundred a month, don't ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... homely or misshapen. Oak and walnut-tree chairs, beds, and tables form the chief part, and these are in a very rickety condition; nevertheless, an air of cleanliness and comfort pervades the rooms, and with the extreme rusticity of the ameublement, give one the notion of being in some ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... disguise or to cast behind him the honest and manly though unpolished characteristics of his earlier days. Never was a man further removed from all snobbish affectation. As little was there, also, of the demagogue art of assuming an uncouthness or rusticity of manner and outward habit with the mistaken notion of thus securing particular favor as 'one of the masses.' He chose to appear then, as in all his later life, precisely what he was. His deportment was unassuming, though without ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... at the Meeting House. The valley was quiet. Scarcely a sound broke the perfect peace of the Sabbath morning. The sun blazed down, a blistering fragrant heat, and the laden atmosphere of the valley suggested only the rusticity, the simple innocence ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... present day can scarcely be contented with tall, waving timothy in the front door-yard, and the rickety board-fence that enclosed a scene of almost primitive rusticity—the state of things ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... an elegant group of ladies and gentlemen indulging in an open air dance of some sort. One couple are doing steps facing one another, to the music of a set of pipes, while the rest flirt and talk, decorously, round about. There is no boisterous rusticity here; ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... With regard to the rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... fever of the city. In passing from Alexandria to Rome it lost much of its limpid purity; the clear crystal of the drink was mixed with flavours and perfumes to fit the palate of a patron or an emperor. The example of adulteration being once set, the implied contrast of civilization and rusticity was replaced by direct satire on the former, and later by the discussion under the pastoral mask of questions of religious and political controversy. Proving itself but a left-handed weapon in such debate, it became ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... rusticity and scurrility, two extremes, as affability is between flattery and contention, it must not exceed; but be still accompanied with that [2181][Greek: ablabeia] or innocency, quae nemini nocet, omnem injuriae, oblationem ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... is not unlike the Etruscan towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of a Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticity strike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats of dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone by and left but few traces,—some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... is treated in this course with much depth of philosophy. This kind of merit is often found among the German writers; but SCHLEGEL has no equal in the art of inspiring his own admiration; in general, be shows himself attached to a simple taste, sometimes bordering on rusticity; but he deviates from his usual opinions in favour of the inhabitants of the South. Their play on words is not the object of his censure; he detests the affectation which owes its existence to the spirit of society: but that which is excited by the luxury of imagination pleases him, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... in life. He now wore more fashionable clothes than he had yet been accustomed to, and any little rusticity of gait or pronunciation which he had brought from Paleham, was so quickly and completely lost that it was ere long impossible to detect that he had not been born and bred among people of what is commonly called education. The boy paid great attention to his work, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... simplicity. Every reader of this journal must have been impressed with the words which conclude his notice of the Vale of Grasmere:—'Not a single red tile, no flaring gentleman's house or garden-wall, breaks in upon the repose of this little unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty, in its neatest and most ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably delightful airs, and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and rusticity, but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the mediaeval |78| things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes found amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... amusement for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the decorations ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... on business, my own withers may be supposed professionally unwrung. Otherwise, so exploratory a lash.... I seldom recall the touch of it more shrewd than in Queen Lucia (HUTCHINSON), an altogether delightful castigation of those persons whom a false rusticity causes to change a good village into the sham-bucolic home of crazes, fads and affectation. All this super-cultured life of the Riseholme community has its centre in Mrs. Lucas, the acknowledged queen of the place (Lucia wife ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... assigned why we may not laugh in the one as well as weep in the other. The true reason of this mixture is to be sought for in the manners which are prevalent amongst a people. It has become very fashionable to affect delicacy, tenderness of heart, and fine feeling, and to shun all imputation of rusticity. Much mirth is very foreign to this character; they have introduced, therefore, a sort ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... because He knows all things; and He knows all things because He made them all; but His greatest knowledge is in comprehending that He made not—that is, Himself. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works. Those highly magnify Him whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and a deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration. Every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final cause and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... simplicity above a neck that would have made an average woman's fortune. This glowing description, however, must be lowered or heightened in tone by the association of these characteristics with an undefinable simplicity of mien, a certain slight rusticity of effect. The town spoke in her well-cut gown and a few simple adornments, but the ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... expression and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity, and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of domestic ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... about him. He was fond of athletic exercises, an adept in running and wrestling, in which he proved himself more than a match for his village companions. The story is told of his being insulted for his rusticity, on his first visit to Boston, by a youth of twice his size, when he taught the citizen better manners by a ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... man of short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular. Liked by his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour in his forthright speech—he never learned to play the courtier. His manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always, but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust. Affectionate, slow—with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin—and tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art, and to-day he is first among the Little Masters. This too convenient ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... prefatory remarks to No. I. Mr. Punch neither admits nor denies the charge. He is convinced, however, that those who do him the honour to read these Studies, might justly complain if he failed to include in them an example of the work of a Poet who has shown our generation how rusticity and rhymes, cattle and Conservative convictions, peasants and patriotism, may be combined in verse. It is scarcely necessary to add that the author of the following magnificent piece is Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N. Like others who might be named, he has not the honour to be an agricultural labourer; but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... of knowing the state of society and the character of man in retirement, must be aware that the amazing disparity subsisting between the extremes of rusticity and of polished life arises far less from original disproportions of capacity than from the accidental circumstances which attach to the two conditions. Education has a tendency to remove these differences, to elevate the inferior classes of society from their degradation, to raise them in ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... endless ingenuities of pleasantness. Where else, for instance, could one find the dear little dishes of hors d'oeuvre, the symmetrically-laid anchovies and radishes, the thin golden shells of butter, or the wood strawberries and brown jars of cream that gave to their repast the last refinement of rusticity? Hadn't he noticed, she asked, that cooking always expressed the national character, and that French food was clever and amusing just because the people were? And in private houses, everywhere, how the dishes always ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... and none whatever in the carriage folks. She was always pining for the fresh air, the breezy common, the green trees; and on the occasions when she could persuade Isabel to a country ramble, she walked with dreamy eyes that saw not the cut-and-dry rusticity of Woodgreen and Whetstone, but the wild dales and the broad ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... statuettes, crucifixes, crosses worked in wool, stables of Bethlehem, little holy-water stoops, and the faded photographs belonging to the early period of the art (portraits, no doubt, of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, all revealing that air of rusticity in Sunday clothes which is not to be mistaken)—I have before me the whole story of a simple life, surrounding itself year after year with fresh emblems and tokens of the hope that reaches beyond the grave, and the affections ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... only child of Henry and Mary Clifton, was just sixteen years of age. Her light form, transparent countenance, brilliant eye, and graceful movements, were not in keeping with the theory that rusticity must be the necessary result of living in a farmhouse, especially when the labors thereof are ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... thousand, the famous bronzes of Corinth, and they heaped these up in their houses. Thus Verres possessed a whole gallery of objects of art which he had stolen in Sicily. Gradually the Romans assumed a gloss of Greek art and literature. This new culture was called "humanity," as opposed to the "rusticity" of the old ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... round my neck. And so we were friends. When I had set him down, which I did presently, for I shuddered at the idea of the people thinking that I was showing off the CLERGYMAN, I looked at the boy. In his face was great sweetness mingled with great rusticity, and I could not tell whether he was the child of gentlefolk or of peasants. He did not say a word, but walked away to join his aunt, who was waiting for him at the gate of the churchyard. He kept his head turned towards me, however, as he went, so that, not seeing where he ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... manners you have considered as so rustic, this man is better bred than you; and, though he knows nothing of Latin, he knows much more than you, and things of much greater use. You see, therefore, how unjust it is to despise any one for the plainness of his dress, and the rusticity of his manners. You may understand a little Latin, but you know not how to plough, sow grain, or reap the harvest, nor even to prune a tree. Sit down with being convinced that you ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows weaker. To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely. It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... country gentleman appears a little curious in observing the edifices, signs, clocks, coaches, and dials, {358} it is not to be imagined how the polite rabble of this town, who are acquainted with these objects, ridicule his rusticity. I have known a fellow with a burden on his head steal a hand down from his load, and slily twirl the cock of a squire's hat behind him; and while the offended person is swearing or out of countenance, all the wag-wits in the highway are grinning in applause of the ingenious rogue ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... Italian, with the Tuscan rusticity of accent, and an unshaped sort of utterance, betokening that he must heretofore have been chiefly conversant with ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... frank, and manly; whatever of fear there is in it certainly cannot be due to any consciousness of crime. It is a handsome face, moreover, framed in a profusion of blonde hair, which falls curling down cheeks of ruddy hue. An air of rusticity in the cut of his clothes would bespeak him country bred, probably the son of a farmer. And just that he is, his father being a yeoman-farmer near Godalming, some thirty miles back along the road. Why the youth is so far from home at this early hour, and afoot—why ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... place in which one may so readily learn the meaning of that misused word "urbanity." Urbanity is the state of mind adapted to a city, as rusticity is adapted to the country. In each case the perfection of the adaptation is evidenced by a certain ease of manner in the presence of the environment. There is an absence of fret and worry over what is involved in the situation. A countryman does not ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... landscape drawn, now from the vales round Syracuse, now from the poet's own district round Mantua; playful contests between rural bards interspersed with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors of the poet; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of genuine rusticity with assumed courtliness; such are the incongruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these the continual imitations, sometimes sinning against the rules of scholarship, [25] which make them, with all their beauties, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... presented Dr Johnson to the Duke of Argyle. We were shewn through the house; and I never shall forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought, for the moment, I could have been a knight-errant for them. [Footnote: On reflection, at the distance of several years, I wonder that my venerable fellow-traveller should have read this ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... fellow from the country went to New York, and, among the sights and experiences he had planned for, he went to Barnum's Museum. Mr. Greenwood was then its manager, and noticed with some interest his patron's rusticity when he called for a ticket. He asked Mr. Greenwood, after having paid for the card of admittance, 'Where is Barnum?' As Mr. Barnum happened to be in sight on the entrance floor, Mr. Greenwood, pointing to him said, There ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... common with the Rhine—but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting country—unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe—lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Boyd. But a girl reared amid the commonest surroundings, enduring the straits of poverty, lack of education, no accomplishments, how could she take her place in the front rank of Mount Morris society? And the boys—how would they accept this rusticity ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... often desirous of breeding up their sons to the liberal professions: and they are conscious that the company, the language, and the style of life, which their children would be accustomed to at home, are beneath what would be suited to their future professions. Public schools efface this rusticity, and correct the faults of provincial dialect: in this point of view they are highly advantageous. We strongly recommend it to such parents to send their children to large public schools, to Rugby, Eton, or Westminster; not ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... Penshurst. The pages and the young gentlewomen (all under the eye of an aged majordomo) moved sedately in the old house, pacing soberly the gardens beneath the open casements; but when they reached the sweet rusticity of the outward ways, fruit-dropping orchards and sunny spaces, they were for lighter spirits, heels, and wits. With laughter young hand caught at young hand, and fair forms circled swiftly an imaginary May-pole. Tall flowers upon the Medway's brim next took their eye, and they gathered ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... right in doing this; or how far the moderns are right in carrying the principle to greater excess, and seeking always for poverty-stricken rusticity or pensive ruin, we must ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... good to suffer him to utter here, at a time, too, when all dignity is in danger of being trodden under foot, we will say nothing by way of defence. The Commons of Great Britain, my Lords, are a rustic people: a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent of their Managers. We are not acquainted with the urbanity and politeness of extortion and oppression; nor do we know anything of the sentimental delicacies of bribery and corruption. We speak the language ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... which are received by magistrates of the most severe character, and represented before a virtuous queen; when, I say, foreigners are told of this insolent conduct, this contempt for the royal authority, and this Gothic rusticity which some presume to call Christian severity, what an idea must they entertain of our nation? And how will it be possible for them to conceive, either that our laws give a sanction to an art which is declared ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... has the spirit of Cambridge been more truly caught than in Milton's Penseroso; for this poem obviously reflects the seat of learning which the poet had lately left, just as the Allegro depicts the cheerful rusticity of the Buckinghamshire village which was his now home. And thus the Penseroso was understood by Gray, who, in his Installation Ode, introduces Milton among the bards and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... his own eyes and in the eyes of the village girls of Harby, a vastly fine gentleman. If they had ever heard of the sun-god, Phoebus Apollo would have presented himself to their rusticity in some such guise as the personality of the local knight. Sir Blaise had been to London—once—had kissed the King's hand at Whitehall, and had ever since striven vehemently to be more Londonish than the Londoner. He talked with what he thought to be the ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Dover is the right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed are right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with whom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though for another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had never yet seen ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English country life is slowly swept away before the advance of the railway and the telegraph, he will be more and more read for his warm-hearted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... enjoyment. The contrast in the neighbourhood of London, is most striking. It is easy to laugh at the dulness and vulgarity of a London citizen, who divides his time between his counting-house and his villa, or at the coarseness and rusticity of an English country squire; but there is no description of men to whom the national character of our country is ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... upon minds "level and low, burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863; "close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely—one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I would stay just ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of holiday-making Londoners who are fond of the water. At all times it is a pretty sail to Harwich and thence to Felixstowe, that quiet watering-place, a seaside residence that has still a pleasant flavour of rusticity about it, with a fine crisp sea-sand floor for ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... the multitude, and especially of the small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress—above all, where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of disparagement—this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civility, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... have been well known to be truly Splenatick, and that my Spleen arises from having contracted so great a Delicacy, by reading the best Authors, and keeping the most refined Company, that I cannot bear the least Impropriety of Language, or Rusticity of Behaviour. Now, Sir, I have ever looked upon this as a wise Distemper; but by late Observations find that every heavy Wretch, who has nothing to say, excuses his Dulness by complaining of the Spleen. Nay, I saw, the other Day, two Fellows ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was very satisfactory on each side. Miss Crawford found a sister without preciseness or rusticity, a sister's husband who looked the gentleman, and a house commodious and well fitted up; and Mrs. Grant received in those whom she hoped to love better than ever a young man and woman of very prepossessing appearance. Mary Crawford ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... But, scowling upon this rusticity, or roguishness—he knew not which—the butler, in high dudgeon at Israel's republican familiarity, as well as black as a thundercloud with the general insult offered to an illustrious household by a party of armed thieves, as he viewed them, declined any assistance. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... attract attention anywhere, except, perhaps, at a London railway station at midnight. She was unused to her surroundings and she was not a city product. So much was obvious, though her clear pale face and slim young figure did not suggest rusticity. Her dark eyes glanced quickly and nervously around her, and then she started to walk slowly towards one of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... something much stronger. They were getting up their energies for their nightly prowls about the city, and thought it no bad start to bait young Tom first. Of course he had betrayed his ignorance and rusticity in a hundred little ways. Although he began to understand a little of what passed around him in the interlarded speech of the day, he could not frame his tongue to any adequate imitation of it yet. He had learnt, alas, to swear in his old life; but there is a ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... real library with readable books and great chairs in which one sank out of sight. There were log fires blazing everywhere, and pictures on the walls that told of sport, and no end of guns and antlers and trophies of all sorts. But you were not to suppose that all this elaborate rusticity would be any excuse for the absence of attendants in livery, and a chef who boasted the cordon bleu, and a dinner-table resplendent with crystal and silver and orchids and ferns. After all, though the host called it a "small" place, he had invited twenty ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the false and mistaken things! Of all the odious daubs!" purled Dr. Gowdy to his cowed and abashed following. For Dr. Gowdy, town-bred and town-born, had no sympathy for ill-considered rusticity, and was too rigorous a purist to give any quarter to such a discordant mingling of the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... love you the best of them all, Call round here whenever you care, And, if you should run against Brown in the hall, Just give him an insolent stare. And when, from rusticity taking a rest, You come up to London and meet me, Remember the evenings when you were my guest, And take me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... fiat-nosed, was a cant word, used for a clown; Galba being jeered for his rusticity, in consequence of his long retirement. See c. viii. Indeed, they called ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... appropriate and expressive imaginable. Not a waste word, nor a wanting one. And he stood and delivered himself in a simplicity and earnestness of attitude and gesture belonging to his manly and now honored and distinguished trade. I admired the touch of rusticity in his accent, amid his truly splendid diction, which betokened, as well as the vein of solid sense that ran entirely through his speech, that he had not been educated at the college. I thought of ploughman Burns as I listened to blacksmith Burritt. Oh! what a dignity ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... mumbled the wretched victims, reddening as they remembered, in Adrian's slightly drawled rusticity of tone, Farmer ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... found him there, attended by a number of his people, who appeared to be true Flemings, and to have all the rusticity and unpolished manners of their country. The Bishop was of the House of Barlemont, one of the principal families in Flanders. All of this house have shown themselves Spaniards at heart, and at that time were firmly attached to Don John. The Bishop received me with great politeness ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... steadfastly upon them, himseeming there proceeded thence a sweetness which fulfilled him with a pleasure such as he had never before felt. The young lady, seeing this, began to misdoubt her lest his so fixed looking upon her should move his rusticity to somewhat that might turn to her shame; wherefore, calling her women, she rose up, saying, 'Cimon, abide with God.' To which he replied, 'I will begone with thee'; and albeit the young lady, who was still in fear of him, would have declined his company, she could not win to rid herself ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... man grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea. Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... than justice, and more of insolence than courage, in some of their most celebrated actions. However that be, this is certain, that they were at first a nation of soldiers and husbandmen: roughness was long an applauded character among them; and a sort of rusticity reigned, even in ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... first footprint of man. The only redeeming feature of this prolonged bivouac was the cabin itself. Built of the half-cylindrical strips of pine bark, and thatched with the same material, it had a certain picturesque rusticity. But this was an accident of economy rather than taste, for which Flip apologized by saying that the bark of the pine was "no good" ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... admit to herself that the young fellow was very undemonstrative at dinner, and that he did not exhibit the rusticity that she half hoped to see. She gained the impression that he was observing her father very closely, and that no remark of his escaped him. "He has the eyes of a lynx," she thought, with a frown. Still, apart from a certain ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... French Consul in Egypt in 1692, says in his curious description of Egypt; "that in spite of the ignorance and rusticity which have got possession of that country, there yet remain in it several traces of the industry and skill of the ancient Egyptians." One of their most admirable contrivances is, the sending their bees annually into different districts to collect food, at a time when they ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... that "he is a perpetual fountain of good sense,"[84] and likes him better than Ovid,—a bold confession in that day. He prefers the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. "Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus and of Plato"; "there is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strutting in his country buskins";[85] "Theocritus is softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately, and performs all this out of his own fund, without diving into the arts and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric dialect ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from Connecticut—which State in general, with the city of Hartford in particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... approach. He was young, apparently not over twenty-eight or nine years, was dressed like a lumberman, and was of somewhat broad and clumsy build. But in his face, which was clearly revealed by the flickering flame of the lantern, though he stood in deep shadow, there was no coarse rusticity. The full but finely-formed features had a most gentle and amiable cast, resembling those of one of Raphael's cherubs in their halo of yellow hair. A grave smile lingered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... with much cordiality, while Peggy was agreeably surprised to note the easy self-possession with which Esther sustained her part in the conversation. Contact with the world had rubbed away the rusticity of manner which still characterised Mellicent, and though by no possibility could Esther be called pretty, there was an undeniable attractiveness about the tall, neat figure and intellectual face. Peggy knew that her father was agreeably impressed, for the colonel had a ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls-in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with Produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the character of Gretchen. In this they forgot that Marguerite and Gretchen are very different characters indeed. There is much of the tender grace of the unfortunate German maiden in the creation of the French authors, but none of her simple, almost rude, rusticity. As created by, let me say, Mme. Carvalho and perpetuated by Christine Nilsson and the painter Ary Scheffer, Marguerite is a good deal of a grande dame, and against the German critics it might appositely be pleaded ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... road, that shambles by, A window, shining like an eye Through climbing rose and gourd, Shows Age and young Rusticity ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... on his nose, the skirts of his rusty black coat hung with cob-webs, and talking in a tone of suavity approaching to condescension to one of the managers. It is a pity that men should so lose themselves from a certain awkwardness and rusticity at the outset. But did not Sheridan make the same melancholy ending, and run the same fatal career, though in a higher and more brilliant circle? He did; and though not from exactly the same cause, (for no one could accuse Sheridan's purple nose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive social and political changes which have transformed the world were due to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Stancy, a little to his surprise, had a touch of rusticity in her manner, and that forced absence of reserve which seclusion from society lends to young women more frequently than not. She seemed glad to have something to do; the arrival of Somerset was plainly an event sufficient to set some little mark upon her day. Deception had been written on the faces ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... A small, formal lawn was adorned with a square fish-pond, bricked round, and covered with the green weepings of four willows, which drooped over it, from their station, at each corner. At the opposite side of this Pierian reservoir, was a hermitage, or arbour of laurels, shaped in the stiff rusticity of the Dutch school, in the prevalence of which it was probably planted; behind this arbour, the ground, after a slight railing, terminated in ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... use the word "peasant," because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved amongst them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization. At the extreme borders of the Confederate States, upon the confines of society and of the wilderness, a ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... eat quick and rather plentifully; yet the valetudinarian (excuse my rusticity, for I rejoice at seeing it) appears to equal the traveller in appetite, and to ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor |
