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More "Ignoble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sensible that I had had the devil's own luck in my capture of a post on The Spectator. Indeed, I very much preferred that, to the thought that the good fortune that was mine was the reward of a grinding and ignoble perseverance. I was in no mood for the drab virtues. I hugged the thought that it was not through my merits but because I possessed a conquering star that I had ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... all means necessary to point this out—that the truly eloquent must be free from base and ignoble (or ill-bred) thoughts. For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips of ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... shall find themes for poesy worthy its loftiest strains. Painter! for you there are pictures fresh from the hand of God. Writer! there are stories still untold by the author-artist—legends of love and hate, of gratitude and revenge, of falsehood and devotion, of noble virtue and ignoble crime—legends redolent of romance, rich ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... tore your heart, and made the treachery still more horrible by the contrast between the riches that eluded your outstretched hand and the ignoble mediocrity in which you were doomed to ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... in his ignoble position, and tears gushed from his eyes. Harlson reached forward and withdrew the pitchfork handle. Woodell scrambled to his feet ungracefully, for his hands were ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... his brother's grief: Then virtuous Javali, chief Of twice-born sages, thus replied In words that virtue's law defied: "Hail, Raghu's princely son, dismiss A thought so weak and vain as this. Canst thou, with lofty heart endowed, Think with the dull ignoble crowd? For what are ties of kindred? can One profit by a brother man? Alone the babe first opes his eyes, And all alone at last he dies. The man, I ween, has little sense Who looks with foolish reverence On father's or on mother's name: In others, none a right may claim. E'en as a man may ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... thought of what political knowledge he could obtain from her. Bourrienne, on the other hand, shows us the other and the really important side of Napoleon's character. He tells us of the long hours in the Cabinet, of the never-resting activity of the Consul, of Napoleon's dreams, no ignoble dreams and often realised, of great labours of peace as well as of war. He is a witness, and the more valuable as a reluctant one, to the marvellous powers of the man who, if not the greatest, was at least the one most fully endowed with ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... unbounded influence—use it nobly! No longer seek popularity by flattering the vanity, or ministering to the passions of the Athenians. Let young men hear the praise of virtue from the lips of beauty. Let them see religion married to immortal genius. Tell them it is ignoble to barter the heart's wealth for heaps of coin—that love weaves a simple wreath of his own bright hopes, stronger than massive chains of gold. Urge Pericles to prize the good of Athens more than the applause of its populace—to value the ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... was. A nice, genial, well-meaning, well-bred gentleman; above anything ignoble, or consciously culpable, or common. His danger lay in his higher tendencies. He had artistic tastes; he was a lover of all grace and natural sweetness; no line of beauty could escape him. More than that, he drew toward all that was most genuine; he cared nothing for the elegant ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... early the next morning after the sowing of her peculiar crop, and looking from the window saw the sad traces of her work lying upon the ground. The evening before she had walked into the house tingling with ignoble triumph, but this morning she felt nothing but shame as she speculated on Steve's attitude. Possibly—this flashed across her mind—Steve had not seen her work, and she might plant those wretched ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... storm on! resolved am I to find The stem that bore me, lowly though it be. She, very like, puffed with a woman's pride, May feel ashamed of my ignoble birth. For me, I do esteem me Fortune's child, Nor blush to hold me of her favour born. She is my mother; and my father, Time, Whose months have on to greatness borne his child. With such a parentage I fear no change That should forbid me to ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... gossip, uncharitableness and suspicion of neighbors, witness arrogant sharp-dealing or lax honor, their own characters can scarcely escape perversion. In the same way others can not easily fail to be thoroughbred who have never seen or heard their parents do or say an ignoble thing. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... daring Goshawk[3] wherever wild crags and precipices afford safe breeding places. In the district of Anarajapoora, where it is trained for hawking, it is usual, in lieu of a hood, to darken its eyes by means of a silken thread passed through holes in the eyelids. The ignoble birds of prey, the Kites[4], keep close by the shore, and hover round the returning boats of the fishermen to feast on the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... extraction, it is confessed by all to have been illustrious, as will be said hereafter, nor was Phocion's, I feel assured, obscure or ignoble. For had he been the son of a turner, as Idomeneus reports, it had certainly not been forgotten to his disparagement by Glaucippus, the son of Hyperides, when heaping up a thousand spiteful things to say against him. Nor, indeed, had it been possible for him, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... vagabond, bezonian^, panhandler [Slang], sundowner^, chiffonnier, Cinderella, cinderwench^, scrub, jade; gossoon^. Goth, Vandal, Hottentot, Zulu, savage, barbarian, Yahoo; unlicked cub^, rough diamond^. barbarousness, barbarism; boeotia. V. be ignoble &c adj., be nobody &c n.. Adj. ignoble, common, mean, low, base, vile, sorry, scrubby, beggarly; below par; no great shakes &c (unimportant) 643; homely, homespun; vulgar, low-minded; snobbish. plebeian, proletarian; of low parentage, of low origin, of low extraction, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Cod to land upon, why was I washed ashore just at this particular spot? Answer:—Because at this spot, at this time, Eastboro Twin-Lights needed an assistant keeper. I like the spot. It is beautiful. 'Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.' With your permission, I'll stay here. The leopard may or may not change his spots, but I sha'n't. I like this one and here I stay. Yes, I mean it. I stay—as your assistant. Come, what do you say? Is it ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious? a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy? a tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolutions have been conducted by persons, who, whilst they attempted ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... plane in a cross-wind know what that means), and the latter from loaded bows and snow-cased bodies. As a consequence, the Northern and North-western upper levels have been practically abandoned, and the high fliers have returned to the ignoble security of the Three, Five, and Six hundred foot levels. But there remain a few undaunted sun-hunters who, in spite of frozen stays and ice-jammed connecting-rods, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... spake the lily maid of Astolat: 'Sweet father, all too faint and sick am I For anger: these are slanders: never yet Was noble man but made ignoble talk. He makes no friend who never made a foe. But now it is my glory to have loved One peerless, without stain: so let me pass, My father, howsoe'er I seem to you, Not all unhappy, having loved God's best And greatest, though my love had ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... in the pose of his lifted head, the glance of his handsome bright eyes. Her heart sank a little: it seemed to her that it would have been nobler in her husband to tell her the whole truth, and it had never occurred to her before to think of him as ignoble in any way. ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... on very successfully toward its accomplishment, when, by some means or other, Philip discovered the intrigue. He went immediately into Alexander's apartment, highly excited with resentment and anger. He had never intended to make Aridaeus, whose birth on the mother's side was obscure and ignoble, the heir to his throne, and he reproached Alexander in the bitterest terms for being of so debased and degenerate a spirit as to desire to marry the daughter of a Persian governor; a man who was, in fact, the mere slave, as he said, of a ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... upon him as if he had been a Noble Dill of waxwork. Several tunes he lifted a fork and set it down without guiding it to its accustomed destination. Food was far from his thoughts or desires, and if he really perceived its presence at all, it appeared to him as something vaguely ignoble ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... trod thy halls, Scorned and derided midst their ribald crew, A licensed jester, save the cap and bells, I have borne this—and I have borne the death, The unavenged death, of a dear brother. I seemed, I was, a base, ignoble slave. What am I?—Peace, I say!—What am I now? Head of this great republic, chief of Rome— In all but name, her sovereign—last of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... Civilized warfare itself, the only field remaining where undying fame may be purchased, seems likely to lose its hold on men, and soon the arbitrator will everywhere replace the commander-in-chief and the noble art of war will degenerate into the ignoble lawsuit. So even universal peace may ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... young people too frequently, and always fatally, are apt to mistake that character for that of a man of pleasure; whereas, there are not in the world two characters more different. A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the p———-s contend which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution. A dissolute, flagitious footman, or porter, makes full as good a rake as a man of the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor or despicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to the dismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the air smells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighs are heard, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... mother who had borne him in her heart. It might be that he needed such a vision to redeem his spirit from the harshness which sin and pride in high places, and want and crime and poverty of spirit among ignoble ones, had made him grow to think the whole ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... and found themselves there practically in a state of slavery through their ignorance of the country and its language. There were few to care for their souls. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was promptly in the field, with its diligent missionaries and its ignoble policy of doing the work of Christ and humanity with a shrewd eye to the main chance of making proselytes to its party.[140:1] With a tardiness which it is difficult not to speak of as characteristic, after the lapse of twenty-one years the classis of Amsterdam recognized its responsibility ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... their sculpture and painting have been employed on most ignoble objects—on scourgers and hangmen, on beggarly enthusiasts and base impostors. Look at the two masterpieces of the pencil; the Transfiguration of Raphael, and the St. Jerome of Correggio; [102] can any thing be more incongruous, any thing more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the castle was a sculptured stone—still preserved, but in a most ignoble position: it represented a cavalier armed with a lance, with a shield on his left arm; by the form of which it would appear to belong to those used by the ancient Franks. The arms of Meilhan are three toads, doubtless ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... strength of human intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus great art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for, as the ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world about him, first sees nothing clearly,—looks nothing fairly in the face, and then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent, and unescapable ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... unceasingly. The sun had passed the zenith—this sun of a culminating summer throughout which he had thrived regal and lustful. It seemed ignoble of him that he now should stoop to torment only us, and one of us a small woman. There was all ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... attention to their study, here they are: (1) The attitude of little children and of old men, expressing weakness; (2) that of absolute repose; (3) vehemence; (4) prostration; (5) transitory attitude, preparatory to (6) reverential walk; (7) vertigo, intoxication, which is an ignoble vertigo, or familiarity; (8) the alternative between the positions of offensive and defensive; (9) defiance. [Applause.] Oh! I beg of you! [Deprecatingly.] It is horribly ugly in me; but in a man ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... struggling Pangs of conscious Truth to hide, To quench the Blushes of ingenuous Shame, Or heap the Shrine of Luxury and Pride With Incense, kindled at the Muse's Flame. Far from the madding Crowd's ignoble Strife, Their sober Wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd Vale of Life They kept the noiseless Tenor of their Way. Yet ev'n these Bones from Insult to protect Some frail Memorial still erected ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... day of days you shall give to the mountain. The mountain, Washington, king of all this Atlantic coast,—at least till but just now, when some designing Warwick comes forward to press the claims of an ignoble Carolinian upstart, with, of course, a due and formidable array of feet and figures: but if they have such a mountain, where, I should like to know, has he been all these years? A mountain is not a thing that you can put away in your pocket, or hide under the eaves till an accident ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... mine once possessed a very large animal of a cross between the Mount St. Bernard dog and the English mastiff, and as remarkable for his good-nature as for his great strength and courage. Rambling out one day, accompanied by this trusty friend, they came upon a group of rustics engaged in the ignoble diversion of baiting a badger, an animal much in request among English dog-fanciers as a test for the pluck of their terriers. "Drawing a badger" is the proper sporting-phrase,—the animal being chained to a barrel, from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... is above himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a girl rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned her, and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of idolatry that is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on their way to God. But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when he wakens from his dream. The nobler his ideal, the further will he have been hurried down the wrong ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... great cause of our Lord under the government of the pagan emperors. The Jews were prompted by mere bigotry to display hatred to the gospel—but the Gentiles were generally guided by the still more ignoble principle of selfishness. Many of the heathen multitude cared little for their idolatrous worship; but all who depended for subsistence on the prevalence of superstition, such as the image-makers, the jugglers, the fortune-tellers, and a considerable number of the priests, [93:3] were dismayed and ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... renown, should I be so fortunate as to acquire it, I should feel as if it were selfish to dwell so much on my passion for distinction, and my devotion to my pencil as a means of winning it. My heart is full of you—but it is full of ambition, too, paradox though it be. I cannot live ignoble. I should not have felt worthy to press my love upon you—worthy to possess you—except with the prospect of celebrity in my art. You make the world dark to me, Fanny! You close down the sky, when you shut out this hope! Yet ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... promote the health which shows itself in the complexion. It is the young lady who interprets literally the Scotch invitation "come into the fire," and who spoils the backs of library novels by holding them too near the comfortable hearth, she it is who suffers from the ignoble and unbecoming liberties that winter takes with the human countenance. Happier and wiser is she who studies the always living and popular Dutch roll rather than the Grecian bend, and who blooms with continual health and good temper. Our changeful climate affords so few opportunities ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... a less ignoble fashion. He had contrived to collect about twelve thousand men; but only a fourth part of these were regularly armed; the rest carried hunting spears, pikes, sharpened stakes, any weapon that came to hand. At first he avoided ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... being wrought with delightful delicacy and freedom; and catching the eye clearly even among the mass of rich wreathed leaves. These tassels and strings are precisely the kind of subject fit for ironwork—noble in ironwork, they would have been entirely ignoble in marble, on the grounds above stated. The real plant of oleander standing in the window enriches the whole group of lines ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him. A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their crimson stains on her ignoble annals. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... was anxious rather to speak of Kate's ignoble father than of his own noble uncle. He had declared his intention of making inquiry of Father Marty, and he thought that he should do so with something of a high hand. He still had that scheme in his head, and he might perhaps be better prepared to discuss ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... abyss: Whatever happy region is thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heaven's eternal year is thine. Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse, In no ignoble verse; But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first-fruits of Poesy were given, To make thyself a welcome inmate there; While yet a young probationer, And ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... delicate hues that looked only fit for the Esplanade or the kettledrum, and who was becoming seriously uneasy, as Kunz, in his fresh snowiness, was disposed to make researches among vulgar remains of crabs and hakes, and was with difficulty restrained from disputing them with a very ignoble and spiteful yellow cur of ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and underrated him. It is true that as he rose higher in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much more ignoble men. . . . But he was also an organiser and liked governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. Therefore, to men on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... only too well that with his temperament no life would bring him the remotest approach to lasting happiness and satisfaction except one that gave scope to his intellectual passion. To yield to the immediate pressure of circumstances was perhaps ignoble, was even more probably a surer road to the loss of happiness for himself and for his wife than the repeated and painful sacrifices of the present. With all this, however, and the more when assured of her entire ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... heart would not reverence a woman that chose to die rather than to be dishonored: and, if we do not say, that it is her duty to do so, that is because the moralist must condescend to the weakness and infirmities of human nature: mean and ignoble natures must not be taxed up to the level of noble ones. Again, with regard to the other sex, corporal punishment is its peculiar and sexual degradation; and if ever the distinction of Donne can be applied safely to any case, it will be ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Had she remembered it now, it might have rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path down which she was just beginning to go. For her life had blunted her, had coarsened her nature. She had followed too many ignoble impulses, has succumbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or to allow any sense of patriotism to ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... impact on that firm and self-determined mind? And if he is superior to Horatio, how much more to Laertes? Had Shakespeare wished to exalt the quality of resolution at Hamlet's expense, he would not have chosen so ignoble a representative of it as this man. A true son of Polonius, a prater of moral maxims, while he is all for Paris and its pleasures; violent, but weak; who, when he is told of the tragic and untimely death of his sister, can find nothing better ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... would pervade our population so generally that patriotic purpose, the support of principle, the desire for the public good, and solicitude for the nation's welfare would be nearly banished from the activity of our party contests and cause them to degenerate into ignoble, selfish, and disgraceful struggles for the possession ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... characters to imitate: the high-minded, passionate, yet withal loyal and lovable Achilles who would rather fight gloriously before Troy (though death in the campaign is certain) than live a long life in ignoble ease at home at Phthia; or Oysseus, the "hero of many devices," who endures a thousand ills and surmounts them all; who lets not even the goddess Calypso seduce him from his love to his "sage Penelope"; who is ever ready with a clever tale, a plausible lie, and, when the need ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... all fairness—the Lombards despised the Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons. 'We Lombards,' says Bishop Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves, Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman; comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble, cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.' If this was—as it very probably was—the feeling of the whole Teutonic race; and if it was repaid—as it certainly was—on the part of the Roman, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... flowery meads, To reap an aftermath Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath 110 And shock of deadly hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, 115 Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Lights the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath: But some day the live coal behind the thought. Whether from Baael's stone obscene, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... these, shew only that they distinguish the slave and the freeman, the noble and the ignoble from each other by their virtues and their [1255b] vices; for they think it reasonable, that as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, so from a good man, a good man should be descended; and this is what nature desires to do, but frequently cannot accomplish it. ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... nearer the eyebrows to the eyes, the more earnest, deep, and firm the character. Eyebrows remote from each other denote warm, open, quick sensations. White eyebrows signify weakness; and dark brown, firmness. The motion of the eyebrows contains numerous expressions, especially of ignoble passions. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... others of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you sat raging and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amazing paradox was revealed in the fact that Palla fascinated her; that she believed her to be as fine as she was perverse; as honest as she was beautiful; as spiritually chaste as she knew her to be mentally and bodily untainted by anything ignoble. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... conception of them set up in my mind I have clung to as closely as I could, and whatever the trials of public life—I will tell you more about them some day—the rewards are great enough if no one can question your sense of public duty, if no accusation of private interest or ignoble motive has ever been able to stand on its feet after the usual ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... since some cavalry horses, deemed "unfit for further service," were sold at Tattersal's. Of one of these a Miller happened to be the purchaser. Subservient now to the ignoble purposes of burthen, the horse one day was led,'with a sack of flour on his back, to the next market- town; there while the Miller entered a house for a few moments, and the animal quietly waited at the door, a squadron of dragoons drew up in ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... had not a right to vote as they pleased![9] We understand nothing in England. As Cousin said, long ago, we are 'insular' of understanding. France may be mistaken in her speculations, as she often is; and if any mistake has been lately committed, it will be corrected by herself in a short time. Ignoble in ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of human passions, and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law. It is "a purer ether, a diviner air," from whence its citizens can afford to look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... than this,—that she had not confined her assurance to the verdict of a jury, that she had protested that she would not accept Major Grantly's hand as long as people thought that her father had stolen the cheque; but the archdeacon felt that it would be ignoble to hold her closely to her words. The event, according to his ideas of the compact, was to depend on the verdict of the jury. If the jury should find Mr Crawley not guilty, all objection on his part to the marriage was to be withdrawn. And he would keep his word! In such ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... revolted from that conduct which would, even in the on dit of a censorious world, have called the very faintest whisper on her name; and her husband, struck by the unwavering honour and integrity of her conduct, gradually deserted the haunts of ignoble pleasures which he had been wont to frequent, and paid her those marks of consideration and respect, both in public and private life, which she so greatly deserved. A large family had been the fruits of this union, all of whom, except her two youngest daughters and two of her sons, were married, ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... think one of the most beautiful persons in the world. She is a year or so older than I am, and she is, well, of a very serene and proud and dignified temperament. If you met her you would, I am certain, think her as fine as I do. She has never done a really ignoble thing that I know of—never. I met her when we were both very young, as young as you are. I loved her and made love to her, and I don't think she quite loved me ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... meditatively, removed the cigar from his lips and delicately knocked off the ash. "Circumstances alter cases. That method is too expensive. Son Altesse cannot afford the blood of the Fatherland in return for such ignoble carcasses. We—the price paid in the Herrero ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... the troopers were useless. Before Chalons four hours had been lost—not by accident, as the royalist legend tells, for Valory the outrider testifies that it took but a few minutes to repair. Bouille knew the ignoble cause of his own ruin and of so much sorrow, but never revealed it. When he came to England he misled questioners, and he exacted an oath from his son that he would keep the miserable secret for half a century. The younger ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... "please don't consider it is at all ignoble to be financially embarrassed. In fact, more than half of our girls are continually 'rationed,' as they call a cut in allowance. And if it is only a matter of ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... originality which Europe finds it so impossible to understand. And it is just as little understood by most of the diplomatists here, and what is still worse, it is not even studied by them. It is wretched work to be obliged to witness the low, the actually ignoble parts which many men play in the great farce of political life. I could easily mention a full score of would-be-eminent men, who are unsurpassed by the meanest of the vulgar herd in flippancy and an utter ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... or in ours, of persons who know and can recite variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from recitation but lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay of Johnny Johnston has also been recovered: it is widely diffused. I myself obtained a genuine version of Where Goudie rins, through the kindness of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote procured the low English version of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman, from an old woman in ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... is what I would certainly do, for under no circumstances will I ever give my consent to be subjected to the will of another, in any relation, for God has bidden me not to do it. But the idea of most women is, that they must be timid, weak, helpless, and full of ignoble submission. Only last week, a lady who has just been divorced from her husband said to me—"I used to be required to go into the field and do the hardest laborer's work, when I was not able to do it; and my husband would declare, that if I would not thus labor, I should not be allowed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... June, 1793, "felt your bosom ready to burst with indignation on reading of those mighty villains who divide kingdom against kingdom, desolate provinces, and lay nations waste, out of wantoness of ambition, or often from still more ignoble passions? In a mood of this kind to-day I recollected the air of Logan Water. If I have done anything at all like justice to my feelings, the following song, composed in three-quarters of an hour's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Spake in his snowy beard. "Bold can he speak, and fairly ride: I warrant him a warrior tried." A foeman to be feared, A leader to be trusted, seemed This dark, cold chief, and few had dreamed Of such strange severance. And any not ignoble eye In sorrow more than mockery Aside will gladly glance. 'Tis pity of it! Right or wrong, The Cause needs champions true as strong, And blameless as they're bold. "A sinful heart makes feeble hand," Cried MARMION, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... ignoble to recognise it if I chanced upon it? Perhaps. But why strip me of my last illusion? In the torment of my self-abasement this morning, I have clung to that one comfort: That I love you with a love which a truly worthless man could ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... would have pierced the whole line of the enemy with his shafts. Ah! but if you will not leave the aged in peace, decree that the advocates be matched; thus the old man will only be confronted with a toothless greybeard, the young will fight with the braggart, the ignoble with the son of Clinias;(8) make a law that in the future, the old man can only be summoned and convicted at the courts by the aged and the young man ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... there is no excuse for the young man who seeks the society of the loose and the dissolute. There is at all times and everywhere open to him a society of persons of the opposite sex of his own age and of pure thoughts and lives, whose conversation will refine him and drive from his bosom ignoble and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... her blandishments and smiles, she attempted to act upon Nero's boyish pride by taunting him with what she called his degrading and unmanly subjection to his mother. How long, she asked, was he to remain like a child under maternal tutelage? She wondered how he could endure so ignoble a bondage. He was in name and position, she said, a mighty monarch, reigning absolutely over half the world,—but in actual fact he was a mere nursery boy, who could do nothing without his mother's leave. She was ashamed, she said, to see him in so humiliating ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... the fervor of genuine passion seemed to touch her, and those who sought her under the transparent guise of seeking her father usually went away as they came. She had a smile and the cheeriest word of welcome for all alike, and so the young dalesmen who wooed her from the ignoble motive came to think her a little of a coquette, while those who wooed her from the purer impulse despaired of ruffling with the gentlest gales of love the ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the world Aunt Jeannie was the least mean or ignoble-minded, and Daisy told herself that she had been measuring her actions by a standard so crooked that it would not lie straight along them. There should be no more such attempts, and no more looking from the dark into windows to see unseen what people were doing inside. Flushed ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... novelist would picture as the nurse-swapped offspring of some rotund or ricketty aristocrat. But being, for my own part, as I plainly stated at the outset, incapable of such romancing, I must register Dixon as one whose ignoble blood had crept through scoundrels since the Flood. Though, when you come to look at it leisurely, this wouldn't interfere with aristocratic, or even regal, descent—rather ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... concerned, and the reader, therefore, need be troubled with no long description of Josephine Murray as she was when she became the Countess Lovel. It is hoped that her wrongs may be thought worthy of sympathy,—and may be felt in some sort to atone for the ignoble motives ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... said of the girl's leaving home. She remained in her mother's house, but without capitulation. It was "her mother's house" now, no longer home. She was one of those proud, not ignoble natures whose affection is entirely dependent upon respect. Her mother had been the great figure in her rather narrow life, object of a silent, critical, undemonstrative affection which was the furthest possible remove from Jacqueline's or Kate's own ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... coward! knave! Think ye my noble father's glaive Would drink the life-blood of a slave? The pearls that on the handle flame Would blush to rubies in their shame; The blade would quiver in thy breast Ashamed of such ignoble rest. No! thus I rend the tyrant's chain, And fling him ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... have been effected, and shew us the benefit. A noisy or seditious individual has obtained a lucrative office—an ambitious leader is in the char of state satiating his pride, or like Abraham Bishop gratifying his passion for ignoble pelf, upon his thousands.—He drives his carriage by his industrious neighbor who has toiled for him at an election, cracks his whip, and laughs at the folly of his dupe, and will laugh till he may need his services again, and then he will again cringe and bow and flatter ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... to cure her. It seemed to him that he would give his life to go to her, and comfort her with love, and yet he was impotent to make the least effort to attain the end he desired. He lay in the sad and cruel memory of Lizzie, his mind filled with ignoble visions of her life with the waiter, or with delicate fancies of her beauty amid the summer of the Thames. He mused on her gracious figure and face, illuminated by reflections from the water, set off by the bulrushes and floating blossoms which she so eagerly ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... de Sellon, the apostle of universal peace, that much as he abhorred bloodshed, he could think of no cure but war. "The Italians need regeneration; their moral, which was completely corrupted under the ignoble dominion of Spaniards and Austrians, regained a little energy under the French regime, and the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality; but to break entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... take part on our side. But it saved us from the greater danger of having the war spirit renewed and intensified by this gigantic struggle, from an international hatred which would not have cooled again for a century; or, if we did not declare war, from taking the ignoble attitude of a great and free people lying in wait for ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... and capable only of the pleasures appropriate to that species of animals." Those who could not answer this argument, and at the same time cannot divest themselves of the association of pleasure with the ignoble, took refuge in the charge of inconsistency, and, finding there was not less but more nobility in Mr. Mill's writing than their own theory, accused him of abandoning the tradition of his school. Mahomet would not go to the mountain, and they pleased themselves with the thought that the mountain ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... doubt right; but there are many compensations in war. It brings out the noble qualities; it raises men to think that valour and fortitude and endurance and honour are qualities which are something above the mere huckstering desire for getting money, and for ignoble ease and comfort. Some day it may be that the world will change, and that war may become a thing of the past; but to my mind, boy, I doubt whether men will be any happier or better for it. The priests, no doubt, would tell you otherwise; but then you see ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... the French; that she was an Austrian in heart; that her frankness and freedom from the restraints of etiquette were the result of an immoral and depraved mind. She exaggerated her extravagance, and accused her, by whispers and insinuations spread far and near, of the most ignoble crimes of which woman can be guilty. The young and inexperienced dauphiness soon found herself involved in most embarrassing difficulties. She had no kind friend to council her. Louis still remained cold, distant, and reserved. Thus, week after week, month after month, year ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... butterflies, whom to handle is to destroy. But such are exceptions only, and should not preclude attempts at improvement. If a bungler tries and fails, let him be Anathema, Maranathema; but let not his failure deter from trial a genuine artist. Nor is it an ignoble office to be thus shapers only of great thinkers' thoughts—Python interpreters to oracles. Nor is his work of slight account who thus—as sunbeams gift dark thunder-clouds with 'silver lining' and a fringe of purple, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... one of the most fascinating writers for youth, and withal one of the best to be found in this or any past age. Troops of young people hang over his vivid pages; and not one of them ever learned to be mean, ignoble, cowardly, selfish, or to yield to any vice from anything they ever read from ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... lowly bowl, or the basin broad, By double refinement a punch-bowl lord! There's the beggarly jug, ignoble and base, By adornment of art ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... euprepestatos. He would therefore have looked the part admirably of the dying gladiator; and he would have died in his natural vocation. But it was ordered otherwise; his death was destined to private malice, and to an ignoble hand. And much obscurity still rests upon the motives of the assassins, though its circumstances are reported with unusual minuteness of detail. One thing is evident, that the public and patriotic motives assigned by the perpetrators as the remote causes of their conspiracy, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... only a story, with no higher purpose than merely to gratify curiosity, than merely to amuse. Its art has no higher purpose than to copy faithfully the event, than to be a faithful photograph; and moreover it is the story not of an emotion, but of a passion, and an ignoble passion at that; the passion is jealousy,—in itself an ugly thing, and the fruit of this ugly thing is a still uglier thing,—a murder. The subject therefore is not a thing of beauty, and methinks that the sole business of art is first of all to deal with things of beauty. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... achieved? He was for retreat to the Isthmus; he was for defending the Peloponnese, because in the Peloponnesus was the unsocial selfish Sparta, and leaving the rest of Hellas to the armament of Xerxes. Themistocles spoke against the ignoble counsel; the Spartan raised his staff to strike him. Ye know the Spartan manners. 'Strike if you will, but hear me,' cried Themistocles. He was heard, Xerxes was defeated, and Hellas saved. "I am not Themistocles; nor is there a Spartan staff to silence free lips. But I too say, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... exchanged between his parents during this period, did Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type—a victim of that false passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for the welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... practical, conscientious, and did not in the least allow his feelings to emasculate him. He was a prodigious worker and throughout his career, in the face of ill health and many adverse circumstances, showed immense courage. His creed was no ignoble one—"To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present; this is my life." And to a gushing patroness of art who asked him what were his ideals, his simple reply was "My ideal is to become a good composer." ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... affected, in his manner or in his mode of living, that "republican simplicity" which is so often nothing but the frontispiece of demagoguism. He despised to flatter the people, for whom he cherished a generous sentiment, by vulgar appeal to their ignoble prejudices. He gratified his tastes where they did not come in conflict with morality or justice, and thus preserved his individuality and his friends, in the midst of the swelling tide of popular commotion and conflicting opinions. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the school wherein sorrow is a part of the discipline is that in which is developed human sympathy, one of the finest and most ennobling manifestations of the Love which is, in its essence, divine. In human life there is much that is ignoble, and the race has almost contemptible weakness and insignificance in comparison with the physical forces of ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... view, persons of ignoble and narrow natures may sit in judgment upon people of genius and refinement, and may force back the most aspiring seer into expressionless life by the utter lack of any comprehension by their dull, selfish fancy. Ye ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... enforce 'plain living' by his prison regulations, he cannot prevent 'high thinking' or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul. They are, of course, intensely personal in expression. They could not fail to be so. But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it. The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here. In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion. Such a sonnet as the following comes out ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... were slain by me; they all perished by my hand. The task of vindication is ignoble. What is it that I am called to vindicate? and ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... been a horror to her, and also a terror, because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her "see red" by her ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered, —not that she believed in prayer,—and of course nothing ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... all fight against you! Can you not see them, my Lord?—yonder at my back?—old Aluric Floyer and all those honest gentlemen, whose blood now blushes in your body—ay, blushes to be confined in a vessel so ignoble! Their armament fights against you, a host of gallant phantoms. And my hatred, too, fights against you—the cur's bitter hatred for the mastering hand it dares not bite. I dare now. You made me your pander, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... He liked a compliment and did not deem it ignoble to show his pleasure. He was gratified, too, at the confidence that the Secretary, a man whose influence he knew was not exaggerated, seemed to put in him, and he thanked ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... are no longer puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty—such distinctions do not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find melody quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a Venetian picture ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... months America has played an ignoble part among the nations. We have tamely submitted to seeing the weak, whom we have covenanted to protect, wronged. We have seen our men, women, and children murdered on the high seas without protest. We have used elocution as a substitute ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... Who was it died of "The Andromache"? {*1} Ignoble souls!—De L'Omelette perished of an ortolan. L'histoire en est breve. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... mother, but I've been so tormented myself, and so desirous not to—oh, not to do anything ignoble! I can't tell you all I've endured since—" She paused, her ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... depends? Not at all. He is meditating on suicide; and he finds that what stands in the way of it, and counterbalances its infinite attraction, is not any thought of a sacred unaccomplished duty, but the doubt, quite irrelevant to that issue, whether it is not ignoble in the mind to end its misery, and, still more, whether death would end it. Hamlet, that is to say, is here, in effect, precisely where he was at the time of his first soliloquy ('O that this too too solid flesh would melt') two months ago, before ever he heard of his father's murder.[55] ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... flung him upon his side. It is not, I confess, a pretty business, matching your brute strength against that of a fellow man, and as I cast myself upon him and felt his hard-blown breath on my face, I hated myself more than I hated him for engaging in so ignoble a contest. ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... circumstances in proposing a Constitution for their country: does it follow that the Constitution ought, for that reason alone, to be rejected? If, according to the noble precept, it be lawful to accept good advice even from an enemy, shall we set the ignoble example of refusing such advice even when it is offered by our friends? The prudent inquiry, in all cases, ought surely to be, not so much FROM WHOM the advice comes, as ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... older than himself, with whom he had been at Eton and at Oxford, and wondered what it felt like to be in his place and have the ball at one's feet. For Rendel in his heart was burning with ambition of no ignoble kind. He was burning to do, to act, and not to watch only; to take his part in shaping the destinies of his fellow-men, to help the world into what he believed to be the right path; and he would do it yet. In his mind that evening, as ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... queen beheld this venerable man approach, and thought on all he had deserved and all he had suffered, she was moved to tears. Columbus had borne up firmly against the rude conflicts of the world,-he had endured with lofty scorn the injuries and insults of ignoble men; but he possessed strong and quick sensibility. When he found himself thus kindly received by his sovereigns, and beheld tears in the benign eyes of Isabella, his long-suppressed feelings burst ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... life; that I ought to keep alive that glowing affection, a spark of which I may sometimes communicate to others; to study children, the people, and the poor, and to write for their benefit; to let no ignoble word fall from my pen, to sacrifice all my inclinations to the common welfare, never to lose heart, never to strive for approval, to hope for nothing and long for nothing but the day on which I may at last say to myself: I have done what I could, my life has not ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... and to me in other things, will be true in this I know. This feeling is stronger than all else—so strong that I have feared and failed to comprehend it. I had not even thought of it until it came upon me with fearful force, and I am conscious that it has not reached its height yet. It is not an ignoble pas' sion, I know. How could a passion for such a creature be ignoble? And yet again, there have been times when I have felt that perhaps it was best to struggle against it. I am beset on every side, as I have said, and I appeal to you. Ought love to ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... music which forbids unreality, rebukes frivolity into silence, subdues ignoble passions, soothes the heart's sorrow, and summons to the soul high and holy thoughts. It was difficult to begin the conversation; the trivial themes of the earlier part of the evening seemed foreign to the mood that had ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations and distant ages gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... embalms the spirit of sour misanthropy; but woe betide the ignoble prose-writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world, or ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or Pope, or Patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of the creation of beautiful things, and the long contemplation of them, in disdain of what in life is common and ignoble and in such felicitous sense of humour as enables one to see how vain and foolish is all popular opinion, and popular judgment, upon the wonderful things of art. These qualities Mr. John Gray possesses in a marked degree. He needs no other protection, nor, indeed, would he ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... economical fashion adopted by certain theatres—called lyric—of causing the cymbals and the long drum to be played by the same performer. The sound of the cymbals when attached to the drum—as they must be to render this economy feasible—is an ignoble noise, fit only for bands at tea-gardens. This custom, moreover, leads mediocre composers into the habit of never employing one of these instruments without the other, and considering their use as solely confined to forcibly marking the accented parts of the bar. This is an ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled, yellow skin. Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the mountain-side. So the people ceased to honour him during his lifetime, and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in a while, it is true, his memory was brought ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... means," the Prince rejoined warmly. "I am not favourably inclined towards this network of espionage. The school of diplomacy in which I have been brought up tries to work without such ignoble means." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... avarice of betting destroys the best part of us. As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! It is rather, as one well describes it, "a shrunken, useless organ, a noble capacity sentenced to death by an ignoble passion, which droops as a withered hand by the side, and cumbers ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... much its violence as its Machiavellian cunning. The art popularly known to-day as camouflage—of dressing-up one design under the guise of something quite different, of making black appear white by glorifying the most ignoble actions, of making white appear black by holding up all honourable traditions to contempt and ridicule, in a word perversion—has been reduced to a system by the secret directors of world revolution. It is here that we can detect the non-proletarian character of the movement. The working-man of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... wide-ranging raptor only attacks comparatively large birds, and, after fastidiously picking a meal from the flesh of the head and neck, abandons the untouched body to the polybori and other hawks of the more ignoble sort. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... when only ten years of age used to collect an audience in his father's shop, by his talent for improvisation. He thus attracted the notice of Gravina, a celebrated patron of letters, who adopted him as his son, changed his somewhat ignoble name of Trepassi to Metastasio, and had him educated in every branch necessary for a literary career. He still continued to improvise verses on any given subject for the amusement of company. His youth, his harmonious voice, and prepossessing ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... which the nineteenth century has no worthy use. It finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous tourist,—somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel. It suffers teetotal picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows itself to be painted ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... that day, stretches now a trilateral patch of pasture-land, which faces a small house. At that time this space was rough forest-ground, and where now, in the hedge, rise two small trees, types of the diminutive offspring of our niggard and ignoble civilization, rose then two huge oaks, coeval with the warriors of the Norman Conquest. They grew close together; yet, though their roots interlaced, though their branches mingled, one had not taken nourishment ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the open air can give, and promote the health which shows itself in the complexion. It is the young lady who interprets literally the Scotch invitation "come into the fire," and who spoils the backs of library novels by holding them too near the comfortable hearth, she it is who suffers from the ignoble and unbecoming liberties that winter takes with the human countenance. Happier and wiser is she who studies the always living and popular Dutch roll rather than the Grecian bend, and who blooms with continual health and good temper. Our changeful climate affords so few opportunities of ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... thick and darkened sunshine of Bludston flooded the asphalt of the yard, which sent up a reek of heat, causing curates to fan themselves with their black straw hats, and little boys in clean collars to wriggle in sticky discomfort, while in the still air above the ignoble town hung the heavy pall of smoke. Presently there was the sound of wheels and the sight of the head of the vicar's coachman above the coping of the schoolyard wall. Then the gates opened and the vicar and his wife and Miss Merewether, her daughter, and Maisie Shepherd appeared and were immediately ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... began, "please don't consider it is at all ignoble to be financially embarrassed. In fact, more than half of our girls are continually 'rationed,' as they call a cut in allowance. And if it is only a matter of a ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... a few favorites of his immediate family and a small body of troops, and commenced his journey—a journey which was considered by all the people as a base and ignoble flight. He involved himself in endless troubles by this step. A revolt broke out on the way among the guards who accompanied him. One of the generals who headed the revolt sent a messenger to Genghis Khan informing him of the emperor's ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... brain is wandering; what can lead you to suspect such treachery? And, since you arouse my suspicions, since you hold a light over those ignoble labyrinths of the human heart which I refused to contemplate, I will speak to you with the same freedom. Was I not in this man's power? Is not this house his? Are not the people by whom I am surrounded devoted to his orders? Gaston, if you love me, you will ask my pardon for what you have ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were splashed thickly with ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... home, and had been brought up to look upon fox-hunting as their future vocation. Lolling on their saddles, probably voting it all a bore, were two or three tufts, and their "tail;" and stuck into all sorts of vehicles, lawful and unlawful, buggies, drags, and tandems, were that ignoble herd, who, like myself, had come to the steeple-chase, just because it was the most convenient idleness at hand, and because other men were going. There were all sorts of people there besides, of course: carriages of all grades of pretension, containing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... however, that the cause of the Allies should prevail not for their own sakes alone, but for the sake of the world, that it is difficult to imagine their consenting to an ignoble pacification. The Allies have signed an important document, in order to prove their solidarity, that no one of them will sign peace without the sanction of the other partners. Let us suppose that the rival armies have fought each other to a standstill; let us suppose that France ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... long services, and despising his person, refused to admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him, the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the held and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario. Unmeet companion ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... short as if the only thing to do were to accept the law of one's talent and thinking that if certain consequences didn't follow it was only because one wasn't logical enough. My disaster has served me right—I mean for using that ignoble word at all. It's a mere distributor's, a mere hawker's word. What is 'success' anyhow? When a book's right, it's right—shame to it surely if it isn't. When it sells it sells—it brings money like potatoes or beer. If there's dishonour one way and ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... war stirred two passions in the heart of Fernando Stevens, revenge and patriotism. One was a noble and the other a very human but ignoble passion; but Fernando was only a common mortal with mortal weaknesses. When he reflected on the wrongs he had suffered; when he remembered the death of poor Boseley, slain to gratify the malice of Captain Snipes, and poor Sukey still the slave of the British monarch, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... this deliberation. It is this: you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant. You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature. My Lords, we have shown to you already, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... promiscuously in narrow prisons, while each of the hand's fingers claims its separate apartment, leading from the antechamber, in the dainty glove. As a natural consequence of all this, their faculties are cramped, they grow into ignoble shapes, they become callous by long abuse, and all their natural gifts are crushed and trodden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Despite his poetry and merit, Stops in his quick retreat awhile, And tries the long-forgotten smile; E'en the pursuing Bum forgets His business, and the man of Debts; The one neglecting "Caption"—"Bail"— The other "thoughts of gyves and Jail"— So wondrous are the spells that bind The noble and ignoble mind. The Paviour halts in mid-grunt—stands With rammer in his idle hands; And quite refined, and at his ease, Forgetting onions, bread, and cheese, The hungry Drayman leaves his lunch, To take a peep ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... chancellor of the exchequer, who, contrary to all precedent, had not been taken into counsel, strongly protested against the nomination, as soon as he was informed of it. Out of this dispute arose the ignoble fall of the Goderich administration, though it was preceded by more serious dissensions on foreign policy. The king, whose activity revived with the increasing weakness of his ministers, committed himself, without asking their opinion, to a hearty approval of Codrington's action ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... dirty den—the Hotel Boncoeur—that the whole cursed life had commenced. Gervaise remained looking at the window of the first floor, from which hung a broken shutter, and recalled to mind her youth with Lantier, their first rows and the ignoble way in which he had abandoned her. Never mind, she was young then, and it all seemed gay to her, seen from a distance. Only twenty years. Mon Dieu! and yet she had fallen to street-walking. Then the sight of the lodging house ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... by the hand, and he now raised it to his lips and kissed it. "The offer from you," he said, "is as high-minded, as generous, and as honourable as its acceptance by me would be mean-spirited, vile, and ignoble. But whether I fail or whether I succeed, you shall see me before the winter ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Christians so convinced of the splendour ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... rudely but patiently resident races, possessing fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... large-based, full-nurtured Pharisee, bland, urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a "sultry" warmth of benevolence, as the author calls it again and again, and basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society; but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description, made up of a hundred admirable touches, in which satire is always winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep sense of reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne followed a model in describing Judge ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... honour? oh, Henrico, Where have you left your goodnesse? sure you cannot Be so ignoble, if you thinke me worthy To be your wife at least, to turne Eleonora Into ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo! the grand prize of his ambition to-day slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former contest, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Heathcliff, the outcast, nameless, adventurer? Antonio and his Duchess; but they have belonged to each other and been happy; these two are eternally separate. Their passion is only heightened by its absolute freedom from desire; even the wicked and desperate Heathcliff has no ignoble love for Catharine; all he asks is that she live, and that he may see her; that she may be happy even if it be with Linton. "I would never have banished him from her society, while she desired his," asserts Heathcliff, and now she is mad with grief and dying. The consciousness ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... pilfering, fraud, theft, occasionally arson or manslaughter. One man, however, was arraigned for murder with highway robbery, and a woman for the most ignoble traffic, which evil feminine ingenuity ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the side of the path stands a tiny roadside oratory. On the walls of this little shrine, which (or its predecessor) has stood here for three hundred years, one might formerly read in stilted French the following astonishing inscription, ignoble witness to human platitude, as ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... seat nearer him to look at the expression of his face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them. And when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... be Bhimasena, could address me with such unbecoming words as thou dost? Therefore, I shall tell thee, O delighter of the Vrishnis, about my own prowess and unrivalled might. Although to speak of one's own prowess is always an ignoble act, yet, pierced as I am by thy unfriendly strictures, I will speak of my own might. Behold, O Krishna, these—the firmament and the earth—which are immovable, immense, and infinite, and which are the refuge ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... masks, which appears astonishing to us, was not only justifiable, but absolutely essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would have deemed it downright profanation. How little is it in the power of the most finished actor to change the character of his ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... than with your knowledge. How this comes to pass is foreign to my present purpose to say; but it certainly lies in a most afflicted state. For the ungodly have gone to such lengths, that the truth of Christ, if not vanquished, dissipated, and entirely destroyed, is buried, as it were, in ignoble obscurity, while the poor, despised church is either destroyed by cruel massacres, or driven away into banishment, or menaced and terrified into total silence. And still they continue their wonted madness and ferocity, pushing ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... lawyer looked straight before him, while the girl, swept on by her ignoble rage, displayed still more of the moral ulceration which had been injected into her ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the old unshared intimacy too great to be borne without tears, she rose, walked to the farther end of the room, held the curtains apart, and stood there mastered for a moment. The grief itself was not ignoble; the sting of it lay in the fact that she had been led to this act of treachery against herself. Trapped, cheated, robbed, first by Ralph and then by Katharine, she seemed all dissolved in humiliation, and bereft of anything she could call ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the photographs were restored to the portfolio and the red leather tongue drawn through, with a little breath heavy with pleasure, and Faith carried off the whole to be put where profane hands should not get hold of it. Then the comparatively ignoble business of dressing occupied her. And Mrs. Derrick yet more, who of course was there to help and look on; while Faith's head was erratically in her portfolio, or at Rome, or at Florence, or—elsewhere,—as the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... scantily attired woman with a dirty yashmak covering her face. The chamber which should have been very sacred if only because there the last of the Byzantine Emperors composedly resigned himself to the inevitable, had become a filthy den devoted to one of the most ignoble of uses. The shame is, of course, to the Greeks of Constantinople.] watching the movements of the Turks. The subtle prophet which sometimes mercifully goes before death had discharged its office with him. He had dismissed ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... to illustrate Hatto's cruelty and treachery. Facing the Mouse Tower, on the opposite bank of the Rhine, stands the castle of Ehrenfels, the scene of another of his ignoble deeds. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... broadside of Cape Cod to land upon, why was I washed ashore just at this particular spot? Answer:—Because at this spot, at this time, Eastboro Twin-Lights needed an assistant keeper. I like the spot. It is beautiful. 'Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.' With your permission, I'll stay here. The leopard may or may not change his spots, but I sha'n't. I like this one and here I stay. Yes, I mean it. I stay—as your assistant. Come, what do you say? ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... homes, had died long years ago with the passing of the mother who had borne him in her heart. It might be that he needed such a vision to redeem his spirit from the harshness which sin and pride in high places, and want and crime and poverty of spirit among ignoble ones, had made him grow to ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... never likely to know," and there the matter dropped. It is humiliating to think, that amongst white men banded together in exploring parties, where the success and safety of the enterprise are much dependent on the good conduct of each individual member, there should be found individuals so ignoble, as to appropriate an undue share of the common stock of food on which the health, and perhaps the life of each equally depends; and yet, sad to say, such instances are not singular. The well-proved charge against ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... others had been verbal. Despite her hatred for Marjorie Dean and her friends, Mignon had resolved to profit by the sudden show of friendliness which, true to their compact, the five girls had lost no time in carrying out. Ignoble of soul, she did not value the favor of these girls as a concession which she had been fortunate enough to receive. She decided to use it only as a wedge to reinstate herself in a certain leadership which her bad behavior of last year had lost her. ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... discovered the intrigue. He went immediately into Alexander's apartment, highly excited with resentment and anger. He had never intended to make Aridaeus, whose birth on the mother's side was obscure and ignoble, the heir to his throne, and he reproached Alexander in the bitterest terms for being of so debased and degenerate a spirit as to desire to marry the daughter of a Persian governor; a man who was, in fact, the mere slave, as he said, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the tardiness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... busy street, hardly a shop window, not a bookstore, not an ignoble news-stand, but had displayed his wife's picture. It was Mrs. Carey, Mrs. Oswald Carey, Mrs. Carey and the ex-King, everywhere. One infamous pictorial publication had a bare-necked portrait of ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Guidobaldo makes formal surrender to him, takes leave of his faithful friends, enjoins fidelity to Valentinois and trust in God, and so on December 19 he departs into exile, the one pathetic noble figure amid so many ignoble ones. Paolo, taking possession of the duchy, assumes the title ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... "I will show you our farms, our vines and orchards. Your participants will enjoy these; they have no interest in the dolor of an ignoble sjambak." ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... of this man as his insignificance permits, I should call him a "gabby" fellow—loud of resolution, ignoble of effort. Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries." As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should convict him by his face; the same indictment would ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... only ones condemned to death. The innocent men were released at once, but Laurent and his companion were put in prison to await the guillotine. But, pooh! Master Laurent had too pretty a head to fall under the executioner's ignoble knife. The judges who condemned him, the curious who expected to witness him executed, had forgotten what Montaigne calls the corporeal recommendation of beauty. There was a woman belonging to the jailer of Yssen-geaux, his ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral values must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived. Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was himself, and such a man is next door to a devil, for, I suppose, the definition of devil is 'self-engrossed still,' and whosoever lives for himself is dead. Don't let the earth be the centre of your system, but the sun. Do not live to yourselves, or your pleasures will all be ignoble and creeping, but live to God. 'Remember.' Well, then, you and I know a good deal more about God than the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes did—both about what He is and how to remember Him. I am not going to content myself by taking his point ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... it is certain that this crude beginning of Christian music arose from a vital necessity, and was accompanied by an indomitable faith. If we look back, we note that until now music had either been the servant of ignoble masters, looked upon as a mathematical problem to be solved scientifically, or used according to methods prescribed by the state. It had been dragged down to the lowest depths of sensuality by the dance, and its divine origin forgotten in lilting ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, also, we have to exclaim: Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... desire for ourselves. The standard of aspiration and effort cannot be lowered to meet weakness. This is nobility of life—to aim at the unattainable, and to be ever approximating towards our aim. It is more blessed to be smitten with the longing to win the unwon than to stagnate in ignoble contentment with partial attainments. Better to climb, with faces turned upwards to the inaccessible peak, than to lie at ease in the fat valleys! It is the salt of life to have our aims set fixedly towards ideal perfection, and to say, 'I count not myself ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Caracas was nevertheless eagerly explored. A governor, newly arrived on that coast, could recommend himself to the Spanish court only by boasting of the mines of his province; and in order to take from cupidity what was most ignoble and repulsive, the thirst of gold was justified by the purpose to which it was pretended the riches acquired by fraud and violence might be employed. "Gold," says Christopher Columbus, in his last letter* (Lettera rarissima data nelle Indie nella isola di Jamaica a 7 Julio ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... criticized by audiences that have not the mental capacity to appreciate his work. The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... of the revelers; on the gay carpet and the rich damask are pools of spilled liquors, heaps of shivered glass, and bouquets and garlands that have ceased to be fragrant hours ago. All around, in different attitudes—ignoble and helpless—are strewn the bodies of those who have gone down early in the battle of the Bacchanals: they lie in their ranks as they fell. One figure towers above the rest—pre-eminent as Satan in the conclave of the ruined ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... ground. The balls passed too high or too low, but they impressed the fact on enthusiasts, who had longed for battle, that one might die for one's country and not die gloriously. It seemed such an ignoble, such a dastardly, outrageous thing, that death could come to them from unseen hands, for as yet they had not seen a soul. But now they are at the foot of the hill—though it is not correct to so call it, for it was a long, winding valley, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... too frequently occur to be worth estimating. And it will be seen, upon examination, that not merely the verbiage, but the sentiment, is thus egotistic throughout, exhibiting a degree of arrogance and self-importance, only to be met with in a Clerical Locofoco, used by bad men for ignoble purposes. To carry out the idea of your vanity, you say in the winding ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... sight. "Ha! start ye back? Fool! coward! knave! Think ye my noble father's glaive Would drink the life-blood of a slave? The pearls that on the handle flame Would blush to rubies in their shame; The blade would quiver in thy breast Ashamed of such ignoble rest. No! thus I rend the tyrant's chain, And fling ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... European monarchies, which were founded upon the ruins of the Roman empire, the sovereigns and the great lords came universally to consider the administration of justice as an office both too laborious and too ignoble for them to execute in their own persons. They universally, therefore, discharged themselves of it, by appointing a deputy, bailiff ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... dust They preach, 'In greatness is no trust.' Here is an acre sown indeed With the richest, royall'st seed That the earth did e'er suck in, Since the first man died for sin. Here the bones of birth have cried, 'Though gods they were, as men they died.' Here are sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings. Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust, once ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... cousin; a good plain girl, but not a person to delight a sculptor's eye. Roderick has a goodly share of the old Southern arrogance; he has the aristocratic temperament. He will have nothing to do with the small towns-people; he says they 're 'ignoble.' He cannot endure his mother's friends—the old ladies and the ministers and the tea-party people; they bore him to death. So he comes and lounges here and rails ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... me. He has a remarkable face—the kind of face that suggests depth and force. I am sure he is very proud. He could bear any extreme of poverty rather than condescend to ignoble ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Pepys. It was but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr. Pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been since Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an entirely ignoble appetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's "How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had more worldly success. One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Fannie!" He strained up a superior smile. "Is passion—are passions bound to be ignoble? But you're making ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... anxiety in his countenance to permit full expression of the natural dignity of the features. It was a fine face and might have been distinctly noble, but circumstances had marred the purpose of Nature; you perceived that his cares had too often been of the kind which are created by ignoble necessities, such as leave to most men of his standing a bare humanity of visage. He had long thin white hair; his beard was short and merely grizzled. In his left hand he carried a ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, "in wit a man, simplicity a child," no artist, of whatsoever denomination, I make bold ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... Fortune, as Pampinea has shewn us, does sometimes bide treasures most rich of native worth in the obscurity of base occupations, so in like manner 'tis not seldom found that Nature has enshrined prodigies of wit in the most ignoble of human forms. Whereof a notable example is afforded by two of our citizens, of whom I purpose for a brief while to discourse. The one, Messer Forese da Rabatta by name, was short and deformed of person and withal flat-cheeked and flat-nosed, insomuch that never a Baroncio(1) had ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... rights of humanity. The captain was said to have expressed a sense of pride in what he termed the smart capture of his erring apprentice, and some talk was heard of the contemplated exploits of drilling after sailing again. Poor man! He was never to have the opportunity of gratifying an ignoble desire, for the night after the vessel's arrival the youthful incorrigible disembarked with a vow that he would never return to her again; and he kept his word. Could those fields and lanes in Scotland speak out the thoughts and the sufferings of the days that were spent ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... virtue and honour, have been pardoned. But of all the forms of pride, even the pride of upstart wealth not excepted, the most offensive is the pride of ancestry when found in company with sordid and ignoble vices, greediness, mendacity, knavery and impudence; and such was the pride of Seymour. Many, even of those who were well pleased to see the ministers galled by his keen and skilful rhetoric, remembered that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and was ordained lector; but was overcome by his violent passion for eloquence to teach rhetoric. St. Gregory Nazianzen wrote to him in the strongest terms, exhorting him to renounce that paltry or ignoble glory, as he elegantly calls it.[1] This letter produced its desired effect. St. Gregory returned to the sacred ministry in the lower functions of the altar: after some time he was called by his brother Basil to assist him in his pastoral ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... with God, of whom—to him at least—it is a symbol. They do, however, take careful count of some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of life, he has raised—with remorse I am sure—the cup of ignoble pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there. How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without—I will not say bearing—but without having even the capacity of appreciating ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Sampson had brought from Meg herself. So that on one particular night all the forces of order, as well as those of disorder, were directing themselves toward the custom-house of Portanferry, where in a close and ignoble apartment Harry Bertram and his worthy friend, Dandie Dinmont, were sleeping. It was Bertram who wakened first. There was a strong smell of burning in the room. From the window he could see a crowded boat-load of men landing at the little harbour, and ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... himself. "Not till you are in safety," he said, and was dully aware of some discomfort. The dying woman, the sheer ugliness of death, the sordid emotions about her numbed the life in him. He felt himself in a world inhuman. Yet, even afterwards, he seems not to have discovered anything ignoble in his admired Pretender. The blame was fate's that mocked coldly at the ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... loafer), perhaps analogous to the even less complimentary modern French word "foutre" (blackguard). Mr. Jesse, however, derives the word "fetter" from the Norman "defaytor" (defaulter), as if the lane had once been a sanctuary for skulking debtors. In either case the derivation is somewhat ignoble, but the inhabitants have long since lived it down. Stow says it was once a mere byway leading to gardens (quantum mutatus!) If men of the Bobadil and Pistol character ever did look over the garden-gates ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her gray eyes full of fire, her face glowing like a rose. Perhaps she was of the enemy's country. Perhaps those she loved, those who made up her life, had set her feet in this path that she was treading. If she was a spy,—Lord! How the mere word hurt one!—it wasn't for ignoble motives; it ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... chose (Cardinal Beaufort and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,—would not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair—the despair of the ignoble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of a prince, whose comeliness her spiritless father hath made over to base and contemptible embraces! Unhappy child of thy mother, with thy happiness marred by consorting with this bed! thy purity is handled by the impurity of a peasant, thy nobility is bowed down by ignoble commonness, thy high birth is impaired by the estate of thy husband! But thou, if any pith be in thee, if valour reign in thy soul at all, if thou deem thyself fit husband for a king's daughter, wrest the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Scientist, can here pursue their studies, and breathe forth inspired thoughts which the res angusta domi have so long stifled. In society congenial to their tastes, far from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," they may succeed in accomplishing their life's work, and their happiness would be the happiness of ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... God's high glory! Pure gems around His burning throne! Mute watchers o'er man's strange, sad story Of crime and woe through ages gone! 'Twas yours, the wild and hallowing spell, That lured me from ignoble glens— Taught me where sweeter fountains Than ever ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of you to cheer and charm me by coming here!" he said, in his most mournful and most musical tones. "I have dressed, expressly to receive you, in the prettiest clothes I have. Don't be surprised. Except in this ignoble and material nineteenth century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colors as well as women. A hundred years ago a gentleman in pink silk was a gentleman properly dressed. Fifteen hundred years ago the patricians of the classic times wore bracelets ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... thoughts away from him. He must not think of such things—it was selfish and ignoble. He must think of the good that he would be able to do with all the money. He might help the poor at last. He and Miss Gladys would devote their lives to this. Perhaps some day he might even own the mill where the children worked, ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... or plenipotentiaries of Madam League they had laid the crown at the feet of the King of Spain, hoping by still further drafts on his exchequer and his credulity to prolong indefinitely their own ignoble reign. The extreme democratic party, which had hitherto supported the House of Lorraine and had seemed to idolize that family in the person of the great Balafre, now believed themselves possessed of sufficient power to control the Duke of Mayenne and all his adherents. They sent ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "I will larn it yet," he repeated over and over. And even while the words were in his mouth, if he had had less obstinacy in his make-up, he would have yielded himself to despair. But a good thing happened to him. Miss Slocum, not knowing his ignoble motive, and seeing a very earnest child striving to improve himself, set about helping him in ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... they had viewed all those fair, exotic scenes through the blurred auras of their emotional infirmities, he and his wife returned to their home in New York. There they were protected against all contact with ugliness, all ignoble influences, all sources of unhappiness ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... their country: does it follow that the Constitution ought, for that reason alone, to be rejected? If, according to the noble precept, it be lawful to accept good advice even from an enemy, shall we set the ignoble example of refusing such advice even when it is offered by our friends? The prudent inquiry, in all cases, ought surely to be, not so much FROM WHOM the advice comes, as whether the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the workhouse. As she thought of this she trembled with true maternal instincts. Her beautiful boy,—so glorious with his outward gifts, so fit, as she thought him, for all the graces of the grand world! Though the ambition was vilely ignoble, the mother's love ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Theodoric (son of Triarius), whom we met with seventeen years ago, and whose receipt of stipendia from the court of Constantinople, at the very time when their own were withheld, raised the wrath of Walamir and Theudemir. This Theodoric, it will be remembered, was of unkingly, perhaps of quite ignoble, birth, had risen to greatness by clinging to the skirts of Aspar, and had, so far as the Emperor's favour was concerned, fallen with his fall. Shortly before the death of Leo he had appeared in arms against the Empire, taking one city and besieging another, and had forced the Emperor ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... secret spleen there must have been—a twist of a painter's wrist may expose his soul. He became a solitary and ate the bitter root of sin, for, cerebral as he is, his discovery of the human soul shows it as ill at ease before its maker. Flaubert has said that "the ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope." But no man may sun himself on this slope by the flames of hell without his soul shrivelling away. Rodin, who admires Rops and has been greatly influenced by him; Rodin, as an artist superior ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the Schlegel household continued to lead its life of cultured but not ignoble ease, still swimming gracefully on the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... sake she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. Indeed she had found other lions in her path that she feared more—the glitter and gauds of her tinsel world, the enervating love of ease, the influence of sordid surroundings and ignoble ideals. But not one could withstand the simple goodness of the unsophisticated girl. They retreated before the power of her fireside traditions of right thinking and true living which she had learned ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... never be the same again, can say with all earnestness: "It is the memory that the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun—that is all which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave or the ignoble." ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... denied, may receive even fuller inspiration from the sea and skies and heights of his native land! This was in 1859. There was then no token or presage of that other July day, when, under the very shadow of these mountains, an army thrilled with heroic impulse; when men, whose whole lives had been ignoble, redeemed them by the most sublime daring; and those whose lives held every promise yielded them with the most patriotic devotion; and through long sultry hours, men cheerfully endured the tortures ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... imagining a dozen emergencies of their unprotected state, with which the elder girl could scarcely grapple. There was little to fear from depredatory man or beast—desperadoes of the mountain trail never stooped to ignoble burglary, bear or panther seldom approached a cabin—but there was the chance of sudden illness, fire, the accidents that beset childhood, to say nothing of the narrowing moral and mental effect of their ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... well-behaved, reasonable, and manageable, was for the majority a flash only; and the dreamed-of social ideal, touched for a moment was to recede again into the far distance. It was Madame Sand's error, and no ignoble one, to entertain the belief that a nation could safely be trusted to the guidance of a force so variable and uncontrollable as enthusiasm, and that the principle of self-devotion could be relied upon as a motive power. The divisions, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of Tommy, he would have definitely disliked her. The dislike would not have been fair, but it would have existed in spite of himself. It would not have been fair because it would have been founded simply upon the ignoble resentment of envy, upon the poor truth that he was not in the state of mind to avoid resenting the injustice of fate in bestowing multi-millions upon one person and his offspring. He resented his own resentment, but was obliged to acknowledge its ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... somewhat offended when he got this protest, which seemed to him like ingratitude; but Dr. Bell remained undisturbed, and secretly made up his mind to continue his efforts with more energy than ever for his friend. 'A noble soul, yet altogether unfit for this ignoble world,' he said to Mr. Gilchrist, issuing his circulars for another philanthropic campaign. When Clare learnt that new appeals to assist him had been put forward, he determined to interfere in the matter. Accordingly, he wrote long letters—very ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... was to prepare them, the evil hour of oblivion was put off for only a little longer. Sooner or later, there came a time when the Double was reduced to seek his food among the town refuse, and amid the ignoble and corrupt filth which lay rejected on the ground. Then, in order that the offerings consecrated on the day of burial might for ever preserve their virtues, the survivors conceived the idea of drawing and describing them on the walls of the chapel (fig. 127). The painted or sculptured ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... world; has written miles of French memorandums; has sung serenades in Italian; and, if he were not so confoundedly lazy, would probably speak more languages than any man in Parliament. But yet he cannot pronounce either a final "g" or allow a word to end in a vowel without adding the ignoble, superfluous, and utterly brutal "er." When he wishes to confound Mr. Gladstone, he assaults about "Ugander"; when the concerns of our great Eastern dependency move him to interest, he asks about "Indier"; and he speaks of the primordial accomplishments ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... mentioned. It is one of the many instances of uninterrupted traditions, that this part of our theatres is still devoted to receive musicians, although, in comparison with their predecessors, they are of an ignoble and ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... virtue that inflicts the stroke Dies with him, and the rank ignoble heads Of plundering faction soon unite again, And prince-protected share the ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... here by Masaccio. Michelangelo's figures are more correct, but far less tangible and less powerful; and while he represents nothing but a man warding off a blow dealt from a sword, and a woman cringing with ignoble fear, Masaccio's Adam and Eve stride away from Eden heart-broken with shame and grief, hearing, perhaps, but not seeing, the angel hovering high overhead who directs their ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... "with a lively curiosity on his fine countenance, which I thought open and noble." The next time that the king appears all is altered. His Majesty's eyes are without the smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought up. It is the same with more important questions. Barere is for the parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday, for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... imprisonment for debt. Under the old monarchy that stain could have been spared you by obtaining a lettre de cachet and shutting you up for a few days in a military prison.—But you are here; you stand before your father, who hears you. You know all that you did before you were sent to that ignoble prison. Will you swear to me before your father's shade, and in presence of God who sees all, that you have done no dishonorable act; that your debts are the result of youthful folly, and that your ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... unprepossessing as their parents and promising to grow up no whit happier, who in due course would give birth to children of their own as poor in spirit and looks as they. Yet now and again a young girl would pass, tall and fair and desirable, rousing in young men a not ignoble passion to possess, and in the old regret for the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... in holding him up to scorn, and not being able to deny the fact of his triumph, explained it by the adoption of tortuous and despicable methods. They would not even allow that he was of royal birth, but asserted that he was of ignoble origin, the son of a female goatherd and a certain Atradates,* who, belonging to the savage clan of the Mardians, lived by brigandage. Cyrus himself, according to this account, spent his infancy and early youth in a condition not far short of slavery, employed at first in sweeping out the exterior ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... wind-torn clouds, it saw a half-mile breadth of racing water where had been pasture-fields; the yellow, foam-laced river was half way up the tall, slender arches of Cluhir Bridge, lapping ever higher, as if in envy, to hide the sole beauty of the ignoble town. Trees, and hayricks, broken boats, and humble pieces of cottage furniture, jostled each other between the piers, tossing and dancing in grotesque gaiety, like drunken holiday-makers on their way ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... with an enormous mass of cactus. On the south side, invisible from the port, are three fine Gothic windows, now filled up, but preserving the traceries. The palace could scarcely have had a nobler site, or the site a more ignoble occupancy. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... to pass over in silence, as incompatible with the gravity and dignity of history, that this worthy gentleman should likewise have been nicknamed from what in modern times is considered the most ignoble part of the dress. But, in truth, the small-clothes seems to have been a very dignified garment in the eyes of our venerated ancestors, in all probability from its covering that part of the body which has been pronounced ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... was before them; but he assured them that pirates were so much in the habit of conquering Spaniards that if they would all promise to follow him and do their best, he was certain he could take the town. He assured them that it would be an ignoble thing to give up such a grand enterprise as this simply because they found the enemy strong and so well prepared to meet them, and ended by stating that if he saw a man flinch or hold back for a second, he would pistol him with his own hand. Whereupon the pirates all shook hands and promised ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... of mind, which really is a symptom of glorious health, never merges into the dreamy laziness and ignoble activity exhibited by Brazilians in the east and north ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... freedom from petty cares may serve as a useful foil to set off the vulgarity and hideousness of that type of life which a hard middle-class tends to establish, and to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness in their true colours. From such an ignoble spectacle as that of poor Mrs. Lincoln,—a spectacle to vulgarise a whole nation,—aristocracies undoubtedly preserve us. But the true grace and serenity is that of which Greece and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of perfection,—a ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... the inglorious campaign of the Thierache. Edward returned to Brussels "like a fox to his hole," and each side denounced the other for failing to keep the appointed tryst. The chivalry of the fourteenth century saw something ignoble in the sluggishness of Philip; but no modern soldier would blame him for his inactivity. Without striking a blow, he obtained the object of his campaign, for the enemy abandoned French territory. Had Edward been fully confident of victory, he could easily have forced a battle by advancing ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss; civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors, and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... as I have said, did not dare show its faintest shadow on the lowest horizons of even the most ignoble consciences. Are you quite sure that, in other times which we think better and more virtuous than our own, men would not have seen it, would not have spoken of it? Can you find a nation, even among the greatest, which, after six months of a war compared with which all other wars ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... with the physical desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved and timid experience. It was here, of course, that Walt Whitman's view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about bodily processes. But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters are caused by a timid reticence about the strongest force that animates ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... joy; the world cries for more sunshine; the world begs for a laugh. Mankind gloats over the depiction of deeds both noble and ignoble. The world delights in that which is novel. The Negro is a son of caloric. His presence is sunshine. He tells a story leaving nothing out. He is himself a novelty, and it will not be too far in the twentieth century before he will take pity on the world and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... himself to Igh art. You know the anecdote, Colonel? King Alfred flying from the Danes, took refuge in a neaterd's 'ut. The rustic's wife told him to bake a cake, and the fugitive sovering set down to his ignoble task, and forgetting it in the cares of state, let the cake burn, on which the woman struck him. The moment chose is when she is lifting her 'and to deliver the blow. The king receives it with majesty mingled with meekness. In the background the door of the 'ut is open, letting ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the same expression—an expression which indicated that they knew something exquisite and sacred which other people could never know. Other people, in their presence, were apt to feel mysteriously ignoble and to become secretly uneasy about ancestors, gloves, and pronunciation. The Magsworth Bitts manner was withholding and reserved, though sometimes gracious, granting small smiles as great favours and giving off a chilling kind of preciousness. Naturally, when any citizen ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and having "a stake in the country," but the ambition ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and tramples upon him. The black man, in return, suspects and fears his old oppressor, and sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him. A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their crimson stains on her ignoble annals. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... nothing more ignoble than the ordinary joys of men. They are too often like the iridescent scum on a stagnant pond, fruit and proof of corruption. They are fragile and hollow, for all the play of colour on them, like a soap bubble that breaks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... acts of chivalry on both sides, deeds which are luminous with a spirit transcending the hatreds of the time, and glorify human nature; but it is happily questionable whether it produced an example to equal that expounded in these pages, of ignoble ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... and in an English castle, the King of Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the English kings, both Henrys, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... day, or in ours, of persons who know and can recite variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from recitation but lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay of Johnny Johnston has also been recovered: it is widely diffused. I myself obtained a genuine version of Where Goudie rins, through the kindness of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote procured the low English version of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman, from ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... made a grimace, as though,—as though he were not quite as well as he might be. And such was the case with him. The idea of purity of election at Percy-cross did in truth make him feel very sick. It was an idea which he hated with his whole heart. There was to him something absolutely mean and ignoble in the idea of a man coming forward to represent a borough in Parliament without paying the regular fees. That somebody, somewhere, should make a noise about it,—somebody who was impalpable to ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the circumadjacent beauty, to latrinae in a garden, ignoble shapes that violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved. "In the mind of Hellas, these things," Renan, with his usual unctuousness, declared, "awoke but ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... wit, improves its native force, And gives a pleasant flavour to discourse: By making all our spirits debonair, Throws off the lees, the sediment of care, But as the greatest blessing Heav'n lends, May be debauch'd and serve ignoble ends: So, but too oft, the Grape's refreshing juice Does many mischievous effects produce. My house should no such rude disorders know, As from high drinking consequently flow: Nor would I use what was so kindly giv'n To the dishonour of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... arbitration when only sought at the end of war, and as a means of escaping its consequences, is certainly to stimulate efforts for averting war at the beginning of difficulties by means of arbitration. The refusal prevents such degradation of a noble reform to an ignoble end as would make arbitration the refuge, not of those who wish to avoid war, but only of those who have preferred war and been beaten at it. The American precedent should thus become a powerful influence for promoting the cause of genuine international ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... tender, doubting affection, she had yielded to an ignoble, unworthy coercion; but it had been put on too hard of late, and her natural character asserted itself under the pressure. She was in that mood which makes the martyr and the heroine, sometimes even the criminal, but on which, deaf ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of Cape Cod to land upon, why was I washed ashore just at this particular spot? Answer:—Because at this spot, at this time, Eastboro Twin-Lights needed an assistant keeper. I like the spot. It is beautiful. 'Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.' With your permission, I'll stay here. The leopard may or may not change his spots, but I sha'n't. I like this one and here I stay. Yes, I mean it. I stay—as your assistant. Come, what do you say? ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... two years, campaigning nearly all the time. But it was an ignoble warfare, cruel and ruthless, and had I not given my word to Carmen, to stand by him until the country was pacified, I should have resigned my commission much sooner than I did. Ramon, who acted as one of my orderlies, bore himself bravely ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... Haggart! Haggart and Tamerlane! Both these men were robbers, and of low birth, yet one perished on an ignoble scaffold, and the other died emperor of the world. Is this justice? The ends of the two men were widely dissimilar—yet what is the intrinsic difference between them? Very great indeed; the one acted according to his lights and his country, not so the other. Tamerlane ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... accumulated wrongs with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. It is now sixteen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb a more delightful vision. I saw her glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... 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, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... a dotard, and in the great knowledge thou possessest of other things, hast forgotten the knowledge best worth knowing—-that of the beautiful part of the creation. Think of the impression likely to be made by a gallant neither ignoble in situation, nor unacceptable in presence, upon a lady who must fear the consequences of refusal! Come, Agelastes, let me have no more of thy croaking, auguring bad fortune like the raven from the blasted ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... arrived on foot at his father's house. He had walked all the way, and through the solitudes of the winter night; but he was not sensible of fatigue till the dismal home closed round him, with its air of hopeless ignoble poverty; and then he sunk upon the floor feeling himself a ruin amidst the ruins. He made no disclosure of what had passed to his relations. Miserable man, there was not one to whom he could confide, or from whom he might hear the truths that connect repentance with consolation! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the strict tenets of his sect, "thou-ing" and "thee-ing" all those whom he addressed; but he had assented to an omission in this matter on the part of his daughter, recognizing the fact that there could be no falsehood in using a mode of language common to all the world. "If a plural pronoun of ignoble sound," so he said, "were used commonly for the singular because the singular was too grand and authoritative for ordinary use, it was no doubt a pity that the language should be so injured; but there could be no untruth in such usage; and it was better that at any rate the young should adhere ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... it did not stop slavery. And from the day that this issue was drawn, the result was assured. It was not Christianity that failed, it was slavery. . . . This, too, is a climactic day in history. For so long time the Gospel and war have lived together in ignoble amity! If at last disharmony between the spirit of Jesus and the spirit of war is becoming evident, then a great hope has dawned for the race. . . . The main issue is clear. Christianity will indeed have failed if it does not stop ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... Signorelli's lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's "Liberation of St. Peter" is gradually going to sleep and collapsing in a fashion which is truly ignoble. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... soul, Lady Lucille herself least of all, realized that this perfection was but the hollow husk and shell of beauty without heart or soul; that behind the lovely face, within the graceful form, lurked as selfish and ignoble a nature as that which stirs the blood of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... nothing of the fray, but now she saw Fra Diavolo's Contra Guerrillas skulking away and the sardonic captain himself fuming in ignoble soreness on his back. "Indeed," with fine scorn she demanded of Ney, "and ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... beloved by every body for the glorious action he had done; for those who did not before favor him did join themselves to him now, because of his marriage into the family of Hyrcanus; for as he had formerly married a wife out of his own country of no ignoble blood, who was called Doris, of whom he begat Antipater; so did he now marry Mariamne, the daughter of Alexander, the son of Aristobulus, and the granddaughter of Hyrcanus, and was become thereby a ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... is nothing more ignoble than the ordinary joys of men. They are too often like the iridescent scum on a stagnant pond, fruit and proof of corruption. They are fragile and hollow, for all the play of colour on them, like a soap bubble ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... reflections upon self. Besides, in drawing the picture of my early days, I also record those events which led, by insensible steps, to my after tale of misery, for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... poor filthy Hippolyte—was it possible that each cherished ideals, hidden beneath? Courageous dreams of freedom and patriotism? Yet if so, how could such beliefs fail to influence their daily lives? Could one cherish standards so noble, yet be himself so ignoble, so petty, ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... your fruitless attempts. You have commenced them in a day, when liberty, justice and equality are claimed by almost all, as nature's rights; for behold! a beam of science, lucid as the sun, has divinely fallen upon the lightless intellects of a portion of that ignoble part of your fellow creatures, who have been so long the victims of your fell injustice and inhumanity. Would to God that conscience might subdue your malignant prejudices. Tell us not that our condition can never be bettered ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... was useless to ask George to come aboard the Comfort, and try to tow his craft. That would seem too ignoble, worse than having a farm wagon drag the broken-down bubble wagon ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... least there is reason to believe that he was not actively engaged in the service of the State during those terrible years (524 and 525) in which the failing intellect of Theodoric, goaded almost to madness by Justin's persecution of his Arian co-religionists, condescended to ignoble measures of retaliation, which brought him into collision with Senate and Pope, and in the end tarnished his fame by the judicial murder of Boethius and Symmachus. It was fortunate indeed for Cassiodorus if he was during this time, perhaps because of his unwillingness to help the King to his ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... imagine how greatly we were surprised by the sudden departure of Lord St Clair. "Ignoble Grand-sire!" exclaimed Sophia. "Unworthy Grandfather!" said I, and instantly fainted in each other's arms. How long we remained in this situation I know not; but when we recovered we found ourselves alone, without either Gustavus, Philander, or the Banknotes. As we were deploring ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the top strong beaks and black feathers adhered, much bedraggled and ruffled by weather. These crows had long been dead; the keeper when he shot a crow did not trouble to have it carried home, unless a nail was conspicuously vacant. The ignoble bird was left where ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... putting such classic plants to such ignoble purposes. She has asked me to distribute the prizes, and I thought I should be expected to place green chaplets upon the brows of the victors. It's too bad, when I had composed a speech on purpose. You suggest I should make ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... that time I knew not what else to do, but wait as others did. I said that we looked like vessels which had come so far up the river with the tide; and now that it had turned we were stranded and fast in the mud. Sometimes I changed the figure to one not so ignoble, and likened ourselves to the stately vessels anchored in Falmouth harbour, which were there because the wind was contrary. We were wind-bound too, and dependent on circumstances; but my idea of true religion ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... excesses of self-mortification, painful posturings, and equally painful impostures are by no means slurred over by the writer. And yet the essential origin of these ascetic practices is perceived by Professor Oman to be a pure philosophy and a not ignoble idealism. And if Professor Oman's analysis be true, one understands how it is that, though there have always been Jewish ascetics, at times of considerable numbers and devotion, yet asceticism, as such, has no recognized place in Judaism. Jewish moralists, especially, though not ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... the comical rout of the "noble army," and Polychrome danced with glee. But Ann was furious at this ignoble defeat of her gallant forces by ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... in the story of "Morton's Hope." It is charged with that 'saeva indignatio' which at times verges on misanthropic contempt for its objects, not unnatural to a high-spirited young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... foreseen what would happen, when I heard of Lucilla's visit on my return to the rectory—and he had, no doubt, prepared himself accordingly. I was conscious of a certain nervous trembling (I own) as I followed the servant to the sitting-room. At the moment, however, when he opened the door, this ignoble sensation left me as suddenly as it had come. I felt myself Pratolungo's widow again, when I entered ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... the greater part of mankind; and, as the hours of life glide away very pleasantly when self-love is tickled, it was impossible that he should be without disciples, for he flattered every body. Our monk did not confine his researches to man alone; for he descended to the more ignoble beasts of the earth, allotted to them their qualities by examining their faces and the structure of their bodies, and imagined that he had made a wonderful discovery when he proved—from the mighty claws, the teeth, and the aspect of the lion, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Lancaster, whose doings were ever contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the mis-management of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded an account of the expenditure. "What do these base and ignoble knights attempt?" cried John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be kings or princes of the land?" But the movement was too strong to be stayed. Even the Duke was silenced by the charges brought against the ministers. After a strict enquiry Latimer and Lyons were alike thrown into prison, Alice ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... acts. If the people were to be trampled on, it was a species of consolation that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But that the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand was altogether intolerable. Frenchmen had begun to ask one another, who was this Mazarin who had come to rule over them? He could not—like Richelieu—boast of his high birth, of descent from a long line of noble ancestors—Frenchmen. Poets ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... might, if it had been united with elevated sentiments of virtue and honour, have been pardoned. But of all the forms of pride, even the pride of upstart wealth not excepted, the most offensive is the pride of ancestry when found in company with sordid and ignoble vices, greediness, mendacity, knavery and impudence; and such was the pride of Seymour. Many, even of those who were well pleased to see the ministers galled by his keen and skilful rhetoric, remembered that he had sold himself more than once, and suspected that he was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... towards Dhananjaya. But those, O king, who filled with rage and vindictiveness, proceeded against the son of Pandu in battle, returned not, like rivers never returning from the ocean. Seeing this, many ignoble Kshatriyas incurred sin and hell by flying away from battle, like atheists turning away from the Vedas.[144] Transgressing that throng of cars those two bulls among men, at last, issued out of it, and looked like the sun and the moon freed from the jaws of Rahu. Indeed, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... struggle with Antony—but the work by which his immortality was to be achieved was yet before him. I think that after defending Milo he must have acknowledged to himself that all partisan fighting in Rome was mean, ignoble, and hollow. With the Senate-house and its archives burnt as a funeral pile for Clodius, and the Forum in which he had to plead lined with soldiers who stopped him by their clang of arms instead of protecting him in his speech, it must have ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... life in gloom, seemed to clear away from Esmond during this fortunate voyage and campaign. His energies seemed to awaken and to expand under a cheerful sense of freedom. Was his heart secretly glad to have escaped from that fond but ignoble bondage at home? Was it that the inferiority to which the idea of his base birth had compelled him, vanished with the knowledge of that secret, which though, perforce, kept to himself, was yet enough to cheer and console him? At any rate, young Esmond of the army was ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... that does not do, to be treated with the utmost rigour of military discipline. His daughter Bess is not less a Tudor. The mean, unworthy treatment of the queen of Scots is striking; and you will find Elizabeth's jealousy of her crown and her avarice were at war, and how the more ignoble passion predominated. But the most amusing passage is one in a private letter, as it paints the awe of children for their parents a little differently from modern habitudes. Mr. Talbot, second son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... between the Mount St. Bernard dog and the English mastiff, and as remarkable for his good-nature as for his great strength and courage. Rambling out one day, accompanied by this trusty friend, they came upon a group of rustics engaged in the ignoble diversion of baiting a badger, an animal much in request among English dog-fanciers as a test for the pluck of their terriers. "Drawing a badger" is the proper sporting-phrase,—the animal being chained to a barrel, from the recesses of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the economical fashion adopted by certain theatres—called lyric—of causing the cymbals and the long drum to be played by the same performer. The sound of the cymbals when attached to the drum—as they must be to render this economy feasible—is an ignoble noise, fit only for bands at tea-gardens. This custom, moreover, leads mediocre composers into the habit of never employing one of these instruments without the other, and considering their use as solely confined to forcibly marking the accented parts of the bar. This is an idea ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... marked preeminence. The council board was unevenly composed. Cromwell, who divides with the king the responsibility of these prosecutions, had succeeded, not to the authority only of Wolsey, but to the hatred with which the ignoble plebeian was regarded by the patricians who were compelled to stoop before him. Lord Exeter was already looking with a cold eye on the revolution; and Norfolk and Suffolk, though zealous as the king himself for the independence ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... innumerable subtle touches that the (so-called) greatness of a villain does not very materially differ from any other kind of greatness, which is equally independent of goodness. This continually suggested affinity between the ignoble and the pseudo-noble is the text of the book. Against genuine worth (its author is careful to explain) his satire is in no wise directed. He is far from considering "Newgate as no other than Human Nature with its Mask off;" but he thinks "we may be excused for suspecting, that ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... the general mental climate itself has, outside of the domain of physical science, ceased to be invigorating; that, on the contrary, it fosters the more inglorious predispositions of men, and encourages a native willingness, already so strong, to acquiesce in a lazy accommodation with error, an ignoble economy of truth, and a vicious compromise of the permanent gains of adhering to a sound general principle, for the sake of the temporary gains of departing ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... and ignoble. It was not like anything human. Dr. Tyrell looked at it dispassionately. With a mechanical gesture he took out ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... laying his hand on the young officer's shoulder as he was about leaving the house, said, 'Snelling, you need not go, I will excuse you.' 'By no means,' was the reply, 'I feel more like doing my duty now than ever.' 'Stay, it is a false alarm by my order,' said the General."[150] The ignoble surrender of Detroit by General Hull was deplored by many of the men under him. The story is told that while General Hull's aid was trying to place the white flag in position he called, "Snelling, come and help me fix this flag." Whereupon ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... fascinating only when one were sure of the right side being turned toward himself, sure that it was another man's heart, and not his own that was being played with. He had not come to confessing to himself that in any case it was ignoble. So he waited while the winter wore on, and March found him still betrothed to Katie and still at her feet though in a mood that threatened danger. For after asserting that she needed time to adapt herself to the altered condition ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... movement to throw up the work, and denounce Le Breton's outrage to the subscribers and the world, was controlled. His labour had lost its charm. The monument was disfigured and defaced. He never forgot the horrible chagrin, and he never forgave the ignoble author of it. But the last stone was at length laid. In 1765 the subscribers received the concluding ten volumes of letterpress. The eleven volumes of plates were not completed until 1772. The copies bore Neufchatel on the title-page, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... long services and despising his person, refused to admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly treated him the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the field and all manly exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth, listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... as sad, and as tragic as those depicted by our great dramatist, for the world is ever the same—human nature varies little, be time and fashion what they may; lovers love as truly and passionately as ever did Romeo and Juliet; and selfish ignoble feelings mar the beauty of mankind as of old. Yet, surely the world is improving—the sun of Christianity has long been struggling behind the dark clouds of the past, and we now surely begin to see its glorious silver lining, and ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Constans himself was delayed about ten years longer, and the revenge of his brother's death was reserved for the more ignoble hand of a domestic traitor. The pernicious tendency of the system introduced by Constantine was displayed in the feeble administration of his sons; who, by their vices and weakness, soon lost the esteem and affections of their people. The pride assumed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... learned—and perhaps it was the most important of our lessons—to think little of material boons—vulgar wealth and stolid comfort and ignoble ease; to set our affections on the joys of soul and spirit; and to recognize in the practice of religion the highest development and most satisfying use of the powers ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... to his feet, or into the forefront of battle,—being a simple allusion to the Mackenzie crest, allegorised into an emblem of the stag at bay, or ready in his ire to push at his assailant. The cabar is the horn, or, rather, the "tine of the first-head,"—no ignoble emblem, certainly, of clannish fury and impetuosity. The difficulty of the measure compels us to the use of certain metrical freedoms, and also of some Gaelic words, for which ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... practise the time-honoured habits, and to practise them efficiently, was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadays with women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager's wife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman; she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with a recognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were her possession. The arts of her people—the flower-gardening, the songs and old sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time and Christmas—were hers as much as anybody's; ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... from interest in life itself. We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note that rings false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have been vulgarised by people who have never passed its borders. All sorts of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use, and the very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the place itself ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... storm-blasted trees, and moving near them some little black specks like men and horses. Arriving at the place, I found a strange assembly. The boats, eleven in number, deep-laden with the skins, hugged close to the shore, to escape being borne down by the swift current. The rowers, swarthy ignoble Mexicans, turned their brutish faces upward to look, as I reached the bank. Papin sat in the middle of one of the boats upon the canvas covering that protected the robes. He was a stout, robust ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... because He hung on it. Christ has purified and ennobled the cross. This principle runs through life. It is not the situation which makes the man, but the man who makes the situation. The slave may be a freeman. The monarch may be a slave. Situations are noble or ignoble, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... respect now? They have taken the law into their own hands, and if they cannot enforce it, is it any part of our business to aid them? Certainly and undoubtedly not. It is part of the penalty of treason; part of the price they are paying for their ignoble thrust at the nation's life; and a very light penalty, and cheap price it is, that they lose their right to hold slaves. Such rights as they possessed they held under the Constitution. We have been willing, for the sake of peace (bearing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... police regulations, that no bargain should be valid unless concluded in these barracks. The rent of them immediately mounted to a hundred livres a month for each, and the whole yielded these noble proprietors an ignoble revenue of half a million ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... alone should be directed toward wild life. That sweet day may come, but at least no man can consistently decry hunting who eats meat, wears furs or leather, or uses any vestige of animal tissue; for he is party to the crime of animal murder, and murder more brutal and ignoble ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... because his rival was a gentleman; he would not have hesitated a second about having half-a-dozen bourgeois murdered, if they had been rash or unfortunate enough to interfere with him, the blood of such base, ignoble creature being of no more consequence in his eyes than so much water. Vallombreuse would have liked to despatch his enemy himself in honourable combat, but that was rendered impossible by the baron's superior ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... human life must spring from woman's breast, Your first small words are taught you from her lips, Your first tears quench'd by her, and your last sighs Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing, When men have shrunk from the ignoble care Of watching the last hour of ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... take place. A crude one is that the pair, after much quarreling, decide to separate or become divorced, or on a still cruder, ignoble level, one or the other runs away, deserts the family. A common adjustment, of an anti-social kind, forms the basis of much of modern and ancient literature; the partners seek compensation elsewhere, enter into illicit love affairs and maintain a dual existence which rarely is ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... to the Virgin there may be detected a feeling of painful humiliation, of suffering, of sadness, produced by the recollection of her ignoble and childless marriage. ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... "It seems so ignoble to spend all one's time and energy in making money when there are so many wrongs which need righting, and so many people who need helping," she said, with a note of pathos ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... tea I've had, it wouldn't matter," said Flossie as if resenting an ignoble implication. Rickman laughed a little uncomfortably and blushed. Perhaps she had hardly given him the right to concern himself with these intimate matters. Yet from the very first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself in minute cares for her physical well-being. They ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... harsher and more ignoble punishment awaits the goatherd Melanthius, a cruel mutilation is inflicted upon him, horrible to the last degree, but it grades his punishment according to his offense. A fumigation with sulphur we find here, as old as ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... stands the statue of Henry IV, between the King's garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised—two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions. It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned; they were tied each to the stake. The flames kindled dully and heavily; the wood, hastily piled up, was green or wet; or in cruel mercy the tardiness was designed that the victims might ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... about the room, half ashamed of the ignoble part that he was playing. As soon as he thought that the welcome between the two ladies had been partially got over, and imagined that they were conversing more amicably together, he slipped out of the room, not knowing whether ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... religious standpoint, it may be well now to ask how the Church is to regard the Stage as an educational institution? The Stage cannot be put down. It responds to an instinct which is ineradicable, and which need not be ignoble. The parables of the New Testament are the sublimest recognition of that instinct. The drama is older than the theatre. Much of the greatest preaching has been dramatic, by which I mean that it has touched human life through the medium of ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... never been upstairs in North Farthing House before, but she found Martin's room after only one false entry—which surprised the guilty Raddish sitting at Sir Harry's dressing-table and smarming his hair-cream on her ignoble head. The blinds in Martin's room were down, and he was half-sitting, half-lying in bed, with his head turned away ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... way with many to follow. And therefore do they also who preceded them much rejoice in them, because they rejoice not in them alone. For far be it, that in Thy tabernacle the persons of the rich should be accepted before the poor, or the noble before the ignoble; seeing rather Thou hast chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong; and the base things of this world, and the things despised hast Thou chosen, and those things which are not, that Thou mightest bring to nought things that ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... Apollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst, as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses are resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... expressing, by orchestral effects, the business of the drama, and of forming a chromatic commentary to the emotions of the soul and the motions of the body, has been shamefully neglected on the English stage. Ignorant composers and ignoble fiddlers have attempted to develop the dark mysteries and intricate horrors of the melo-drama; but unable to cope with the grandeur of their subject, they have been betrayed into the grossest absurdities. What, for instance, could be more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness? In these cases the sufferers are too ignoble to be known; and the mass too indiscriminate to be pitied. But should a philosopher feel and reason thus? Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions? The excesses ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... confess, a pretty business, matching your brute strength against that of a fellow man, and as I cast myself upon him and felt his hard-blown breath on my face, I hated myself more than I hated him for engaging in so ignoble a contest. ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... to forget your coercive and threatening proceedings, in order that I might only remember that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it might be possible for me to love you, you became jealous, you, as no man has ever been before, with the base, ignoble jealousy of a spy, which was as degrading for you as it was for me. I had not been married eight months, when you suspected me of every perfidiousness, and you even told me so. What a disgrace! And as you could not prevent me from being beautiful, and from pleasing people, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to the powers that exploit the masses. They have seen in the course of time the tricks of partisan legislators almost invariably win as against the wishes of the masses. They know that in politics there is little study of the public needs, but merely a practice of the ignoble arts of the professional politician. Here, however, the proposed social reorganization depends, not on representatives, but on the citizens themselves; and the means by which the citizens may fully carry out their purposes have been developed. A fact, too, ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... rebelliously disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian, might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to find that they were playing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... an ignoble exactitude. How can a man whose words are unbounded confine himself within the ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... for myself! I am a vulgar soul, and have a low mind—anything you like. But the idea that that woman belongs to another drives me mad. I ought to hate her, but, notwithstanding everything, I cannot live without her. If she will come back to me I will forgive her. It is ignoble! I feel it, but it is too strong for me. I ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... will demand stringent legislation to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This demand will rest in law, in morals and in true statesmanship; no difficulties attending it could be worse than the present ignoble attitude of the Nation toward its own laws and its own ideals—without courage to enforce them, without conscience to change them, the United States presents the spectacle of a Nation drifting aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is concerned, upon the sea of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... than Danton; and all men could see that he had been put to death out of personal spite, and jealousy, and fear. There was no way, thenceforth, for the victor to maintain his power, but the quickening of the guillotine. Reserving compassion for less ignoble culprits, we must acknowledge that the defence of Danton is in the four months of increasing terror that succeeded the 5th of April 1794, when Robespierre took his stand at the corner of the Tuileries to watch the last moments ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... could find peace. He loved to see the volumes rising tier above tier into the misty dome. He loved the chairs that glide so noiselessly, and the radiating desks, and the central area, where the catalogue shelves curve, round the superintendent's throne. There he knew that his life was not ignoble. It was worth while to grow old and dusty seeking for truth though truth is unattainable, restating questions that have been stated at the beginning of the world. Failure would await him, but not disillusionment. It was worth while reading books, and ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... with him. Believe me, Maurice, I speak the truth. My heart bleeds for him. I think I know the thing that drove him here amongst us. It is a great temptation, which pursues him here—even here, where his life is so commendable. I have seen him fighting it. I have seen his torture, the piteous, ignoble yielding, and the struggle, with more than mortal energy, to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that we were pursued: perhaps the unlocking of the door took our foe too much time, perhaps he did not think it worth while to hunt down such ignoble game, or perhaps he considered (but this I much doubt) that the cleverness which a rat had shown in making so extraordinary an escape, entitled him to a little indulgence. But we ran as though a whole pack of hounds were behind us; we never paused to take breath or look behind us, till we had ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... great man than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... childhood,—its follies, its innocent pleasures, its winsome affections,—so later, the temptations that would naturally beset a career so extraordinary fell harmlessly away from him, for a passion for knowledge burned within him, consuming all ignoble motives and keeping this young scholar, in friar's robes, in marvelous singleness of heart, in the midst of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Cromwell's iron government. Once more a wretched formalism—that perpetual danger to the English Church—came to the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... suspects and fears his old oppressor, and sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him. A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their crimson stains on her ignoble annals. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... sun. His laugh, so frank, so guileless at seeing one of his Saint-Cecilias, shed sparkles of youth and gaiety and innocence about him. The treasures he poured from the inner to the outer were like a mantle with which he covered his squalid life. The most supercilious parvenu would have felt it ignoble to care for the frame in which this glorious old apostle of the musical religion lived and moved ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... advantage, who was her heir. Time was when a few guineas would have been more useful to me than hundreds which might come to me when I had no need; but when Madam Esmond and I met, the period of necessity was long passed away; I had no need to scheme ignoble savings, or to grudge the doctor his fee: I had plenty, and she could but bring me more. No doubt she suffered in her own mind to think that my children had been hungry, and she had offered them no food; and that strangers had relieved the necessity ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... immensely important, however, that the cause of the Allies should prevail not for their own sakes alone, but for the sake of the world, that it is difficult to imagine their consenting to an ignoble pacification. The Allies have signed an important document, in order to prove their solidarity, that no one of them will sign peace without the sanction of the other partners. Let us suppose that the rival armies have fought each other to a standstill; let us ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... identigi. Idiocy idioteco. Idiom (a peculiar expression) idiotismo. Idiom (general sense) idiomo. Idiot idiotulo. Idle senokupa. Idleness senokupeco. Idol idolo. Idolatry idolservado. Idolize amegi, adori. If se. Ignis fatuus erarlumo. Ignite ekbruligi. Ignoble malnobla. Ignominy malnobleco. Ignorance nescio. Ignorant of, to be nescii. Ignorant malklera. Ignore neobservi. Ill malbono. Ill malbone. Ill, to be malsani. Ill-bred maledukita. Illegal mallegxa. Illegible nelegebla. Illegitimate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object, for one cannot think of the Lord God as sacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of abasement, like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviously the invention of small and ignoble men. It is the pollution of theology by ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... stood firm, and the gallant Colonel Gardiner put himself at their head. A blow from a scytheblade in the hands of a gigantic Macgregor ended his life, and spared him the shame and sorrow of another defeat. The Park walls at their back prevented the infantry from seeking ignoble security in flight, after the fashion of the dragoons, and they were forced to lay down their weapons and beg for quarter. Some 400 of them fell, struck down by the broadswords and dirks of their enemy, more than 700 were taken prisoners, and only ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... trident stands, And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands; Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides His finny coursers and in triumph rides, The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. As, when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd, Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud; And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly, And all the rustic arms that fury can supply: If then some grave and pious man appear, They hush their noise, and lend a list'ning ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... now, my child, alone in the world, and under the immediate watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary circumstances, to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder, or by particular fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to find favour in the eyes of the President himself. Such a fate for a girl like you were worse than death; better to die as your mother died than to sink daily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sinks; one half of his face is buried in his hand, the other fixed in a stony spasm of despair, foreshadowing perpetuity of hell. Nothing could express with sublimity of a higher order the sense of irremediable loss, eternal pain, a future endless without hope, than the rigid dignity of this not ignoble sinner's dread. Just below is the place to which the doomed are sinking. Michelangelo reverted to Dante for the symbolism chosen to portray hell. Charon, the demon, with eyes of burning coal, compels a crowd of spirits in his ferryboat. They land and are received ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... such as it was, would be all over, and the ladies would be induced to go peacefully to bed again; and Annie would retreat with them to her ignoble cradle, very much disappointed, and looking vainly back at the more martial scene below. The next morning, she would seem to have forgotten all about it, and would spill her bread-and-milk by the fire ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... deficient in the ethereal tenderness which would overcome a true heart, even when blighted in its best affections, it was not to be expected that its imitator should have been visited with deeper glimpses of the divine. The indignant passions of his unrequited lover are, indeed, passions of the most ignoble clay—not one touch of elevated feeling lifts him for a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... There is too much talking among the Mortalities whom one of themselves has called the Windbags. Let not us be like them. I hear among men so much vain speech, so much precious breath and precious time wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble mouthings, that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid on man to weaken and envenom all his under-takings. For over two hundred years I have never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so reticent. I only speak now because one of you said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we all might ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... heaven above,— act in obedience to the law of their limited natures. Still, let us recognize the limitation, and not forget that the pursuit which may be fitting and praiseworthy toil for one class of minds may be ignoble indolence for another. We must remember, on the other hand, that, however humble may be the intellectual position of the man of science or knowledge, in distinction from wisdom, the results of his labors may be of the highest importance. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... lists of gymnastic glory; while flying trowsers, elastic jackets, and feathered buskins, fit for Mercury himself, will contribute at once to the adornment, the swiftness, and the reputation, of our noble and ignoble racers. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... mission; he was old and poor; his condemnation would bring his truths before the world in a more impressive form. He knew the moral greatness of a martyr's death. He reposed in the calm consciousness of having rendered great services, of having made important revelations. He never had an ignoble love of life; death had no terrors to him at any time. So he was perfectly resigned to his fate. Most willingly he accepted the penalty of plain speaking, and presented no serious remonstrances and no indignant denials. Had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... zeal an instinctive hatred of gambling, of bad language, and of tyranny or cruelty in any form. He entertained a love for the horse in the stable without bowing down to worship the stage-coachmen, the jockeys, and other ignoble heroes of "horsey" life. He loved his country and "the quiet, unpretending Church of England." He was ready to exalt the obsolescent fisticuffs and the "strong ale of Old England," but he was not blind either to the drunkenness or to the overbearing ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... unfair of fate to lay their lines so, and it would be doubly ignoble and selfish of her to permit him to make the sacrifice. Dr. Slavens cared enough for her to ask her to marry him, and to expect her to marry him, although she had given him no word to confirm such expectation. He had taken hold ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of a Purgatory, using even the most ignoble weapons and means to defend your belief. Why, instead of wasting your time in affirming the existence of that which you never saw, do you not preach and practice love and charity amongst yourselves? Why not preach words of comfort and hope, to somewhat soothe the miseries of life, instead ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... high rank, during the last age took the lead in this mode of attack on Christianity; and have been followed by a countless throng of noble and ignoble, learned and unlearned, down to this day. Few infidels are so modest as not to affect wit on the subject of religion; few witticisms so contemptible as not to meet the approbation and receive the ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... his magnificent Apology with a style of adamant upon a plate of steel, and left it for the outlaws of Filippo Strozzi's faction to deal with the crisis he had brought about. For some years he dragged out an ignoble life in obscurity, and died at last, as Varchi puts it, more by his own carelessness than by the watchful animosity of others. Over the wild, turbid, clever, incomprehensible, inconstant hero-artist's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... men to submit to such sly and insulting inquisition? Do you deserve the name of men who consent to put up with such ignoble ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... wise man gives the cream of his thought and wisdom to personal influence with men. He thinks the thing best worth while is drawing a man through the inner reach upon his thinking and affections and will away from the impure and ignoble and deceptive up into touch with his ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... birth, but very ignoble in his propensities, called Sgombro, and belonging to the Gritti family, fell deeply in love with him, and Croce, either for fun or from taste, shewed himself very compliant. Unfortunately the reserve commanded by common decency was ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heaven's eternal year is thine. Hear then a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse, In no ignoble verse; But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first fruits of Poesy were given; To make thyself a welcome inmate there: While yet a young probationer, And candidate ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... distinctly. It did not occur to her once that such things could be temptations to the brilliant young leader whom every woman admired and every man flattered, and that only his devoted love for her had kept him out of ignoble adventures since he had grown to be a man. Had she seen that, she would have loved him even better, if it were possible. It was all, as she had said, shameless and abominable. She had thought that she knew much of evil, and she had even told him so that evening, but this was far beyond anything ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... treated in his most glowing, vivid, picturesque, and varied style, is regarded by the majority of us as destitute of interest, as containing neither memorable men nor memorable affairs, and as overspread with an ignoble pall of all that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... made certain purchases in haberdashery. Through it all, he had a most oppressive feeling of self-contempt, which—Piers was but one-and-twenty—he did not try to analyze. Every shop-mirror which reflected him seemed to present a malicious caricature; he hurried away on to the pavement, small, ignoble, silly. His heart did battle, and at moments assailed him in a triumph of heroic desire; but then again came the sinking moments, the sense of a grovelling fellowship with people ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... must not the mother be capable to determine the exact spot at which it lies and to lay her egg on its side or at least close by? For these reasons, I boldly number the Chrysis, the Mutilla and their rivals among the hunters and reserve the ignoble title of parasites for the Tachina, the Melecta, the Crocisa, the Meloe-beetle, in short, for all those who feed on ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Queen and Tristan; but Brangien noting it warned them both and the King watched in vain, so that, soon wearying of an ignoble task, but knowing (alas!) that he could not kill his uneasy thought, he sent ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... express sentiments like these, shew only that they distinguish the slave and the freeman, the noble and the ignoble from each other by their virtues and their [1255b] vices; for they think it reasonable, that as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, so from a good man, a good man should be descended; and this is what nature desires to do, but frequently cannot accomplish it. It is evident then that this ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... washerwoman, a barber's wife, a milkmaid, and the daughter of a land-owner- choosing the darkest time of night and the most secret part of the house, he drank with them, was sprinkled and anointed, and went through many ignoble ceremonies, such as sitting nude upon a dead body. The teacher informed him that he was not to indulge shame, or aversion to anything, nor to prefer one thing to another, nor to regard caste, ceremonial cleanness or uncleanness, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... which is the guide of life (i.-ix.); and there is scepticism (cf. Eccles.) represented by the words of Agur (xxx. 1-4). The book, as a whole, might be described as a guide to the happy life, or, we might almost say, to the successful life—for a certain not ignoble utilitarianism clings to many of its precepts. The world is recognized as a moral and orderly world, and wisdom is profitable unto all things. The wisdom which the wise man manifests in contact with life and its exigencies ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... first ignoble thing I ever knew her to do," said Boyd, slowly. "She has helped me in a hundred ways. Without her assistance, I could never have won through. That cannery site would still be grown up to moss and trees, and I would still be ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... contemporaries. It had become a sort of tradition among the followers of Mr. Chamberlain, and among others who ought to have known better, that Forster was not even a genuine Liberal. He was supposed to be a trimmer and a time-server, and all manner of ignoble jealousies were attributed to him. I know, not only from many repeated conversations with him, but from acts of his which never reached the public, how deep and genuine was his faith in Liberal principles, how exalted and far-extended ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... has torn my heart, so that it can never again be as it was before, and because there is some big, noble thing in you, some little, not ignoble thing is born in me. Ian, you could never know the anguished desire I have to be with you always, but, if I keep sane at all, I will not go—no, I will not go with you, unless the madness carries me away. It would kill you. I know, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Riel. They know he is a liar and a coward. He leads brave men astray and then runs away and leaves them to suffer. This thing he did many years ago." And Cameron proceeded to give a brief sketch of the fantastic and futile rebellion of 1870 and of the ignoble part played by the vain ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... ever, my dear Sir, felt your bosom ready to burst with indignation on reading of those mighty villains who divide kingdom against kingdom, desolate provinces, and lay nations waste, out of the wantonness of ambition, or often from still more ignoble passions? In a mood of this kind to-day I recollected the air of "Logan Water;" and it occurred to me that its querulous melody probably had its origin from the plaintive indignation of some swelling, suffering heart, fired at the tyrannic strides of some public destroyer, and overwhelmed ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... himself with it, and through it with God, of whom—to him at least—it is a symbol. They do, however, take careful count of some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of life, he has raised—with remorse I am sure—the cup of ignoble pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there. How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without—I will not say bearing—but without having even the capacity of appreciating ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... probably the same person as he whose heartless presence in the sick chamber was so hard to bear, should be Ahithophel, whose counsel had been like an oracle from God. Even he, "the man of my friendship, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread"—he, like an ignoble, vicious mule—"has lifted high his heel" ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... confiscated. If he himself were to make his escape to the army, would he ever again behold the face of Ruth Newville, ever again see the love beaming from her eyes, or feel the touch of her hand? How could he go and leave her with such uncertainty before him? And yet, would it not be ignoble to remain? If he could get away, was it not his duty to do so? Was not ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Leavenworth and engaged to drive these freighting teams to Denver. Many of them were sons of rich fathers, well educated, and had never engaged in manual labor, much less in such menial work as this, and when these proud and high-spirited fellows felt what an ignoble life they had been reduced to, the reader may well believe they did not feel good-natured over it. And now, when these young gentlemen came to understand that they were to be associated with a man that was reported to be the representative ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... in noble music which forbids unreality, rebukes frivolity into silence, subdues ignoble passions, soothes the heart's sorrow, and summons to the soul high and holy thoughts. It was difficult to begin the conversation; the trivial themes of the earlier part of the evening seemed foreign to the mood that had fallen upon the company. At length Mr. Sims ventured to ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... doctrine. "Yes," replied Mr. Mill, "if men were swine, and capable only of the pleasures appropriate to that species of animals." Those who could not answer this argument, and at the same time cannot divest themselves of the association of pleasure with the ignoble, took refuge in the charge of inconsistency, and, finding there was not less but more nobility in Mr. Mill's writing than their own theory, accused him of abandoning the tradition of his school. Mahomet would not go to the mountain, and they pleased themselves with the thought that the mountain had ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
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