"Desultory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most virtuous members in the present would be chosen into the new legislature, which, if the constitution were but once fairly established, would not regard the murmurs of any town or province." After this, a desultory conversation took place, in which some were of opinion that it would be proper, on the introduction of the subject into the Assembly, to move for a committee of inquiry, which should collect facts and documents against the time, when it should be taken ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... I finally prevailed upon Mlle. Jacquier to keep them out of my room and away from my table. But the majority of the students were "regular girls." At first I was as welcome in the dining-room as a Prussian sentinel, and they exchanged desultory remarks in whispers; but after a while they grew accustomed to me and chattered like magpies. I could hear them again in their dormitories until about half-past ten at night. Mlle. Jacquier asked me once with some anxiety if ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... just allowance, at the same time, for the difference of circumstances and manners. I am far from pretending to the knowledge or ability which such a task would require. All that I mean to offer is a collection of desultory remarks upon a most ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... everybody to talking, even the public school children and students in all the higher institutions were profoundly interested. The press and the pulpit broke their silence and from all over the state came the echo. It was the firing of the signal guns. The response came desultory, as the rattle of musketry in a skirmish, then heavier from the bigger guns, as is the case in all reformatory work. The criticisms and comments were varied, often amusing, reflecting the agitation from far and near ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... Appropriations bill was under discussion in the House, a desultory debate occurred on the politics of Colonel Polk. Such digressions were not unusual on the eve of a presidential election. Seizing the opportunity, Douglas obtained recognition from the Speaker and launched ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... passed from French to English hands, and the military period commenced. This lasted about fifty years, during which time the combatants were French, English, Indians, and Americans. Much blood was shed in desultory warfare. Detroit, Mackinac, and other posts were taken and retaken; in fact, there never was peace in that land till after the naval victory of Perry in 1813, when the command of the Lakes ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... 1893, I had studied various subjects by myself in a more or less desultory manner. I read the histories of Greece, Rome and the United States. I had a French grammar in raised print, and as I already knew some French, I often amused myself by composing in my head short exercises, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Tories, and opposition to English rule was practically abandoned in the South for the time, with the exception of that made in a desultory swamp-warfare by the partisan bands with such leaders ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... a loquacious meal, and for a while silence reigned, broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the exorbitant price he demanded for it—statements which had staled with ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... allegations and suggestions, for which he came unprepared, from a reliance that those publicly given were all against which he need arm himself, and that, if those were disproved, he was cleared; while the desultory and shifting charges of the managers put him out in every method of defence, by making it impossible to him to discern where he might be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... combine, and insist upon higher wages, shorter hours, more regular employment, and better sanitary conditions? Well, it may be regarded as an axiom in practical economies, that any concerted action, however weak and desultory, has its value. Union is always strength. An employer who can easily resist any number of individual claims for higher wages by his power to replace each worker by an outsider, can less easily resist the united pressure of a large ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... a napkin, growl, "Well, if that's all you know about it—if you're all as ignorant as that, you simply ain't worth arguing with," and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room—a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... slagged it over with impenetrable, flint-hard deposits. Pompeii, though, lay farther away, and was entombed in dust and ashes only; so that it has been comparatively easy to unearth it and make it whole again. Even so, after one hundred and sixty-odd years of more or less desultory explorations, nearly a third of its supposed area is yet ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... he had earned daily bread, and something more; he had studied in desultory fashion; he had seen a good deal of the British Isles and had visited Paris. The result of it all was gnawing discontent, intervals of furious revolt, periods ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... then, as now, blew from the east in the spring and from the west later in the year, the Northmen, both Norsemen and Danes, neither being Christians, had, like their predecessors the Saxons and Angles and Frisians, for some time made trading voyages and desultory piratical attacks in summer-time on the coasts of Britain and Ireland, and probably many a short-lived settlement as well. But as these attacks and settlements are unrecorded in Cat, no account of ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... had transformed into a neighbour. Effie was to pay for her morning's holiday by an hour or two in the school-room, and Owen suggested that he and Darrow should betake themselves to a distant covert in the desultory ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together. Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him for the town's essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue Lorne would have ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... them was under command of Colonel Jones, of the 60th Rifles, who made his arrangements with singular judgment and tact, and insisted on a regular formation being kept by the troops, instead of the desultory style of action in vogue during previous sorties. There was, however, some very hard fighting in the gardens and serais, where we were received by a storm of bullets; but the men being persuaded to keep ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... himself on parting, after final arrangements concluded). I wish ROSE had warned me that PODBURY's habit of mind was so painfully desultory. (He ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... demonstrations went on again. Whenever more serious attempts were made, the preparations were totally inadequate. Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Malta sent a combined fleet in 1784 to punish the Algerines, but the vessels were all small and such as the Corsairs could tackle, and so feeble and desultory was the attack that, after a fortnight's fooling, ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... But the same asyntactle disorder is equally found in the History of Britain, which he had in hand for forty years. Nor is it only the Miltonic sentence which is incoherent; the whole arrangement of his topics is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. His inspiration comes from impulse. Had he stayed to chastise his emotional writing by reason and the laws of logic, he would have deprived himself of the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... in his tone and went back to the door, around which a knot of men engaged in desultory conjectures while they waited expectantly. A large tent that Perkins had found convenient as a temporary jail for those unfortunates upon whom his heavy hand fell swiftly, stood next to Bill's place; and it ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... billiards, Zukertort, Blackburne, Gunsberg and Bird remained alone in the chess room, the last named proposed a match between themselves, the others less enthusiastic did not fall in and after a desultory conversation of half-an-hour or so the ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... which Mrs. B. blamed her daughter for spending her money so foolishly; and declared that the things were always considered to belong to the daughter, and were given up without the slightest objection when she applied for them in the name of Miss B. This statement produced a desultory conversation, which was terminated by the solicitor remarking, that the principal object, the return of Miss B., had been lost sight of. Mr. B. then said, he had paid for the education and every charge of Miss B. for ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... told, a fair and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. There sat a youth beside him on the college benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it washed. It was my friend's principle ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Collecting a large body of troops he directed them into the mountains, and marched from the wall of Antoninus even to the very extremity of the island; but this year, 208, was also barren of fruits. Fifty thousand Romans fell a prey to fatigue, the climate, and the desultory assaults of the natives. Soon after the entire country north of the Antonine wall, was given up, for it was found that while it was necessary for one legion to keep the southern parts in subjection two were required to repel the incursions ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... since my baby has made her entrance into the world, I neither read, write, nor cast up accounts, but am as idle, though not nearly as well dressed, as the lilies of the field; my reading, if ever I take to such an occupation again, is like, I fear, to be, as it always has been, rambling, desultory, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... turned on desultory and indifferent matters. I knew my wife was an excellent talker, but on that particular evening I think she surpassed herself. She had resolved to fascinate me, THAT I saw at once, and she spared no pains to succeed in her ambition. Graceful sallies, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... at a certain period, she could have no possible claim, but to a house which was her own for ever, or, at least, could solely by her own choice be transferred, she determined, as much as was in her power, in quitting her desultory dwellings, to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... "Epistles" of "Hosea Biglow," with great delight to the youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. ("Poetical Works", vol. ii, p. 170.) "Coleridge"—says a schoolfellow [1] of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room, (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate,) was a constant rendezvous ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... action to bring the mining industry upon a sound and legitimate basis. Though our ranges abound in all kinds of minerals that might give employment to hundreds of thousands of people, mining is carried on in a desultory, haphazard fashion. There is no system, and the treatment of ores is of necessity handed over to the tender mercies of men who have not even an idea of what an intricate science metallurgy has become in older countries. During ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Judith sprang to the back of the sorrel nag from Creed Bonbright's hand. Creed, still bareheaded, and wholly unconscious of the fact, walked beside her leading the mules. They passed slowly up the street towards the mountainward edge of Hepzibah, talking as they went in the soft, low, desultory fashion ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... on for some time in a desultory kind of fashion—a letter here, another there, and then an interval of a few weeks—there came a perfect avalanche of the things, and the Vicar, although he had really wished to hush the matter up, was advised to take steps to ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the charge hotly, and, by way of emphasizing his denial, raised his foot and sent the mat flying along the passage. Honor satisfied, he returned to the door-post and, looking idly out on the street again, exchanged a few desultory remarks with Mr. Joe Brown, who, with his hands in his pockets, was balancing himself with great skill on the ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... pretend to Divine, I think it is easy to foresee that the papal Power will in a very short space be considerably lessen'd if not in a great measure disregarded in that Kingdom, by the intestine Jarrs and Discords of their Parties for Religion, and the Desultory Judgments ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... no one thing more necessary to a housekeeper in performing her varied duties, than a habit of system and order; and yet, the peculiarly desultory nature of women's pursuits, and the embarrassments resulting from the state of domestic service in this country, render it very difficult to form such a habit. But it is sometimes the case that women who ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... crinoline—you never saw them now. You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... by alternate doubts and fears, and troubled by wildly vivid imaginings during the day, and by frightful dreams by night. Her mother had been unable to send her to school, but she got occasional lessons in the evenings from a fellow-servant; and through the desultory assistance obtained in this way, backed by her solitary efforts at self-instruction, she learned to read. She must have deemed that an important day on which she found she could at length converse with books; ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... quality; while it certainly betokens a good deal of dash and impudence. Carl Perousse, one of the most prominent among the political notabilities of Europe, had begun his career by small peddling transactions in iron and timber manufactures; he came of a very plebeian stock, and had received only a desultory sort of education, picked up here and there in cheap provincial schools. But he had a restless, domineering spirit of ambition. Ashamed of his plebeian origin, and embittered from his earliest years by a sense of grudge against ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... struggle, but as absolute Lord of that struggle, and the consequent belief that nothing but obedience to the lower motive can be called evil. The new view of truth his vision had given him had become too really a part of his mind to be overthrown. It was no doubt a growth from the long years of desultory browsing upon popular science and the one year that had been so entirely devoted to the story of the gospel and to prayer. He could not doubt his new creed; but no sooner had he left the hospital walls than that burden came upon him of which the greatest stress is this, ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... compile and publish a book with the title, Press, Platform and Parliament (NISBET). It is one of the most genuinely good-tempered books I have ever read; but that was to be expected from the author of the column signed "Sub Rosa," who had in this course of desultory writing made innumerable friends and never lost one; and, more pleasing sport than that, had brought two people together through a matrimonial agency conducted by W.T. STEAD, and had met the pair many years after, to find that they were perfectly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... which all the power of Prance, actuated by all the ambition of France, had acquired in two centuries. The Romans had frequently acquired more in a single year. They severely and in every part of it criticized the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, whose irregular and desultory ambition had more provoked than endangered Europe. Indeed, they who will be at the pains of seriously considering the history of that period will see that those French politicians had some reason. They who will not take the trouble of reviewing it through all its wars and all its negotiations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... tolerably; adopting the nonchalance of Geoffrey Crayon's uncle on entering a superb drawing-room—looking around him with an air of indifference, which seemed to say, "he had seen finer things in his time." After some desultory conversation, regarding the heights of hills, the breadths of lakes, and the curative influence of the sentimental region on the smoke-dried citizens, mixed with some elaborate eulogies on the "Colloquies ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... After half an hour's desultory visit, the Hon. Cy rose to go. As the door closed behind him (I am at least thankful the child waited for that), Punch raised his appealing brown eyes to mine and murmured, with a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... after this change bore the impression of impatience at the breaking up of a happy time. Edward found this natural enough; but he was surprised in the following letters to detect signs of a disturbed and desultory state of mind, wholly foreign to his friend's nature. The riddle was soon solved. Ferdinand's heart was touched for the first time, and perhaps because the impression had been made late, it was all the deeper. Unfavorable circumstances ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... while the classical tradition remains in our schools, there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his uncle's mad adventures and queer scrapes, Henry Glazier, in turn, would listen with a species of reverent wonder to the boy's recital of striking passages of history or of fiction which he had picked up in the course of a varied and desultory reading—a taste for which was developed even at that early age. The volumes to which he had access were few in number, but he had read their pages again and again, and the subjects of which they treated were, for the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... work on Hereditary Genius in 1869, I have written numerous memoirs, of which a list is given in an earlier page, and which are scattered in various publications. They may have appeared desultory when read in the order in which they appeared, but as they had an underlying connection it seems worth while to bring their substance together in logical sequence into a single volume. I have revised, condensed, largely re-written, transposed old matter, and interpolated much that is new; but traces ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... not been much conversation on the way, for hill-climbing all day at top-speed is not compatible with small talk. Besides, the obvious anxiety of Ravonino rendered his companions less inclined than usual to engage in desultory remarks. Nevertheless there were occasions—during momentary halts to recover breath, or when clear bubbling springs tempted them to drink—when the ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... who had been a very careless and desultory attendant, sometimes upon the Catholic chapel, sometimes upon the Protestant church, now became a very regular frequenter of the latter place of worship; the object of his worship being not the Creator, but the creature, whom, if he missed ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... shall the muse, For golden baits, her simple theme refuse? Oh, no! but while the weary spirit greets The fading scenes of childhood's far gone sweets, It catches all the infant's wandering tongue, And prattles on in desultory song. That song must close—the gloomy mists of night Obscure the pale stars' visionary light, And ebon darkness, clad in vapoury wet, Steals on ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... some fierce torrent swoln with show'rs, Or sudden Cataracts of melting Snow, Which from the Alps its headlong Deluge pours, And foams, and thunders o'er the Vales below, With desultory fury borne along, Rolls his impetuous, ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... of the house took a long time, conducted in this somewhat desultory and dawdling manner; but the closing in of night and the sound of the dinner-gong gave the ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... Robert Louis did desultory work on newspapers in San Francisco and later at Monterey, with health up and down as hope fluctuated. In the interval a cablegram had come from his father saying, "Your allowance is two hundred and fifty pounds a year." This meant that he had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... bandaged her blisters the woman prepared food and coffee for them all and then took Lou upstairs with her, while Jim dried his soaking clothes by the kitchen fire and the three men talked in a desultory way of ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... passages wound circuitously between blank walls, turning sharp corners at every few steps and bringing up abruptly in the cul-de-sac of some courtyard, affording admirable facilities for carrying on a guerilla warfare; there were spots where ten men might defend themselves for hours against a regiment. Desultory firing was already beginning to be heard, for the suburb commanded Balan, and the Bavarians were already coming up on the other side of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... always given, since manhood, to the life of the farmer, that he returned to its simple but attractive avocations. But the world with him was, as it were, to be begun anew; no easy matter to one whose habits had been necessarily rendered irregular by the capricious and desultory influences of a military career; still more difficult in the case of one who has entered upon the last period of life. The close of the Revolution found him destitute of means, almost in poverty, and more than fifty years old. His health was good, however; his frame ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... was to the Italian Lakes—and a life of sitting in the sun, walking up and down promenades, short drives, and making and unmaking of desultory friendships began. They grumbled a good deal to third parties, but still they were happy enough, according to their low standard ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... trade still exists to a most lamentable extent."[23] Indeed, all that an American slaver need do was to run up a Spanish or a Portuguese flag, to be absolutely secure from all attack or inquiry on the part of United States vessels. Even this desultory method of suppression was not regular: in 1826 "no vessel has been despatched to the coast of Africa for several months,"[24] and from that time until 1839 this country probably had no slave-trade police upon the seas, except in the Gulf of Mexico. ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... like to have me ask the bishops?" inquired Plank, naively shrewd. And the conversation became very cordial between the two, which Mortimer observed, keeping one ironical eye on Plank, while he continued a desultory discussion with O'Hara concerning a very private dinner which somebody told somebody that somebody had given to Quarrier and the Inter-County Electric people; which, if true, plainly indicated who was financing ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Almost the only thing I knew concerning them was, that a notable number of them had been given to study. I had myself so far inherited the tendency as to devote a good deal of my time, though, I confess, after a somewhat desultory fashion, to the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of different sciences of the same order, or between physical and metaphysical facts, but between physical ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... silent. Grace and her brother and the Captain talked in a desultory sort of way during dinner; but Kate never spoke, except when directly addressed, and silence was Eeny's forte. She sat down to the piano after dinner, according to her invariable custom, but not to sing. She had never sung since that day. How could she? There was not a song in all ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the shade by a stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter. He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let them know that he considered himself above them. His reading was desultory; in fact, everything he did was desultory. He was not selfish in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather was he distinguished by a large and liberal open- handedness; but he was liberal also to himself to a remarkable degree, dressing himself expensively, and spending a good deal of money ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... no excuse of haste, or of a want of time, to offer for the defect of these volumes. All I ask is, that they may be viewed as no more than they profess to be. They are the gleanings of a harvest already gathered, thrown together in a desultory manner, and without the slightest, or, at least, very small pretensions, to any of those arithmetical and statistical accounts that properly belong to works of a graver character. They contain the passing remarks ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is after all slight, and Weber, on whom the hand of death was heavy as he wrote the score, failed to infuse much individuality into his characters. 'Oberon' was his last work, and he died in London soon after it was produced. During the last few years of his life he had been engaged in a desultory way upon the composition of a comic opera, 'Die drei Pintos,' founded upon a Spanish subject. He left this in an unfinished state, but some time after his death it was found that the manuscript ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... up, leaving the shattered wreck of the waggon behind, and the trains commenced to move back slowly, keeping pace with the cavalry and artillery. The Boer guns kept firing until out of range, and then there was a desultory pitter-patter of rifle fire at a sufficient distance to ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... College benefactors, as having been the founder of the Cricket and the Whist Club, and restored to its old place on the river, at much cost and pains, the boat which had been withdrawn for the last five years, and reduced the sundry desultory idlenesses of the under-graduates into something like method and order—Charley White was now rector of a poor and populous parish in Yorkshire, busily engaged in building a new church and schools, opening Provident Societies, and shutting up beer-shops, and instructing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... butchering, that being his occupation. The adjutant, being newly married to a gaunt female, who, I hope, nagged him as he us, preferred to take his meals at home. Smallweed, who had somehow got made quartermaster, couldn't go old Heavysterne, he said, and so kept as long as he could to his desultory habits of living as a citizen and a bachelor. So our mess consisted of the major, who exercised a paternal care over the rest of us, superintending, indeed often joining in, our amusements and discussions, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would be nicer if you could go on with art or architecture; but your reading will not be so desultory as to be useless, if it is all strung on the one thread of Italy, and then you can group it, as you go along, in a commonplace book. I should take a large one, and divide it among the towns I wanted to see, and then subdivide the pages ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... with the Pilgrim's Progress. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work, he said, was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... were watching alertly at the loopholes. Occasionally they would fire at some partly exposed Indians, and then dodge back as a straggling volley of bullets pelted the stockade. Over on the east side muskets were cracking in the same desultory fashion. The storm showed no signs of abating. On the contrary, the snow was falling more thickly and in finer flakes, and a bitter wind was constantly heaping it in higher drifts, and blowing it in blinding, eddying showers about ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... grazing order, and when Shep had executed certain commands necessary to get them headed in the right direction, the trio of caretakers began their slow progress through the day. Shep, subject to orders, followed at Steve's heels; Janet walked at his right hand; thus they wandered along in the desultory manner of the sheep-herder, standing a while, sitting down a while, advancing now and then as ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... Beulah went to the house where they were boarding. Claudia met her rather awkwardly, but Beulah kissed her as if nothing had ever occurred to mar their intercourse; and, after some desultory conversation, asked her what they ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... began to read for myself; but the delights of desultory reading were gloomed by the necessity of studying long lessons that no emancipated child of to-day would endure. Misguided people sometimes came to the school and told childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which even the most illiterate despised. To have known George ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... left on my mind by these years of desultory dabbling with—rather than study of—the subject, was decidedly that the phenomena of spiritualism were genuine. Looking at the matter from my present standpoint and frame of mind, it seems to me incredible that I should have thought so little of the source of the phenomena. It was, as ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... take the lofty position it deserves in the histrionic literature of this country. We feel that there is a wide field here laid open for the exercise of British talent, and have therefore, made a few desultory mems. on the subject, which we subjoin; intended as modest hints for the guidance of composers of melodramatic music. The situations we have selected from the most popular Melos. of the day; the music to be employed in each instance, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... exception, as I am quite confident, of Mr. Ames's entertaining, but hasty and desultory work, called "Mariner's Sketches," all the books professing to give life at sea have been written by persons who have gained their experience as naval officers, or passengers, and of these, there ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... was general and desultory until they reached the Land's End, on the point of which ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... continued, resuming the tone of his desultory conversation, as he held up to the rich light of a censer one of the magnificent vases—"to dream has been the business of my life. I have therefore framed for myself, as you see, a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... alone, the fugitives crouching in the interior of the altar estimated that about a dozen people had entered the church. They seemed to rush forward a few paces and then halt, as though staring about them; then followed a few brief, desultory movements, and silence. Finally, a ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in the intervals of light. By these flashes, however, we gained a momentary glimpse of each other's position, and as we dashed forward in the gloom, we were further directed by the fire of the artillery and the desultory fire of ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... Virginia, sauntered about the deck and presently approaching an elderly lady who sat somewhat apart from the rest, lifted his cap with a smiling "How do you do, Mrs. Noyes?" and taking an empty chair by her side entered into a desultory conversation. ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... was naturally of a very impatient temper, and his maxims of philosophy encouraged him to the most unrestrained expression of his feelings—the maxims of his philosophy —for he had read, though in most desultory manner, and he had thought often deeply, and not seldom justly. The turns of his mind, and the questions he asked, were sometimes utterly unexpected. "Pray, now," said he to Harry, who stood beside his bed, "now that I've a moment's ease—did you ever hear ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little village offered at the moment many attractions ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch pieces. How far was she away? How soon could she arrive upon the scene? Evening was closing in. Cradock was steering hard in her direction. If the British, engaging the enemy immediately, could keep them in play throughout the night, when firing must necessarily be desultory, perhaps morning would bring the Canopus hastening into the action. It was possible that the Germans did not know of her proximity. They might, accepting the contest, and expecting to cripple the British next morning at their leisure, find themselves ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... work on another tale. It was his purpose to complete four or five stories before he sent any away. But to-day he did not get beyond half a dozen desultory start-offs. From McClintock's came an infernal tinkle-tinkle, tump-tump! There was no composing with such a sound hammering upon the ear. But eventually Spurlock laughed. Not so bad. Battle, murder, and sudden death—and ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... some of the usual desultory sniping commenced on the other side of the camp, but a demonstration by the inlying piquet ('G' company, 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers) was sufficient to put ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... an authour not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... soldiers back over the desert plains which they had already passed with so much difficulty. The retrograde march was terribly harassed by the light cavalry of the Persians, a species of troops peculiarly fitted for desultory warfare. The difficulties of the Romans increased at every step, and the harassing attacks of their pursuers became more frequent and more formidable; at length, in a skirmish which almost deserved the name of a battle, Julian was mortally wounded, and with his loss the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... suffering in the arms of a husband, who should possess as many and great virtues as herself, and an ample fortune to boot. I wish with all my heart that it were a fiction, and that Providence had never furnished me with such a seeming anomaly to add to the list of my desultory chronicles. But I am telling a true story of a life. Ellen found no mate. No mate, did I say? Yes, one: the same grim yokefellow whose delight it is 'to gather roses in the spring' paid ghastly court to her faded charms, and won her—who shall say an unwilling bride? I could see ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... early orphaned, well educated, much traveled, he was deemed, on his return in the springtime of his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically borne, as pathetic entries ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... by the great elms which had been planted when Indian lads played among the stumps and the red flag of England had flown from the tall pine staff. The green was covered now with students of a conquering race, skylarking to and fro as they looked on at a desultory baseball game. "I verily believe," said the president, "at a word from your son, most of them would put on their coats and follow him on any mad expedition ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical sound. The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company, which nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock afforded ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... spare time on their hands, contrive to accomplish as much as any ordinary half-dozen people put together. He formed part of the much- despised band of fellows in his form contemptuously termed "muggers." In other words, he read hard, and took no part in the desultory amusements which consumed the odd moments of so many in the house. And yet he was an excellent cricketer and runner, as the school was bound to acknowledge whenever it called out its champions to do battle for it ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and other reading in our heads, to see Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (it has got another name now) and Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... a letter from Friend Barton, and was preparing to read it aloud to the children. They were in the kitchen, where the boys had been helping Dorothy, in a desultory manner, to shell corn for the chickens; but now all was silence, while Rachel wiped her glasses and turned the large sheet of paper, squared with many foldings, to ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... had finished, the jury would undoubtedly have acquitted; but the learned Judge had to sum up, which in this, as in many cases at Quarter Sessions, was no more a summing up than counting ten on your fingers is a summing up. It was a desultory speech, and if made by the counsel for the prosecution, would have been a most unfair one for the Crown: totally ignoring the fact that human nature was subject to frailties, and testimony liable to be tainted with perjury. It made so great an impression upon me in my dream that I transcribed ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... a town so full of curiosities of every description, I am not able, during so short a stay in it, to transmit you any intelligence about those sights which are vulgarly called the Lions. But I must not close this rambling, desultory letter, without apprising you that I have walked from one end of the Moenschberg to the other. This is an excavation through a hard and high rocky hill, forming the new gate, or entrance into the town. The success of this bold undertaking was as complete, as its utility ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... especially appeal to a certain class of men; like most women, however, I prefer something more solid, both physically and intellectually—I cannot stand "the pretty, pretty." She was, of course, far too ill to converse, and, beyond a few desultory and spasmodic ejaculations, maintained a rigid silence. As there was no occasion for me to sit close beside her, I drew up a chair before the fire, placing myself in such a position as to command a full view of the bed. My first ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... disorderly persons offence; misdemeanor. [moral disorder] slattern, slut (libertine) 962. V. be disorderly &c adj.; ferment, play at cross-purposes. put out of order; derange &c 61; ravel &c 219; ruffle, rumple. Adj. disorderly, orderless; out of order, out of place, out of gear; irregular, desultory; anomalous &c (unconformable) 83; acephalous^, deranged; aimless; disorganized; straggling; unmethodical, immethodical^; unsymmetric^, unsystematic; untidy, slovenly; dislocated; out of sorts; promiscuous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... place five of these houses; but only two of them, besides the incubator and the brooder-house, were built in 1896. As offset to the heavy expenditure of this year, I had not much to show. Seven hundred cockerels were sold in November for $342. In October the pullets began laying in desultory fashion, and by November they had settled down to business; and that quarter they gave me 703 dozen eggs to sell. As these eggs were marketed within twenty-four hours, and under a guarantee, I had no difficulty in getting thirty cents a dozen, net. November ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter |
