"Coarseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... without being coarse, with a chest broad and ample as a gymnast's, and with arms whose muscular power was evident at every movement. His hair and beard (which latter he wore full, as was just beginning to be the custom) were dark brown in color, and thick and strong almost to coarseness in texture; his eye was a clear hazel, full, quick, and commanding, sometimes almost fierce; while an aquiline nose, full, round forehead, and a complexion bronzed by long exposure to all sorts of weather, gave him an aspect to be noted in any throng he might be thrown into. There was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... aspect of things inside the house told of such habitual coarseness in their way of living as seemed to explain, while it formed the fitting counterpart of, the forbidding gloominess of the outside. My astonishment by degrees changed into disgust, and my disgust into uneasiness. ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... war into the enemy's country proved as disconcerting as unexpected, while to mention the sex of an animal was, in Reginald Sawyer's opinion, to be guilty of unpardonable coarseness. The atmosphere of a Protestant middle-class home clung to him yet, begetting in him a squeamishness, not to say prudery, almost worthy of his hostesses, the Miss Minetts. He shook the culprits again, with a will. He ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... being open and hooked back against the bulkhead; and passing through this doorway one found oneself in the main cabin, an apartment some thirty feet long, with three staterooms on each side of it. Abaft that again was the sail-room, well-stocked with bolts of canvas of varying degrees of coarseness and several sails, many of which seemed to be quite new, neatly rolled up into long bundles, stopped with spunyarn, and each labelled legibly with the description of the sail. Forward of the main cabin, on the starboard ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... Mary felt weary with all the world. Her home seemed poorer and meaner than ever; the boarders disgusted her with their coarseness; teaching was unrelieved drudgery; everything was distasteful. To her mother's renewed inquiries about the party she replied wearily, "My dress was poor and mean, mother; and had I spent our year's income on my toilet, it would have still been poor, compared with those I saw last night. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... [97] grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the very fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are—the skeleton ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the ship's crew. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... depressed—hopelessly depressed. It seemed as if a breath of the real atmosphere of the world towards which she was striving had blown on her suddenly, making her shudder at its coarseness and darkness. What Moloch was this to which she was ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... friendship quite untouched and unimpaired when their friend takes into equal intimacy a third person for whom they themselves entertain aversion or contempt; at the best they see in such conduct an unexpected failure of discernment; very often they detect in it evidence of a startling coarseness of feeling, an insensibility, and a grossness of taste difficult to tolerate in one to whom they have given their affection. Marchmont felt that, if May Gaston wronged him, she was wronging far more herself, and most of all his ideal ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... after that, that a lazy city, where no industry was carried on, became a den of avarice? The Spartans succumbed the more easily to the allurements of luxury and Asiatic voluptuousness, being placed entirely at their mercy by their own coarseness. The same thing happened to the Romans, when military success took them out of Italy,—a thing which the author of the prosopopoeia of Fabricius could not explain. It is not the cultivation of the arts which corrupts ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... The coarseness of the Germans and the mocking infidelity of the French vied with each other in license. Sometimes Voltaire felt that things were carried rather far. "Here be we, three or four foreigners, like monks in an abbey," ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of men, and as the Homes are, so will the men be. Mind will be degraded by the physical influences around it,—decency will be destroyed by constant contact with impurity and defilement,—and coarseness of manners, habits, and tastes, will become inevitable. You cannot rear a kindly nature, sensitive against evil, careful of proprieties, and desirous of moral and intellectual improvement, amidst the darkness, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... grew sad as he looked at this great, strapping woman, whose red face was the very representative of coarseness and meanness. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... novels—humanity. And they seem—also to me, and speaking under correction—to write, if not consummately, far more than moderately well, and to tell in a fashion for which consummate is not too strong a word. While for pure gaiety, unsmirched by coarseness and unspoilt by ill-nature, you will not find much better pastime anywhere than in the work of the author of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of Ancient English Poetry will furnish an example of the coarseness of invective used by both parties during the era of the Reformation; in such rhymes as "Plain Truth and Blind Ignorance"—"A Ballad of Luther and the Pope," &c. The old interlude of "Newe Custome," printed in Dodsley's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... our sense of conventionality, and which may well be called harsh and rough, still the wrath that seizes on our hero is a just and righteous wrath, and we disregard it, just as in Nature, whose grandeur constantly elevates us above the inevitable stains of an earthly soil. The coarseness and ill-breeding, which would claim toleration because this great man now and then showed such feelings, must beware of doing so, being certain to make shipwreck when coming in contact with the massive rock of true morality on which, with all his faults ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... often been reproached by writers for the coarseness of their taste; but our present grievance does not seem to be the want of a good taste, ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the fun-maker of the house, and, like Falstaff, could boast that he was not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others. His stories were irresistibly comic; but they almost always contained expressions of profanity or coarseness which renders it impossible for us to transmit them to these pages. He was an inimitable mimic, and had perfect command of a Dutchman's brogue. One of the least objectionable of his humorous stories ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... for instance, in the essay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration, seems to us a coarse and vulgar picture, whose painter took the most garish colours he could find on his palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. And who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... a little wicker-covered bottle to Arnold, who refused by a gesture. The positive coarseness of the peasant had rekindled his regret and his contempt. Were they really men such as he was, these unfortunates, doomed to unceasing labor, who lived in the bosom of nature without heeding it and whose souls never rose above the most material sensations? Was there one point of resemblance which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... demeanour and person of others of his rank recently imported, and the beauty of Miss Caithness, and the chance that Captain Voucher had if Leila Mortimer would let him alone, and the absurdity of the Page twins, and the furtive coarseness of Leroy Mortimer and his general badness, and the sadness of Leila Mortimer's lot when she had always been in love with other people,—and a little scandalous surmise concerning Tom O'Hara, and the new house on Seventy-ninth Street building for Mrs. Vendenning, and that charming widow's success ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... about them pretty much as does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him, and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain himself. I remember what he said about him because ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... on the room. Mr. Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs. Baines's curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr. Scales had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex. Further, he had no suspicion of the local fame of Mrs. Baines's mince-tarts. He had already eaten more mince-tarts ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... hungry youth the prostitute appeals as the embodiment of many of the refinements and perversities of civilization, on many more complex and civilized men she exerts an attraction of an almost reverse kind. She appeals by her fresh and natural coarseness, her frank familiarity with the crudest facts of life; and so lifts them for a moment out of the withering atmosphere of artificial thought and unreal sentiment in which so many civilized persons are compelled to spend the greater ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the eastern side of the dingle, on which account the dingle was wet and dank from the dews of the night. I kindled my fire, and, after sitting by it for some time to warm my frame, I took some of the coarse food which I have already mentioned; notwithstanding my late struggle, and the coarseness of the fare, I ate with appetite. My provisions had by this time been very much diminished, and I saw that it would be speedily necessary, in the event of my continuing to reside in the dingle, to lay in a fresh store. After my meal, I went to the pit and filled a can with water, which I brought ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... perfectly evident anxiety, over-shot the mark as usual, Corinna reflected. It was his way, she had observed, to cover a mental disturbance with pretended hilarity. There was, as always when he was unnatural and ill at ease, a touch of coarseness in his humour, a grotesque exaggeration of his rhetorical style. With his mind obviously distracted he told several anecdotes of dubious wit; and while he related them Miss Spencer sat primly silent with her gaze on her plate. Only Corinna laughed, as she laughed at any honest ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... of speech, amounting in some places to coarseness, and a deeply religious tone, are to many modern readers the most curious features of the book. A just estimate of it could not be formed if these two facts were overlooked. A century ago men and women were much more straightforward in their speech than we are ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation, of a man who had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I can only do it in a sentence or two, of more important changes in these fifty years. English manners and morals have been bettered, much of savagery and coarseness has been got rid of; low, cruel amusements have been abandoned. Thanks to the great Total Abstinence movement very largely, the national conscience has been stirred in regard to the great national sin of intoxication. A national system of education has come ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... apologize for the coarseness of their meal: but her father interposed, saying, "It is good enough for well people, and as good as we generally have; but if thee has anything a little nice for a poor appetite, bring it ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... head. A scholar and a gentleman, early misfortunes and an imprudent marriage had driven him to the mastership of the little country grammar school; and here the perpetual annoyance caused to his refined mind by the coarseness of clumsy or spiteful boys, had gradually unhinged his intellect. Often did he tell the boys "that it was an easier life by far to break stones by the roadside than to teach them;" and at last his eccentricities became too obvious to ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... legal owner, were in domestic service, and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon—youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the neck, the little ears peeping out through its tresses. The hands, like the feet, were very small and delicate, and the curves of the bust soft and full without being coarse, or even showing the promise of coarseness. ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... souls be wellnigh as black in the eyes of a strict judge, arbiter alike of the seen and the unseen. Such are hardly the conceptions wherewith the brain of a cultivated woman would teem. It were too glaring treason to her sex and to her own nature. Although it must be said that there is no word of coarseness or bold suggestion of wickedness to be found upon any page. So far from it, we scarcely find recognized the crime to which the maidens are tempted, and we half-ignorantly wonder at the existence of compunctions, excited at we can scarcely say what. But the author knew probably ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the fifth century, manufacture of vases at Athens decayed. Supply chiefly from South Italy. Growing use of additional white (rare in Attic red figure vases), sometimes addition of detail in yellowish brown, and a general coarseness of ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange somewhere ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... fashion, that picture would intertwine itself with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion—profound disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all considerations ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... to make her work!" laughed Jacques with fiendish coarseness. "You'll slave for me, eh, my pretty? Yes, for you, ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... Padre Sibyla seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word by reason of the respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he took his revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base fawner and despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla let him scold, while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself by rubbing his long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like the good tactician that the Canon hinted he was, of all the mistakes of his opponents. Padre Camorra was ignorant of the ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... give in to them with the ignoble readiness with which they gave in to one another. I hated them from the first, and shut myself away from everyone in timid, wounded and disproportionate pride. Their coarseness revolted me. They laughed cynically at my face, at my clumsy figure; and yet what stupid faces they had themselves. In our school the boys' faces seemed in a special way to degenerate and grow stupider. How many fine-looking boys came to us! In a few years they became ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... goes and sits apart. She detests Brisbille, who is the personification of envy, malice and coarseness. And everybody hates this marionette, too, for his drunkenness and his forward notions. All the same, when there is something you want him to do, you choose Sunday morning to call, and you linger there, knowing that you will meet others. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... not perish; our spirit, separated from its body by death, enters into a connection with some other body. Thus Edelmann taught a kind of metempsychosis. What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of. But as yet the faith of the church was a ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Dryden added coarseness to strength in his remarks when he wrote of one of Settle's plays:—"To conclude this act with the most rumbling piece ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... gathered mushrooms, eaten berries, Or found the sheep they lost, or killed a fox, Or snared the kestrel, or so played their pipes Some maid showed pleasure, sighed, nay even wept. There to be poet need involve no strain, For though enough of coarseness, dung—nay, nay, And suffering too, be mingled with the life, 'Tis wedded to such air, Such water and sound health! What else might jar or fret chimes in attuned Like satyr's cloven hoof or lorn nymph's grief In a choice ode. Though lust, disease and death, As everywhere, are cruel tyrants, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... Here is a solid body which we touch but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure and homogeneous ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... literary monuments have been conceived and carried out; (3) for the accuracy of its historical statements, so far as it has been possible to test them; and further (4) for its ennobling standards and lofty ideals, as well as for its wholesome purity and an almost total absence of coarseness ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... they arose. There were calls upon him now to resign the Senatorship; but he had no intention of doing so. His fighting blood was aroused. He was hardened to contests and to misunderstanding and abuse. He had been berated for coarseness and charged with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... which, he said, had been given in Berlin with the coarsest bluntness. He mentioned, as a striking instance of this, a brief chorus in C major of male and female nymphs in the third act. By the introduction of a more moderate tempo and very soft piano I had tried to free this from the original coarseness with which Devrient had heard it rendered in Berlin—presumably with traditional fidelity. My most innocent device, and one which I frequently adopted, for disguising the irritating stiffness or the orchestral ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Pope or saint that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its flavor, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... one time he was chosen among the selectmen to perambulate the town lines—an old annual custom. One day they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he had friends among the ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, and though admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness of the original stock. The men are man-like, but the women are not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the male. To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few, and their behavior, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... had the ability to conceive. Thus Percell's melody, though often original and expressive, is nevertheless more often rude and ungraceful. In the words of a recent writer on this subject, "We are often surprised to find elegance and coarseness, symmetry and clumsiness, mixed in a way that would be unaccountable, did we not consider that, in all the arts, the taste is a faculty which is slowly formed, even in the most highly gifted minds." We suspect that the pageant saved King Arthur; the scenic illusions by which contending ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... increased coldness and aversion. Had it not been for the influence of his mother and the books he read, he would have inevitably fallen into low company. But he had promised his mother to shun it. He saw its result in his father's conduct, and as he read, and his mind matured, the narrow coarseness of such company became repugnant. From time to time he was sorely tempted to leave the home which his father made hateful in many respects, and try his fortunes among strangers who would not associate him with a sot; but his love for his mother kept him at her side, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... manner indicated? No doubt of it. Each one of you can submit the question to an experimental test. Water will not dissolve resin, but spirit will; and when spirit which holds resin in solution is dropped into water, the resin immediately separates in solid particles, which render the water milky. The coarseness of this precipitate depends on the quantity of the dissolved resin. Professor Bruecke has given us the proportions which produce particles particularly suited to our present purpose. One gramme of clean mastic is dissolved in eighty-seven grammes of absolute alcohol, and the transparent solution ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... he reach Chinon until the middle of December. The pomp of his entrance was a thing stupendous. We find a detailed relation of it in Brantome, translated into prose form some old verses which, he tells us, that he found in the family treasury. He complains of their coarseness, and those who are acquainted with the delightful old Frenchman's own frankness of expression may well raise their brows at that criticism of his. Whatever the coarse liberties taken with the subject—of which we are not allowed more than an occasional glimpse—and despite the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... comedy of the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance, Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and beautiful. And something pitiable, and ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... genuine good-nature, and at the same time how strange an ignorance of the world and of men, was combined in him together with a passionate zeal for combat. George answered him at once with ferocity, and, as Luther says, with the coarseness of a peasant. The prince, otherwise not ignoble, was so embittered by hatred against the heretic as to reproach him with the vulgarest motives of avarice, ambition, and the lust of the flesh. Never had Luther, even with his ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... a cause where his convictions of justice and of legal right were fixed, there was not among his contemporaries, in the courts of this State, an advocate, whose efforts were so nearly irresistible before a jury. He has command of sarcasm and invective, without coarseness. He attacks oppression, meanness and fraud as if they were offences not only against the public, but against himself. He has never strayed from the profession to engage in any speculations or occupations to divert his thoughts from pure law, except for ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... want with women between sun-up and sun-down?' His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh to say about everything, and their ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... gentleman's valet, Petrushka—the latter a fellow of about thirty, clad in a worn, over-ample jacket which formerly had graced his master's shoulders, and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... be obtained from constant presence with the sunlight and the stars. I thought of them all day, and envied them (as they envied me), and in the evening I found them again. It was growing dark, and the shadow took away something of the coarseness of the group outside one of the village "pothouses." Green foliage overhung them and the men with whom they were drinking; the white pipes, the blue smoke, the flash of a match, the red sign which had so often swung to and fro in the gales now still in the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... like. At length a man of about fifty, pock-broken and somewhat bald, began to speak: unlike the others who screamed, shouted, and seemed in earnest, he spoke in a dry, waggish style, which had all the coarseness and nothing of the cleverness of that of old Rowland Hill, whom I once heard. After a great many jokes, some of them very poor, and others exceedingly thread-bare, on the folly of those who sell themselves to the Devil for a little ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... much to disturb it by a word. Perhaps, too, there was comfort to his vanity in the spectacle of her humiliation; at all events he suffered some time to pass before he spoke to her. When he did, it was with a great deal of respect; for Blassemare, notwithstanding his coarseness, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... use and value in exchange. (Polit., I, 3, Schn.) Similarly D. Hume, who allows a period of luxury, culture, industry, of trade and manufactures, of freedom and circulation of money, to be preceded by one in which the feeling of wants is not awakened, in which coarseness and idleness prevail, one in which agriculture is alone pursued, and monetary economy and freedom decline, and trade by barter obtains. (Discourses, passim, especially On Interest and on Money.) A similar contrast ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... action and language. Sir T. S. Clouston furnishes a very striking case of this character, which he cites in order to show "the common mixture of religious and sexual emotion."[118] I do not reproduce it here because of its grossly obscene character; but, save for coarseness of language, it does not differ materially from illustrations already given. Almost any of the text-books will supply cases illustrating the connection between sexualism and religion, a connection generally recognised as the opinions cited ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... intolerable; and by indispensably softening down the incidents, he has killed the spirit of that humour, gross and farcical, that pervades the original. When the work was first mentioned to me, I protested as strongly as possible against admitting any coarseness and indelicacy, so that my conscience is clear of countenancing aught of that kind. So great is my admiration of Chaucer's genius, and so profound my reverence for him. . . for spreading the light of Literature through his native land, that, notwithstanding ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... the brunette, the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose. Admiration was, I repeat, the first impression. But the second was criticism. There was something subtly wrong with the face, some coarseness of expression, some hardness, perhaps, of eye, some looseness of lip which marred its perfect beauty. But these, of course, are afterthoughts. At the moment I was simply conscious that I was in the presence of a very handsome woman, ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... home to Mademoiselle de Guerchi how imminent was her danger. At first she had thought the commander's visit might be a snare laid to test her, but the coarseness of his expressions, the cynicism of his overtures in the presence of a third person, had convinced her she was wrong. No man could have imagined that the revolting method of seduction employed could meet with success, and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... moral inclinations, etc., do the children differ. Some like this, and dislike that, and the reverse; some are attracted toward this and repelled by that, and the reverse; some are kind while others are cruel; some manifest an innate sense of refinement, while others show coarseness and lack of delicate feeling. This among children of the same family, remember. And, when the child enters school, we find this one takes to mathematics as the duck does to water, while its brother loathes the subject; the anti-arithmetic ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... Coarseness perceptibly abated, and violence became much rarer in that portion of his corps with which he had immediately to do; the men gradually acquired from him a better, a higher tone; they learned to do duties inglorious and distasteful as well as they ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of the dead, they answered, 'that it was not only to evidence their love for their departed relatives, but that they might avoid the sight of objects which, having been used by them, would continually renew their grief.' The same delicacy of feeling, so inconsistent with the coarseness of the Red Man's nature, was manifested in their custom of never uttering the names of the dead; and if these names were borne by any of the other members of the family, they laid them aside during the whole of their mourning. And it was esteemed the greatest insult that could be offered to ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... coaling system is, no doubt, demoralising in itself, as it enables Negroes of the lowest class to earn enough in one day to keep them in idleness, even in luxury, for a week or more, till the arrival of the next steamer. But what we saw proceeded rather from the mere excitability and coarseness of half-civilised creatures than from any deliberate depravity; and we were told that, in the island just mentioned, the Negroes, when forced to coal on Sunday, or on Christmas Day, always abstain ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... walk with you There's honor and instruction too; Yet here alone I care not to resort, Because I coarseness hate of every sort. This fiddling, shouting, skittling, I detest; I hate the tumult of the vulgar throng; They roar as by the evil one possess'd, And call it pleasure, call ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... characterized by the coarseness of its fibre and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions. It is to a certain extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided with stings. It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable parts of the victim on which it fastens. These two qualities give it a certain ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with me? Did I lose courage ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had seen only the faces of savage women and still more savage men; for eight years his life had been steeped in bitterness, and all that was tender or romantic in his nature had been cramped, as in iron fetters, by the coarseness and stolidity around him. Now, after all that dreary time, he met one who had the beauty and the refinement of his own race. Was it any wonder that her glance, the touch of her dress or hair, the soft tones of her voice, had for him an indescribable charm? Was it any wonder ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... enter upon the scene, and are asked to join in the dance, but instead, Elvira delights them with a song, a vocal scherzo ("Yes, I'll obey you"). The innkeeper is rude to them, but they are protected from his coarseness by Manuel, the muleteer, who suddenly appears and sings a rollicking song ("I am a simple Muleteer") to the accompaniment of a tambourine and the snappings of his whip. A dialogue duet follows, in which she accepts his protection and escort. She ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... one distinguished as the city of the Sun, "Sippara sha Shamash," while the other gave lustre to Anunit in assuming the designation of "Sippara sha Anunitum." Rightly interpreted, these family arrangements of the gods had but one reason for their existence—the necessity of explaining without coarseness those parental connections which the theological classification found it needful to establish between the deities constituting the two triads. In Chaldaea as in Egypt there was no inclination to represent the divine families ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... gratulation, that American minstrelsy has of late been divested of much of its former coarseness; that its entertainments have become so much diversified and elevated in character—the musical portions of which at times so nearly approach the classical—as to render the same entirely different from the minstrel performances so common a few years ago. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... escorted, guarded, went other women, reputable women. Great rawboned women, daughters of Irish portenos, with the coarseness of the Irish peasant in their faces, the brogue of the Irish peasant on their Spanish, but punctiliously Castilian as to manners; gross Teutonic women; fluffy sentimental Englishwomen, bearing exile bravely, but thinking long for the Surrey downs; gravid Italian women, clumsy in the body, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the pains to scan the lines you must soon admit how subtle and delicate are the alternating measures, prepared purposely to create the very idea of age and coarseness and succeeding with every almost matchless line ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... behavior to show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to intolerable coarseness; and English intercourse to need enlivening by games and stories and other pastimes; so he does not feel called upon to acquire these defects after taking great paths to cultivate himself in a ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the only men whom the modest position of her parents allowed her to think of. Accustomed, of course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of the people, she now became aware of instincts within herself which revolved from all coarseness. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... and thoughtless. We live gayly and do not trouble for the morrow, but we are not altogether fools; and even were there nothing else to unite us against the Commune, the squalor and wretchedness, the ugliness and vice, the brutal coarseness, and the foul language of these ruffians would band us together as artists against them. Now, enough of Paris, what have you been doing in England, besides recovering ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... which are the result of my gross living; also my melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life. To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable disposition; to my daughter Jane my coarseness of thought and my unwillingness to be restrained in my desires, and also my ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country—all these are features in Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part of jester to the Athenian tyrant. But his jests were the vehicles for telling to them the soundest truths. They were never without a ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... drew away a little. His fine nature was shocked by Fred's coarseness and lack of principle; still, this was the boy he had chosen for an ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... short, the faith in this order of the physico- miraculous is open alike to the sceptical and the non-sceptical: it is touched superficially with the coloring of superstition, with its tenderness, its humility, its thankfulness, its awe; but, on the other hand, it is not therefore tainted with the coarseness, with the silliness, with the credulity of superstition. Such a faith reposes upon the universal signs diffused through nature, and blends with the mysterious of natural grandeurs wherever found—with ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... personification is copious beyond example; but it is seldom sufficiently select; rich as it is in imagination, it too commonly wants taste and delicacy; it has the fault of coarseness, which Burke's images in prose two centuries afterwards, sometimes fell into. But Collins's images are as pure, and of as exquisite delicacy, as they are spiritual. They are not human beings invested with some of the attributes of angels, but the whole figure is purely angelic, and of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... he realized that his Ideal could never become reconciled to it. This, at first, caused him deep suffering, but he soon conceived a pleasant thought: "Why should I expose my precious jewel to the vulgarity, coarseness and filth of a practical life? I will put it into a jewel case and hide it ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... thought I loved you, and perhaps the feeling I cherished might have truly become love had you always remained the same considerate gentleman I first believed you to be. Instead, little by little, I have been driven away, hurt by your coarseness, your lack of chivalry, until now, when it comes to the supreme test, I find my soul in revolt. ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... others, and to talk as if Christian painting had expired with Perugino. We were much struck with our authoress's power of finding spiritual truth and beauty in Titian's "Assumption," one of the very pictures in which the "high-art" party are wont to see nothing but "coarseness" and "earthliness" of conception. She, having, we suppose, a more acute as well as a more healthy eye for the beautiful and the spiritual, and therefore able to perceive its slightest traces wherever they exist, sees in those "earthly" faces of the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... written with a coarseness and irreverence so singular, even in the attacks of that age, that it were well if they could be attributed to insanity. They contain the most undisguised abuse which had been uttered against Christianity since the days ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... life was cynical and coarse. The cynicism was the natural outcome of his profession; the coarseness was his heritage by birth, as his sensual mouth, blubber lips, thick nose, and bull-neck attested. It was a strange freak of Fate which had made him the guardian of the morals of society and the upholder of law and order in a modern civilized ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... pleasant things to remember hyarabouts, all thet-thar long time I got to be away," he said, with a quizzical drawl; "so I kain't be a-kissin' o' ye none. My stomick hain't none so strong nohow," he added, with the coarseness that usually flavored the humor of ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... her niece a sentiment which she mistook for affection; her self-approbation was gratified at the contemplation of a being who owed every advantage to her, and whom she had rescued from the coarseness and vulgarity which she deemed inseparable from the manners of every Scotchwoman. If Lady Audley really loved any human being it was her son. In him were centred her dearest interests; on his aggrandisement ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... censured for the coarseness of his language upon Certain topics; but very little of this appears in his earlier poems, and what there is, was in accordance with the taste of the period, which never hesitated to call a spade a spade, due in part to the reaction from the Puritanism of the ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... master, or whatever the proper name may be,' replied Nicholas quickly; 'and I was an ass to take his coarseness ill. They are looking this way, and it is time I was in my place. Bless you, love, and goodbye! Mother, look forward to our meeting again someday! Uncle, farewell! Thank you heartily for all you have done and all you mean to do. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... and this trait gives to his statements and descriptions, when his own reputation is not concerned, a value beyond that of those of most contemporary travelers. And there is another thing to be said about his writings. They are uncommonly clean for his day. Only here and there is coarseness encountered. In an age when nastiness was written as well as spoken, and when most travelers felt called upon to satisfy a curiosity for prurient observations, Smith preserved a tone ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... every halt, an altar was set up and the sacrament administered. No oath or foul language passed without punishment or censure. Even the roughest and most hardened veterans obeyed her. They had put off for a time the bestial coarseness which had grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they felt that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and acknowledged the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent Maid was leading ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... letch for her took hold of me. The women in the streets I have described had fine women among them, but for the most part they were plain in face, indifferent in form somewhere, and hideously coarse in manner; but the beauty of this woman was so great, I forgot all her coarseness. When I came to myself after my pleasures, she was fast asleep. She had perhaps spent, that and the liquor called gin overpowered her, and she forgot her business. Then the biting of fleas worried me for half-an-hour, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... our eighteenth-century novelists—Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett—safely behind us, with all their solidity and their audacity, their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre. They have brought us, as you perceive, to the end of the shelf. What, not wearied? Ready for yet another? Let us run down this next row, then, and I will tell you a few things which may be of interest, though ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rank and position should condescend to marry a girl of low degree, however virtuous or excellent she might be. These mesalliances can never answer. Too soon the one of more refined habits and ideas discovers a degree of coarseness and vulgarity in the other, which must ultimately cause separation. No; my only notion of a happy union is, that where people are of the same rank and education, and all their ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... Brillat-Savarin,—in one word, a gourmand! His appetite never failed him, and, he knew how wisely to direct it. He never ate a careless or thoughtless meal, be its elements simple as they might. He knew and was loved by the foremost cooks all over Europe. Never did he allow coarseness or intemperance to mar the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape—you hear the pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr leers from the thicket. At the core of him profoundly melancholy, and consumed by a hunger for truth, he stands like Prospero in the enchanted island, and ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... point—pretty things enough, but only as a change and a relief, or perhaps rather as a prelude to more serious business! I was, as a boy, afraid of life, hated its noise and scent, suspected it of cruelty and coarseness, wanted to keep it at arm's length. I feel very differently about life now; it's a boisterous business enough, but does not molest one unduly; and a very little courage goes a long way in ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts—in which her memory now chiefly lives—in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... what changes would occur if the Platte should increase in volume? What changes would occur if the load should be increased in amount or in coarseness? ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the prelates, the coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of the thirteenth century only by those of her sons who do her the most honor; none the less are these the anchorites who flee into the desert to escape from wars and vices, pausing only when they are very sure that none of the world's noises will ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not find them until "newspaper-time," and fear the extra ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... as candy is concerned, the coarseness of the sugar does not make a great deal of difference, although the finer sugars are perhaps a little better because they dissolve more quickly in the liquid and are a trifle less likely to crystallize after cooking. When sugar is to be used without cooking, however, its fineness makes a decided ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... when they arrived properly packed through the post, and ran the gauntlet of the sharp, anxious eyes of his four daughters, the old man was soon called to task for the poorness of the trimmings and the coarseness of the work. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... brother of the late King Edward, for a policeman attached to the British Ambassador, so exceedingly commonplace a person in appearance, speech and manner he seemed; Louise has a telling chapter on the mean looks of royalty, but fails to see the connection between that and royalty's coarseness. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... Diana, and most unjust!" said I indignantly. "You know my chief purpose in wedding you is to take you from this wandering life and shield you from all hardship and coarseness." ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... forward, however, Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's influence was perceptibly upon the wane. Even Colonel Colquhoun wearied of her—to Evadne's great regret. For Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's vulgarity and coarseness of mind were always balanced by her undoubted propriety of conduct, and her faults were altogether preferable to the exceeding polish and refinement which covered the absolutely corrupt life of a new acquaintance Colonel Colquhoun had made at this time, a Mrs. Drinkworthy, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... gleams of reason and intelligence, and all his mistakes and blunders have something arch about them. The true mode of representing him is to give him suppleness, agility, the playfulness of a kitten with a certain coarseness of exterior, which renders his actions more absurd. His part is that of a faithful valet; greedy; always in love; always in trouble, either on his own or his master's account; afflicted and consoled as easily as a child, and whose grief is as amusing ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... but, unfortunately for what merit it really possesses, many of its assailants have so far disregarded the just principles of taste and criticism, as to go laboriously out of their way to be profanely witty on its defects. Song and satire, raillery and ridicule, pun and pasquinade, and even the coarseness of caricature, have thus been let off at this specimen of NASH-ional architecture; whilst their authors have wittingly kept out any redeeming graces which could be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... drink; she did not identify herself with any movement toward prohibition, or refuse the cocktails, the claret, and the wine that were customarily served at her own and at other people's dinner-tables. But she hated coarseness in any form, she hated contact with the sodden, self- pitying, ugly animal that Clarence Breckenridge became ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... rascalities and impotent Byronics. Every person who interprets her description by a knowledge of what profligacy is, cannot fail to see that she is absurdly connecting certain virtues, of which she knows a good deal, with certain vices, of which she knows nothing. The coarseness of portions of the novel, consisting not so much in the vulgarity of Rochester's conversation as the naive description of some of his acts—his conduct for three weeks before his intended marriage, for instance, is also to be laid partly to the ignorance of the authoress ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... bachelors, or related funny stories happening at home at wedding-feasts. Sometimes with a happy laugh they made some rather too free remarks about the fun in love-making. But love-making, as these men understand it, is always a healthy sensation, and for all its coarseness remains tolerably chaste. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... her lip, her whole nature in revolt, but she made no reply. Too much was at stake for her to show anger at such coarseness. She had no rights that he was bound to respect. She was only one of his work-girls, and her short experience had shown her that but few of her associates received better treatment ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Thackeray and Tennyson. One night when she was giving a supper-party, a fellow-guest, Roger de Beauvoir, happened to read to the company some verses he had written. The hostess, on the grounds of their alleged "coarseness," complained to Morton that she had been insulted. As a result, Morton, being head over ears in love with her, sent de Beauvoir a challenge. Lola, however, having had enough of duels, took care that nothing should ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... dark, with hair and eyes as black as a gypsy's, and a clear olive complexion to match. Her forehead was low, but smooth and well-shaped; and the lower part of her face, handsome as it was, was far more developed than the upper. There was not a trace of refinement about her features; yet the coarseness of them was but slightly apparent as yet. She did not strike me as having more than a very slight ailment indeed, though she dilated fluently about her symptoms, and affected to be afraid of fever. It is not always possible to deny that a woman has a violent headache; but, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the fleet without warning, instead of summoning the admiral to retrace his course, was a foolish no less than a barbarous act—one of those horrible barbarities of civilization, when moral principle suddenly forsakes the helm and the merest coarseness emerges in its room, as if to warn us against the childish belief that civilization is able to extirpate brutality ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... was what he was, not what he did," said Caldegard. "Tall, slender, effeminate, over-dressed, native coarseness which would not be hidden by spasmodic attempts at fine manners, and a foul habit of scenting his handkerchiefs and even his clothes with some weird stuff he made himself; left a trail behind him wherever he went. It smelt something like a mixture ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... later friendship with Armstrong; borrows a grammar; his honesty; loses situation; involved in border quarrels; his temperance considered eccentric; careless habits of dress; in the country groceries; coarseness of speech; his sympathetic understanding of the people; his standards dependent on surroundings; enlists in Black Hawk ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... was as a blot to her I cannot delay; but I request you, that are here privileged I detest anything that has to do with gratitude Love, with his accustomed cunning No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale Nor can a protest against coarseness be sweepingly interpreted One of those men whose characters are read off at a glance The majority, however, had been snatched out of this bliss Their way was down a green lane and across long meadow-paths They, meantime, who had a contempt ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... I went to Sacramento and sold our chunks of gold (it was all very coarse) to Page, Bacon & Co. who were themselves surprised at the coarseness of the whole lot. When our savings were weighed up we found we had made half an ounce a day, clear of all expenses, for the ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... prevented. For one thing, she made no intimate friends. She was kind to everybody, nobody was taken into her confidence. Her nature was apart from theirs; one of those rare and few whose fate it is for the most part to stand alone in the world; too fine for the coarseness, too delicate for the rudeness, too noble for the pettiness of those around them, even though they be not more coarse or rude or small-minded than the generality of mankind. Sympathy is broken, and full communion impossible. It is the penalty ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... off coarseness of soul? How shall we keep our souls REFINED? that is, true and honest, pure, amiable, full of virtue, that is, true manliness; and deserve praise, that is, the respect and admiration of our fellow-men? By thinking of those very things, says St. Paul. ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... suggests it—just the face that makes you say, "that man must have a handsome sister;" indeed, it bears an absurdly strong family likeness to Cecil's, amounting to a parody. But the outline of feature which in her is so fine and clear, is dull and filled out even to coarseness. It reminded one of looking at the same landscape, first through the medium of a bright blue sky, and then through driving mist, when crag, and cliff, and wood still show themselves, but blurred and dimly. His hair and eyes are, by several shades, the lighter ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... "beautiful passing and dribbling," as if to the manner born. I cannot, however, dismiss the subject of spectators without referring to the use and abuse of a free and unrestrained vent to pent-up feelings. There is the low, vulgar fellow, whose collarless neck and general coarseness of exterior and language indicates that he possesses all the vices but none of the virtues of the "honest working man." Work he will not, except he is compelled, and although to "beg he is ashamed," he would be the first to do a mean action if he had the opportunity. ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... western conditions in the midst of which the slave-holding interest was now lodged. Planters, as well as pioneer farmers, were exploiting the wilderness and building a new society under characteristic western influences. Rude strength, a certain coarseness of life, and aggressiveness characterized this society, as it did the whole of the Mississippi Valley. [Footnote: Baldwin, Flush Times in Ala.; cf. Gilmer, Sketches of Georgia, etc.] Slavery furnished a new ingredient for western forces ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... filament becomes strong. He then must combine enough fibres of the same size and strength to make a thread uniform in size. And this is not so easy as it sounds, since there is great diversity in the coarseness and fineness of the filament on the cocoons. He cannot always put the same number of filaments together. In addition to this fact he is often required to reel silk of various sizes. The coarseness or fineness demanded ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... narrative of Bernal Diaz, one of the companions of Cortes, who accompanied him during the whole of his memorable and arduous enterprise, an eye-witness of every thing which he relates, and whose history, notwithstanding the coarseness of its style, has been always much esteemed for the simplicity and sincerity of the author, everywhere discoverable[1]. Those who are desirous of critically investigating the subject, as a matter of history, will find abundant ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... with a nervous hand. Diana was aghast at her appearance. The dirty finery of her dress had sunk many degrees in the scale of decency and refinement since February. Her staring brunette color had grown patchy and unhealthy, her eyes had a furtive audacity, her lips a coarseness, which might have been always there; but in the winter, youth and high spirits had to ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sportive; their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was the case with their North ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... which is revealed precious, but the beauty and perfection of the revelation itself grows upon him. He has now no need of external evidence to prove its inspiration; it everywhere bears the impress of Divinity. And as the microscope which reveals the coarseness and blemishes of the works of man only shows more fully the perfectness of GOD'S works, and brings to light new and unimagined beauties, so it is with the Word of GOD ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... the last twelve months the best of the humorous designs have been selected and bound into a handsome quarto volume.[M] Pen and pencil combine in making its pages laughable, and there are many incisive thrusts at the weak spots in society, but without coarseness or vulgarity. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... mean mere coarseness or rusticity, for that were more pardonable; but a want of civility. In this sense of the term, I am prepared to censure one practice, which in the section on Politeness, was overlooked. I refer to the practice so ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... things, in a rather languid way; then at last came and sank down in a very low position at Wych Hazel's feet on the carpet. She was a pretty girl; might have been extremely pretty, if her very pronounced style of manners had not drawn lines of boldness, almost of coarseness, where the lip should have been soft and the eyebrow modest. The whole expression was dissatisfied and jaded to-day, over and above those lines, which even low ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... of the Romans to pathos appears a priori in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, a posteriori, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, a posteriori, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness of this demand, which proceeded even so far as pinching to elicit a cry, is beyond easy credit to men of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... adroit and capable women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time. The thrilling incidents were further enlivened, moreover, by cuts called by the printer "curious" in the sense of very fine: and curious they are to-day because of the crudeness of their execution and the coarseness of their design. Nevertheless, the grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, Tom Thumb. The book itself shows ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... own studies in order to direct mine. Never did I see a more pleasing countenance than that of M. Gatier. He was fair complexioned, his beard rather inclined to red; his behavior like that of the generality of his countrymen (who under a coarseness of countenance conceal much understanding), marked in him a truly sensible and affectionate soul. In his large blue eyes there was a mixture of softness, tenderness, and melancholy, which made it impossible to see him without feeling one's self interested. From ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... taught a new movement. Where before he had to touch, he must now feel the stuffs, which, according to the degree of fineness or coarseness from coarse cotton to fine silk, are felt with movements correspondingly decisive or delicate. The child whose hand is already practised finds the greatest pleasure in feeling the stuffs, and, almost instinctively, in order to enhance his appreciation of the tactile ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... boy, who enters into the spirit of the game, and it tickles him hugely to play the part of a despot. But while he is Henry VIII. in miniature, he is Henry VIII. without the king's coarseness, and in the place is a child's innocent pleasure. It was no wonder that his parents, delighted with the success of the costume, wished to have a ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... department of the Hautes-Pyrenees. He was a self-made man, and thoroughly well made was he—witty, kind, just, and learned in certain lines; and his warm Southern blood colored his personality with a shade of materialism which his refined tastes never allowed to sink to the level of coarseness. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... words became more distinct, his manner more earnest and energetic; it seemed as if religious zeal was triumphing over bodily weakness and infirmity. His natural eloquence was not altogether untainted with the coarseness of his sect; and yet, by the influence of a good natural taste, it was freed from the grosser and more ludicrous errors of his contemporaries; and the language of Scripture, which, in their mouths, was sometimes degraded ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pure, chaste woman; that Marguerite must have experienced the sins she depicted; but such reasoning is not sound. The expressions used by her were current in her time; there was greater freedom of manners, and coarseness and drastic language—examples of which are found so frequently in the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... of the World who knows most of his species. And where, alas! may this knowledge, so painful and so humiliating, be better acquired than in a colony? There we have the human heart laid open before us without veil or disguise: there we see it in all its coarseness, its ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... into a sage; yet neither nature nor art knows any transformation like unto that wonder of time when, by slow processes, God develops man out of rude and low conditions of life unto those high and spiritual moods when selfishness gives place to self-sacrifice, coarseness to sweetness, hardness to gentleness and love, and perfection dwells in man as ripeness dwells in fruit, as maturity ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... graceful style he has deserved the praise of modern students. The Satyricon, a severe satire on the Jesuits, is modelled on Petronius and catches his lightness of touch, though it shows little or nothing of the tone of its model, or of the unhesitating severity and coarseness of the humanistic satire of Barclay's age. The Argenis is a long romance, with a monitory purpose on the dangers of political intrigue, probably suggested to him by his experiences of the league in France, and by the catholic plot ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Nothing will escape the memory:—nothing. The days of childhood, of youth, of middle age, of elder years will give in their report. The soul will see things then as they are, no longer tricked out in false and flattering guise. There, in all their miserable littleness, and coarseness, and meanness, and cowardice, bygone sins will rise up before the stern tribunal of the unsparing memory, each as it was, each as it is, each as GOD saw it at the time, each as GOD ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... against swearing and getting drunk, and against some other objectionable actions which betray a great lack of feminine modesty. The "Moral Instructions" of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry present a picture of coarseness and immorality among both men and women, which shows how incompatible was the barrack-like existence of feudal times with the practice of any sort of self-restraint or purity ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... receiving pleasure; and when men wiped their mouths and moustaches, Julian remarked that the object of his curiosity used a handkerchief of the finest cambric—an article rather inconsistent with the exterior plainness, not to say coarseness, of his appearance. He used also several of the more minute refinements, then only observed at tables of the higher rank; and Julian thought he could discern, at every turn, something of courtly manners and gestures, under the precise ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... flannels—no more. She heard someone at the door. The handle turned and the door opened as if the person who came in had forgotten the ceremony of knocking. Susan laid down on the bed the ugly little night-dress she had been looking at; it lay there stiff with its coarseness, its short arms stretched out. She turned about and faced Margery Latimer, who had crossed the threshold ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... trenches in the streets of a city where the texture of the soil varied continually from clay to sand and even to gravel, all saturated with subsoil water into which wells could have been dug. It was very striking to see how the coarseness of the material affected the quantity of water that had to be pumped from the trenches,—the finest sand requiring only one hand pump at a time, while the coarse gravel required either a dozen men or a steam pump to keep a short trench reasonably free from water. The same ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... transformation. I remember being warned, also, that the buffoonery was coarse, and some of the slang hardly fit for "ears polite." But I am afraid that I was not shocked at the prodigality of these poor people, who purchased a holiday on such hard conditions; and, as to the coarseness of the performance, I felt that I certainly might go ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... excel. Though often present at good men's feasts, I remember only a single dinner, which, while lamentably conscious that many of its higher excellences were thrown away upon me, I yet could feel to be a perfect work of art. It could not, without unpardonable coarseness, be styled a matter of animal enjoyment, because out of the very perfection of that lower bliss there had arisen a dream-like development of spiritual happiness. As in the master-pieces of painting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... understood how to produce illusion without being theatrical. In the decay of Italian art what strikes one most strongly is the combination of the three faults which the great men knew how to avoid—coarseness, commonplace ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... purpose of "keepin' the draf out'n 'er neck-hole" when she was at work in the dairy. For my share of disguising, I now rubbed together some ruddle and dry soil, and the mixture gave a necessary touch of coarseness to her hands. Altogether she was changed out of recognition, even if, which was not the case, any of her pursuers had seen ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... and well, you remember how Mr. Taylor, in that noble play, works out to our view the sad sight of the deterioration of character, the growing coarseness and harshness, the lessening tenderness and kindliness, which are apt to come with advancing years. Great trials, we know, passing over us, may influence us either for the worse or the better; and unless our nature is a very obdurate and poor one, though they may leave us, they ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd |
