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More "Rarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so eagerly sought after because they make most suitable and convenient souvenirs. Their own beauty and rarity, apart from all historical associations, are a great attraction. Many of them will form, when cut and polished by the lapidary, pretty tazzas and paper-weights, and even the smallest bits can be put together in a mosaic pattern, so as to make extremely ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... necessarily exaggerated way. It is quite true, and very sad to say, that if any one nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he get it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights; yet I cannot see how the 'British Working Man' is to be made to bear the whole burden ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... peeped into appeared especially tempting. Mrs. Nathan Butters had brought a great loaf of her rich fruit cake, a kind for which she is famous in the village, and Mrs. Sim White had brought two of her whipped-cream pies. Mrs. Ketchum had brought six mince pies, which were a real rarity in June, and Flora Clark had brought a six-quart pail full of those jumbles she makes, so rich that if you drop one it crumbles to pieces. Then there were two great pinky hams and a number of chickens. Louisa and I had brought a chicken; we had one of ours killed, and I ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... confusion of tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties of English speech from Highland Scotch to Cockney; but none of the intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile, heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy circumstances ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... these words. "Oh! sire," said he, "that puts me a little more at my ease. To a question put so frankly, I will reply frankly. To tell the truth is a good thing, as much from the pleasure one feels in relieving one's heart, as on account of the rarity of the fact. I will speak the truth, then, to my king, at the same time imploring him to excuse the ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a pigtail. A Chinaman without a pigtail would be as great a rarity as a Manx cat, or rather, I ought to say, he would be like the tailless fox in the fable; only you would never catch a Chinaman trying to persuade his friends that it was creditable to have no tail! For I must tell you that pigtails are sometimes cut off—as ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... its editor says, "is mainly confined to the natural expressions of a mind rejoicing in the beauties of nature, and throwing itself, with a delight rendered keener by the rarity of its opportunities, into the enjoyment of a life removed, for the moment, from the pressure ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... on the intellectual tendencies of capital I speak generally. Not only individual capitalists, but great corporations, exist, who are noble examples of law-abiding and intelligent citizenship. Their rarity, however, and their conspicuousness, seem to prove the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... than he had believed it in him to make. The desire to have something or other to show for his "parts"—to show somehow or other—had been the dream of his youth; but as the years went on the conditions attached to any marked proof of rarity had affected him more and more as gross and detestable; like the swallowing of mugs of beer to advertise what one could "stand." If an anonymous drawing on a museum wall had been conscious and watchful ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... happy. Courteous, grave far beyond his years, silent and thoughtful, he impressed them all as a man who had suffered too much ever again to be light-hearted. Then it was more than believed he had fallen deeply in love with Nellie Travers; and that explained the rarity and sadness of his smile. To the women he was a centre of intense and romantic interest. Mrs. Waldron was an object of jealousy because of the priority of her claims to his regard. Mrs. Hurley—the sweet sister who ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... the second part, and in them Tsze-sze quotes the words of Confucius, 'for the purpose,' according to Chu Hsi, 'of illustrating the meaning of the first chapter.' Yet, as I have just intimated, they do not to my mind do this. Confucius bewails the rarity of the practice of the Mean, and graphically sets forth the difficulty of it. 'The empire, with its component States and families, may be ruled; dignities and emoluments may be declined; naked weapons may be trampled under ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... Cooking Vegetables.—It is not intended to go into the general cooking of vegetables, although it may be said that even the choicest cooking can offer no greater luxury, or, alas! a greater rarity, than a dish of early peas or asparagus perfectly cooked. But this is not the place to remedy the wholesale spoiling of summer vegetables that goes on in almost every kitchen. I will only give what may be a few new ways of preparing ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... rarity Of Christian charity Under the sun! Oh! it was pitiful! Near a whole city full ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... you imagine you would have as fine clothes, if your mothers had to spin all the cloth? She knit, too, O, so fast! as well in the dark as the light. I have known her to knit a coarse stocking easily of an evening—her fingers flew along the needles! Cotton cloth was a great rarity among us. I remember once my mother had a cotton gown, and it was esteemed ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... oratorical tone, will help Borrow to genial, substantial effects such as the dinner with the landlord and the commercial traveller: "The dinner was good, though plain, consisting of boiled mackerel—rather a rarity in those parts at that time—with fennel sauce, a prime baron of roast beef after the mackerel, then a tart and noble Cheshire cheese; we had prime sherry at dinner, and whilst eating the cheese prime porter, that of Barclay, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... tender and manly than was this boy of 12. Their lunch was simple and scanty; but it had the grace of a royal banquet. At the last, the mother produced with much glee three apples and an orange, of which the children had not known. All eyes fastened on the orange. It was evidently a great rarity. I watched to see if this test would bring out selfishness. There was a little silence; just the shade of a cloud. The mother said: "How shall I divide this? There is one for each of you; and I shall be best off of all, for I expect big ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... and all the way distinguished herself by readiness to make room. Can it be that the rarity of this virtue in England has to do with our living in a straitened island? It ought to work in the contrary direction! The British lady, the British gentleman too, seems to cultivate a natural repellence. Amy's hospitable nature welcomed a fellow-creature ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... reached the richly furnished conservatory in which a splendid snow-white dahlia with a scarce perceptible rosy tinge in its innermost petals was just then beginning to bloom. It was a great rarity in Europe at that time. Rudolf thought this specimen very beautiful, and maintained that only at Schoenbrunn was a more ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... it is, that I had not been three weeks back in Amsterdam before the House of Vandepeereboom and Dangerous went Bankrupt. Now 'tis an ugly thing to be Bankrupt in Holland. The people are so thrifty and persevering, and so jealous of keeping their Engagements, that the very rarity of Insolvency makes it Scandalous. A Trading Debtor being a character very seldom to be met with, he is held in more Odium in Holland than in any other part of Europe. Yet are their Laws of Arrest milder than with us in England, where for a matter ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... over again, when her imagination was at a loss for a new one. Windmills, I suppose from their picturesqueness, had a very strong attraction for her. There were none near our Yorkshire home, so, perhaps, their rarity added to their value in her eyes; certain it is that she was never tired of sketching them, and one of her latest note-books is full of the old mill at Frimley, Hants, taken under various aspects of sunset and storm. Then Holland, with its low horizons ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... to profit by these terrible diamonds, in her way. He pointed out to her that her farm lay right in the road to the diamonds, yet the traffic all shunned her, passing twenty miles to the westward. Said he, "You should profit by all your resources. You have wood, a great rarity in Africa; order a portable forge; run up a building where miners can sleep, another where they can feed; the grain you have so wisely refused to ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... pinnacles and snow-covered heights. The sky above us was of a clear, bright blue; in some places beautifully streaked, and varied with a silvery hue or pale straw colour, but not a cloud dimming its lustre. Severe as was the cold, as we were in constant exercise we scarcely felt it; while the rarity of the air imparted wonderful lightness and elasticity to our frames, so that sometimes I could scarcely help leaping and bounding forward. At night we generally found shelter in a cave or under an overhanging rock—always keeping ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... has the thirty-seven of the gens Cassia, one hundred and eighteen to one hundred and twenty-one of the gens Cornelia, the eleven Farsuleia, and dozens of Numitoria, Pompeia, and Scribonia, all in perfect condition, as if fresh from the die. Besides these, he has some large medals of the greatest rarity; the Marcus Aurelius with his son on the reverse side, Theodora bearing the globe, and above all the Annia Faustina with Heliogabalus on the reverse side, an incomparable treasure, of which there is only one other ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... on her side, had plenty to say to her sister about the rarity of Mr. Beaumont's visits and the nonappearance of the Duchess of Bayswater. She professed, however, to derive more satisfaction from this latter circumstance than she could have done from the most lavish ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... expounds Boggs, once when he ondertakes to explain the public attitoode towards water to some inquirin' tenderfoot—'an' for this partic'lar reason: Arizona is a dry an' arid clime; an' water drinkers bein' a cur'ous rarity, we admires to keep a spec'men or two buck-jumpin' about, so's to ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... I am alone in my room, and journalizing, it behooves me to gather up and record some of those words, precious from their rarity. Flora and I, in our merry nonsense, had a mock dispute, and referred the matter to Miss ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... taken advantage of it; but Duchambon and some of his officers, remembering the mutiny of the past winter, feared to make sorties, lest the soldiers might desert or take part with the enemy. The danger of this appears to have been small. Warren speaks with wonder in his letters of the rarity of desertions, of which there appear to have been but three during the siege,—one being that of a half-idiot, from whom no information could be got. A bolder commander would not have stood idle while his own cannon were planted by the enemy to batter down his walls; and whatever the risks of ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... derisively pretends to stand in awe. In one instance he defeated his own purpose; for the so-called "Cook's Tale of Gamelyn" was substituted by some earlier editor for the original "Cook's Tale," which has thus in its completed form become a rarity removed beyond the reach of even the most ardent of curiosity hunters. Fortunately, however, Chaucer spoke the truth when he said that from this point of view he had written very differently at different times; no whiter pages remain than many ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... that God and nature have bestowed on you, and do not fear in any crisis of suffering, under any pressure of injustice, to derive free and full consolation from the consciousness of their strength and rarity." ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... Another rarity of insect life at Pyrford was a spider whose appearances have been oftenest noted at Hampton Court. These creatures, large, black, and horrific, were accordingly known as 'Hampton Courters,' but received no welcome, being slain on sight, their slayer quoting a characteristic saying ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... perhaps, complain as much of the frequency of my letters now, as you were wont to do of their rarity. I think this is the fourth within as many moons. I feel anxious to hear from you, even more than usual, because your last indicated that you were unwell. At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival—that is, the latter part ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and the Sheriffs where there is free and generous entertainment for all men of fashion and quality, the like both for plenty of dishes and order of service is not elsewhere to be or found through Europe. If then their daily provision be so curious and costly, what may we think their variety and rarity was at the invitation and entertainment of two such great majesties? I must therefore leave it to the Readers imagination being so far transcending my expression. Let it therefore give satisfaction to any one that shall doubt thereof, that it was ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... are only where the penalty had already been commuted from death or punishment to payment or restitution. They are better taken as examples of civil law. But this distinction is not the cause of their rarity or absence. When a man had to be put to death, scourged, or exiled, there was no need for a written bond. Hence the only references which we have outside the Code and the phrase-books, are the penalties set down in marriage-contracts for conjugal infidelity, or for breach of contract voluntarily ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... think that the mistletoe never was abundant on the oak; so that it may be that additional sanctity was conferred on the Viscum guerneum on account of its great rarity. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... been "done within." Perhaps this latter custom gave rise to the term "chaffing." Thirty years ago both these customs were very common in this locality; but, either from an improved tone of morality, or from the comparative rarity of the offence that led to them, both ridings and chaffings are now of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... are more clever people than good people; character,—high, spotless, saintly character,—is a far rarer thing in this world than talent or even genius. Character is an infinitely better thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity. And yet so true is it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent, and even bodily strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one there either understands or values or pursues moral character, though it is ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... discussed in the Origin, Ed. i. p. 171, vi. p. 207, are the rarity of transitional varieties, the origin of the tail of the giraffe; the otter-like polecat (Mustela vison); the flying habit of the bat; the penguin and the logger-headed duck; flying fish; the whale-like habit of the bear; the woodpecker; ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... which there is a specific, as compared with tuberculosis, for which there is no specific, is incomparably in favor of the former. If we had as powerful weapons against tuberculosis as we have against syphilis, the disease would now be a rarity instead of the disastrous plague it is. Comparing the situation in two diseases for which we have specifics, such as syphilis and malaria, malaria has lost most of its seriousness as a problem in any part of the world, while syphilis is rampant everywhere. Malaria has, of course, been ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... in the first half-century of its Occidental use to have been frequently seen in New England. Judge Sewall mentioned it but once in his diary. He drank it at Madam Winthrop's house in 1709 at a Thursday lecture, but he does not note it as a rarity. In 1690, however, when not over-plentiful in old England, Benjamin Harris and Daniel Vernon were licensed to sell it "in publique" in Boston. In 1712 "green and ordinary teas" were advertised in the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... is wretched enough to set foot on English ground! I find the last that was seen was shot at Margate so long ago as 1842,—and there seems to be no official record of any visit before that, since Mr. Thomas Embledon shot one on Newcastle town moor in 1816. But this rarity of visit to us is strange; other birds have no such clear objection to being shot, and really seem to come to England expressly for the purpose. And yet this blue-bird—(one can't say "blue robin"—I think we shall have to call him "bluet," like the cornflower)—stays in Sweden, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... came with Madam Wetherill in the lumbering chaise, which was a great rarity at that period. Primrose was dressed in a white homespun linen frock. At this early stage of the country's industries they were doing a good deal of weaving at Germantown, though many people had small looms ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... purchased, just as the succulent little roast pigs in The New Paul and Virginia run about with knives and forks in their sides pleading to be eaten. The Bibliotaph said he did not despair of buying Poe's Tamerlane for twenty-five cents one of these days; and that a rarity he was sure to get sooner or later was a copy of that English newspaper which announced Shelley's death under the caption Now he Knows whether there is ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... in Cooper I like, too, and that is That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis, Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity. Now he may overcharge his American pictures, But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his strictures; And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... tries to comply with your request, you will probably be surprised both by the difficulty he has in his attempt, and the little that he really can say upon these familiar subjects. The interesting story teller is a rarity, which is only another way of saying that the ability to narrate and describe needs cultivation. There is no better opportunity possible than that of ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... The rarity of the original edition of Satchells is such, that the copy now at Abbotsford was the only one Mr. Constable had ever seen—and no wonder, for the author's envoy ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... a mere trick to gain time. She is waiting for her chance; she wishes to launch herself, and to do it well. She knows her Paris. She is one of fifty thousand, so far as the mere ambition goes; but I am very sure that in the way of resolution and capacity she is a rarity. And in one gift—perfect heartlessness—I will warrant she is unsurpassed. She has not as much heart as will go on the point of a needle. That is an immense virtue. Yes, she is one of the celebrities of ...
— The American • Henry James
... the book called, 'Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar school, chap. 8.'" Notwithstanding a title so pretentious, it contains a translation of no more than the first 567 lines of the first Book, executed in a fanciful and pedantic manner; and its rarity is now the only merit of the volume. A literal interlinear translation of the first Book "on the plan recommended by Mr. Locke," was published in 1839, which had been already preceded by "a selection from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, adapted to the Hamiltonian system, by a literal and interlineal ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... pseudonym Philaretus. The Physics, 1688, the Metaphysics, 1691, and the Annotata Majora in Cartesii Principia Philosophiae, 1691, were also posthumous publications, from the notes of his pupils. In view of the rarity of these volumes, and the importance of the philosopher, it is welcome news that J.P.N. Land has undertaken an edition of the collected works, in three volumes, of which the first two have already appeared.[1] The ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... ships in a calm. You wrong the King: he meant what he said to-day. Who shall vouch for his to-morrows? One word further. Doth not the fewness of anything make the fulness of it in estimation? Is not virtue prized mainly for its rarity and great baseness loathed as an exception: for were all, my lord, as noble as yourself, who would look up to you? and were all as base as—who shall I say—Fitzurse and his following—who would look down upon them? My lord, you have put so many of the King's household out of ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Sell by Auction at their Great Room, 191. Piccadilly, on Thursday, Dec. 19, and two following days, the very choice Collection of Autograph Letters of the late S. George Christison, Esq., including specimens of great rarity and curiosity, and of high literary and historical interest, in fine condition, mostly selected from the collection of the late William Upcott, Esq., and the various celebrated collections dispersed by us. Catalogues will be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... as the whim and inspiration of the editor dictated. The establishment of the paper was undoubtedly a bold attempt at a time when the province was but sparsely settled, and the circulation necessarily limited by the rarity of post-offices even in the more thickly-populated districts, and by the exorbitant rates of postage which amounted to eight hundred dollars a-year on a thousand copies. More than that, any independent ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... earth, made no impression upon me. My father joined in opinion with those of his brothers who had spoken in favour of Egypt; which filled me with joy. "Say what you will," said he, "the man that has not seen Egypt has not seen the greatest rarity in the world. All the land there is golden; I mean, it is so fertile, that it enriches its inhabitants. All the women of that country charm you by their beauty and their agreeable carriage. If you speak of the Nile, where is there a more wonderful river? What water was ever lighter ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the seventeenth century the potato was quite a rarity in this country, and up to 1684 was cultivated only in the gardens of the gentry. In Scotland it does not seem to have been grown at all, even in gardens, before 1728. Phillips, in the History of Cultivated Vegetables, says that in 1619 the price in England was one shilling a ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... one that gave most satisfaction to the Venetian's love of his State, and to his love of splendour, beauty, and gaiety. He would have had them every day if it were possible, and, to make up for their rarity, he loved to have representations of them. So most Venetian pictures of the beginning of the sixteenth century tended to take the form of magnificent processions, if they did not actually represent them. They are processions ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... Marmaduke, with a smile of compassion, "the poor man must be somewhat demented; for I opine that the value of such curiosities must be in their rarity; and who would care for a book, if five hundred others had precisely the same?—allowing always, good Nicholas, for thy friend's vaunting and over-crowing. Five hundred! By'r Lady, there would ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "The wonderful rarity of our atmosphere in these altitudes is something that has to be experienced in order to be thoroughly understood and appreciated, or even believed. You tell an eastern man of the great distances here at which you can see and hear, clearly and readily; he will immediately doubt your ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... bring you a bridegroom! Prepare a nice hearty little lunch for us. Put out on the table as much of our old silverware as possible, also bring out the fruit-vases, so that he is impressed by our table! Let him see that each and everything we have is a rarity!" ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... that a free man of free spirit should as far as possible wear his thoughts upon his face. Indeed I actually showed this small fish, which you call a sea-hare, to many who stood by. I do not yet know what name to call it[14] without closer research, since in spite of its rarity and most remarkable characteristics I do not find it described by any of the ancient philosophers. This fish is, as far as my knowledge extends, unique in one respect, for it contains twelve bones resembling the knuckle-bones of a sucking-pig, linked together like a chain in its belly. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... be, the national dish of the French Canadians. Beans, cucumbers, melons, and a dozen other products were also grown in the family gardens. There were potatoes, which the habitant called palates and not pommes de terre, but they were almost a rarity until the closing days of the Old Regime. Wild fruits, chiefly raspberries, blueberries, and wild grapes, grew in abundance among the foothills and were gathered in great quantities every summer. There was not much orchard fruit, although some seedling trees ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... verdict was too great for any jury t' risk their lives by comin' to an agreement. There was no justice; so there was nothin' left but to fight it out, the same as when nations go to war. An' what were they goin' to fight about? A metal which was only val'able because o' its rarity—which had no value in itself, an' couldn't help men t' godliness; one which you couldn't make an engine out o', nor a plough, nor even a sword, because it was too soft. But in order to possess it, they was goin' to take each other's ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... to make this concession, she told me, on account of its very rarity, so that the princes would now know that they had to deal with a very able princess, and that they should not apply to her such mockery as to make her revoke a truce by the very heralds who had proclaimed it. For while they were planning to give her this insult, ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... earth-makers—that is to say, people, that temper the earth for the China ware. As I was coming along, our Portuguese pilot, who had always something or other to say to make us merry, told me he would show me the greatest rarity in all the country, and that I should have this to say of China, after all the ill-humoured things that I had said of it, that I had seen one thing which was not to be seen in all the world beside. I was very ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... of its rarity, was given him by a peasant. He tamed her, and she became his constant companion, unaffrighted even in the tumult of battle. He saw that the people began to invest the little animal with supernatural qualities; so, finally, he confided to them that she was sent to him by ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... as much in love as the feebler passions of the age permitted (for though Miss Chancellor believed in the amelioration of humanity, she thought there was too much water in the blood of all of us), that he prized Verena for her rarity, which was her genius, her gift, and would therefore have an interest in promoting it, and that he was of so soft and fine a paste that his wife might do what she liked with him. Of course there would be the mother-in-law to count with; but unless she was perjuring ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... great diligence, the Italian and Spanish poets. But literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank. The publick was gross and dark; and to be able to read and write, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of very few which are not preserved in the British Museum—and a greater tribute to its rarity could not be devised—was called, "A Good Suggestion as to ye Proper Use of ye Chinne Whisker," and consisted of a few lines of doggerel printed beneath a caricature of the king, with the crown hanging from ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... viper; but, of course, on examining it I soon saw what it really was. It has no fangs, and it is, as I said, quite harmless. At its full size it may measure from fourteen to sixteen inches. As for its rarity, here is a fairly long list of the specimens we have had, and we have several at present. But come along to the reptile house and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... devourers, and are said soon to exhaust all ye fish in a pond. Here was a curious sort of poultry not much exceeding the size of a tame pidgeon, with legs so short as their crops seemed to touch ye earth; a milk-white raven; a stork which was a rarity at this season, seeing he was loose and could fly loftily; two Balearian cranes, one of which having had one of his leggs broken, and cut off above the knee, had a wooden or boxen leg and thigh, with a joint so accurately made that ye creature could walke and use it as well as ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... branch. This may be due to the position of the flowers on a portion of the stem of the plant especially devoted to the formation of flower-buds, to the more or less complete exclusion of leaf-buds, i.e. on the inflorescence. This conjecture is borne out by the comparative rarity with which prolification has been observed in flowers that are solitary in the axils of the ordinary leaves of the plant. If the lists of genera appended hereto be perused, it will be seen that nearly all the cases occur in genera where the inflorescence is distinctly separated from ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... had in those centuries, and dare to maintain that the 'springs of life' have not been polluted and weakened beneath this 'star,' beneath this network in which men are entangled! Don't talk to me about your prosperity, your riches, the rarity of famine, the rapidity of the means of transport! There is more of riches, but less of force. The idea uniting heart and soul to heart and soul exists no more. All is loose, soft, limp—we are all of us limp.... Enough, gentlemen! I have done. That is not the question. No, the question ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... my shelves. She had sold out all the books that had been provided, and in a mad moment of enthusiasm for the cause parted with a volume I had secured after much difficulty in London to complete a set of some rarity for about seven dollars less than the book ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... seem to be so much in your news," said Betty, in a disappointed tone. "To be sure, strangers are a rarity in our little village, but, judging from the strangers who have visited us in the past, I imagine this one cannot be ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... were maintained. When there were wolves in the mosses and caverns of Ireland, for example, there were wolf-dogs to hunt them. The last wolf of that country—and he was a wonder, from the then rarity of the animal—was killed about one hundred and fifty years ago; and although the breed of hound then known as the Irish wolf-dog—one of the largest, noblest, and most courageous of the canine race—was kept up to some extent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Samuel Green, of Cambridge, and he brought forward facts and comparisons which seemed conclusive and for which he deserves much credit. It was a clever bit of bibliographical work. With such an endorsement as to rarity and quality the pamphlet was again put to the test of the auction room. The cataloguer stated his case in sufficient fulness of detail and the first page of the text was reproduced.{2} Naturally the discovery sent a little thrill through the mad-house of bibliography. ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... are so good as to think of me," answered Beauty, "be so kind as to bring me a rose; for as none grow hereabouts, they are a kind of rarity." ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... and M. de Martius have done me honor in placing my name at the head of a work so admirable as the one you have just published. The importance and the rarity of the species therein described, as well as the beauty of the figures, will make the work an important one in ichthyology, and nothing could heighten its value more than the accuracy of your descriptions. It will be of the greatest use to me in my History of ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... carry presents to his brother. The presents were made up of cattle, and a great number of four-footed beasts, of many kinds, such as would be very acceptable to those that received them, on account of their rarity. Those who were sent went at certain intervals of space asunder, that, by following thick, one after another, they might appear to be more numerous, that Esau might remit of his anger on account of these presents, if he were still in a passion. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... is another beech and a hemlock, as loving as two brothers, or, for that matter, more loving than some brothers; and yonder are others, for neither tree is a rarity in these woods. I fear me, Hurry, you are better at trapping beaver and shooting bears, than at leading on a blindish sort of a trail. Ha! there's what you wish to find, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... hair, probably from its rarity in southern climates, seems to have been at all times much prized by the ancients; witness the [Greek: Xanthos Menelaos] of Homer, and the "Cui flavam religas comam?" of Horace. The style of Leucippe's beauty seems to have resembled that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... reproduced in the present volume. His pencil drawings represent, perhaps, his more familiar style, one reason of the association of his name with this medium in the public mind being the comparative rarity of its use for the purposes of reproduction. Certainly it will be conceded that pencil, soft and amenable, with its opportunities for delicate manipulation, is admirably adapted to the interpretation of those refined shades of meaning and expression which constitute the characteristic charm of ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... rather prided myself on the rarity of my name. I don't go so far as to claim that it came over with the Conqueror, but it is an old name and an uncommon one, and hitherto I had been the only owner of it in the district. To have it duplicated ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... summoned by Bentley as before a judgment seat, the authority of which he would have been the first to repudiate. The admiration which a discriminating man acquires as a philologist is in proportion to the rarity of the discrimination to be found in philologists. Bentley's treatment of Horace has something of the schoolmaster about it It would appear at first sight as if Horace himself were not the object of discussion, but rather the various scribes and commentators who have handed ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... suffrage. I suppose that you will agree with me that geniuses are a rarity. Let us be liberal and say that there are at present five in France. Now, let us add, perhaps, two hundred men with a decided talent, one thousand others possessing various talents, and ten thousand superior intellects. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... gorgeous colouring, which does not find itself ill-matched with accurate drawing of nature. He is above the average Elizabethan, and his very bad taste in The Affectionate Shepherd (a following of Virgil's Second Eclogue) may be excused as a humanist crotchet of the time. His rarity, his eccentricity, and the curious mixing up of his work with Shakespere's have done him something more than yeoman's service with recent critics. But ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Laplace's theory scarcely needs stating. Books of popular astronomy have familiarized most readers with his conceptions;—namely, that the matter now condensed into the Solar System, once formed a vast rotating spheroid of extreme rarity extending beyond the orbit of the outermost planet; that as this spheroid contracted, its rate of rotation necessarily increased; that by augmenting centrifugal force its equatorial zone was from time to time prevented ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... more honourable for me as well. In such case, she said, love alone would hold me to her, and the strength of the marriage chain would not constrain us. Even if we should by chance be parted from time to time, the joy of our meetings would be all the sweeter by reason of its rarity. But when she found that she could not convince me or dissuade me from my folly by these and like arguments, and because she could not bear to offend me, with grievous sighs and tears she made an end of her resistance, ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... is a rarity, owing to an unfortunate accident, some of your readers may like to see a brief notice of it. Watts (as quoted by "G." for I have not his portly volumes at hand,) states that the "whole impression" was "consumed in the fire which took place in Mr. Nicholls's premises in 1808." This was ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... good. About sunset, Whirlwind had the good fortune to kill one, and they deemed it prudent to encamp, as it would be impossible for them to reach the boundary of the prairie that night. Steaks constituted the chief feature of their supper, and a rarity they were, having so long been deprived of them, and which, with the addition of the Indian bread-root, made ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... society)—love, but especially unfortunate love, is regarded with a sanctity of interest and pity such as they give to religion or to the memory of the dead. In this point women of the lowest rank (as a body) are much more worthy of respect and admiration than those above them, in proportion to the rarity of the temptations which beset them for diverting the natural course of their own affections—and to the less worldly tone of the society[1] in which they move. Women however of all classes manifest a purity and elevation of sentiment ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... the sees of St. Asaph and of Rochester.[3] At this time the friars of London were specially fortunate. The White Friars enjoyed a good library, to which Thomas Walden, a learned brother of the order, presented many foreign manuscripts of some age and rarity.[4] The Grey Friars' library was founded or refounded by Dick Whittington (1421).[5] The room "was in length one hundred twentie nine foote, and in breadth thirtie one: all seeled with Wainscot, having twentie ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... from judicial bribery has been gradual in most of the European countries. In France it received an impulse in the 16th century from the high-minded chancellor, Michel de L'Hopital. In England judicial corruption has been a crime of remarkable rarity. Indeed, with the exception of a statute of 1384 (repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1881) there has been no legislation relating to judicial bribery. The earliest recorded case was that of Sir William Thorpe, who in 1351 was fined and removed from office for accepting bribes. Other ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... definition that 'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all men seek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind and nature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and value of friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly the better for knowing some friendly companion. But these afternoon teas are inimical to friendship; and the first duty of a hostess is to separate, expeditiously and without ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and direct. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... obtain depth and richness through a judicious distribution of values. If we were to disturb the distribution of values in the pictures of Titian, Rubens, Veronese, their colour would at once seem crude, superficial, without cohesion or rarity. But some will aver that if the colour is right the values must be right too. However plausible this theory may seem, the practice of those who hold it amply demonstrates its untruth. It is interesting and instructive to notice how those who seek the colour without regard for the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... dated March 1, 1828, we noticed "Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, is one of the most delightful household books in our language, and we are surprised at the rarity of such works." The publication of the Journal of a Naturalist, early in March, 1829, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... a sigh. Presently they came to the long glittering range of greenhouses and hothouses, and an attendant gardener was there to admit the party. Molly did not care for this half so much as for the flowers in the open air; but Lady Agnes had a more scientific taste, she expatiated on the rarity of this, and the mode of cultivation required by that plant, till Molly began to feel very tired, and then very faint. She was too shy to speak for some time; but at length, afraid of making a greater sensation if she began to cry, or if she fell against the stands of precious flowers, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... summit of the Peak, we beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41 degrees of the cyanometer. We know, by Saussure's experiment, that this intensity increases with the rarity of the air, and that the same instrument marked at the same period 39 degrees at the priory of Chamouni, and 40 degrees at the top of Mont Blanc. This last mountain is 540 toises higher than the volcano of Teneriffe; and if, notwithstanding ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Albert Fink on a very extensive scale lasted for many years and was thought to have had a vital influence in eliminating rate-wars. Their efficacy depended mainly on good faith, and good faith was a rarity among railroad officials in the seventies and eighties. In the eyes of the public, rate agreements and pools were vicious conspiracies which left the rights and well-being of the private shipper completely ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... of thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Albert the Great Vincent of Beauvais Thomas Aquinas Roger Bacon's beginning of the experimental method brought to nought The belief that science is futile gives place to the belief that it is dangerous The two kinds of magic Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era The Christian theory of devils Constantine's laws against magic Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft Papal enactments against them Persistence ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... surprised when you ask the price of the volume you may happen to fancy. You are not dealing with a bouquiniste of the Quais, in Paris. You are not foraging in an old book-shop of New York or Boston. Do not suppose that I undervalue these dealers in old and rare volumes. Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets of the quays. But there ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... me very often with parsimony of writing: but you may discover by the extent of my paper, that I design to recompence rarity by length. A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;—a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something. Yet it must be remembered, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... threw over it a tender light, like a mother's dream of her child. The people, I have said, are not so lost in self-contempt as to undervalue their best men, but it must be admitted that they rarely produce young fellows wearing the undeniable chieftain's stamp, and the rarity of one like Robert lent a hue of sadness to him in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any objection to his majesty's attendance at the civic festival, it was not an objection to which the course of events had suddenly given birth within the last two or three days. Every one must have known that such an event as the visit of his majesty to the city of London must, from its rarity, collect thousands, if not myriads, to witness it; so that any accident to which the metropolis was exposed at present, from the collection of a large mass of people together, must have been as palpable a month ago as at the present moment. In the course of his speech ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and recurrences, had no great destiny. She packed it up and took it away with her quite as if she had been a woman who had come to sell a set of laces. The laces were as wonderful as ever when taken out of the box, but to admire again their rarity you had to send for the woman. What was above all remarkable for our young man was that Miriam Rooth fetched a fellow, vulgarly speaking, very much less than Julia at the times when, being on the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... cinnamon, inclosed in gold filagree, in the Capitol and the Temple of Peace; and Livia dedicated the root in the Palatine Temple of Augustus. The plant itself was brought to the emperor Marcus Aurelius in a case seven feet long, and was exhibited at Rome, as a very great rarity. This, however, we are expressly informed came from Barbarike in India. It seems to have been highly valued by other nations as well as by the Romans: Antiochus Epiphanes carried a few boxes of it in a triumphal procession: and ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... Pleasures, apart from its intrinsic interest, is exceptionally important from a book-collector's point of view. It is of the utmost rarity. There is no copy in the British Museum and none in the Cambridge University Library. In fact, there are only two copies known of the whole work—one in the Bodleian (wanting one plate), and that from which the present text is taken. The Huth Collection had a copy of ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... has not bestowed on their fellows, they are not said to surpass the bounds of human nature, unless their special qualities are such as cannot be said to be deducible from the definition of human nature. (3) For instance, a giant is a rarity, but still human. (4) The gift of composing poetry extempore is given to very few, yet it is human. (5) The same may, therefore, be said of the faculty possessed by some of imagining things as vividly as though ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... because of the rarity of your dealings in cash?-It is not exactly that; I should think that there ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... phraseology as more euphonious and at the same time more poetic. With all due gentleness I uprooted Viola cucullata from its place in the boscage and, after it has been suitably pressed, I mean to add it to my collection of the fauna indigenous to the soil of Western New Jersey, not because of its rarity, for it is, poor thing, but a common enough growth, but because of its having been the first tender harbinger of the budding year which has come directly to my attention. I shall botanize extensively this year. For with me to botanize is one of the dearest of pursuits, amounting ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... appeared in our seventh number, gave us both a lift and a shove. Nothing else was talked of for a long while; and after 10,000 copies had been sold, it became a very great rarity, quite a desideratum.... The sale of the Quarterly is about 14,000, of the Edinburgh upwards of 7,000.... It is not our intention, at present, to suffer our sale to go beyond 17,000.... Mr. Murray, under whose auspices our ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... like gnats flying in the air; in liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about. The congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the congregation. So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids and gases, or vice versa. The behavior of atoms in ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... refine a speck of matter, a tiny atom—extract of light—something more vivid and lively than fire; for since wood can turn to flame, cannot flame, being further purified, teach us something of the rarity of the soul? And is not gold extracted from lead? My creatures should be capable of feeling and judgment; but nothing more. There should be no ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... "Moving pictures ain't any rarity to me," said Rosetta Muriel, trying to appear sophisticated. "I've seen 'em lots of times. But I get awfully tired of the country. I've got a friend who clerks in a store in your town. Maybe you know her. Her name's ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... the Azores (315/3. H.C. Watson, "London Journal of Botany," 1843-44.) has surprised me much; do you not think it odd, the fewness of peculiar species, and their rarity on the alpine heights? I wish he had tabulated his results; could you not suggest to him to draw up a paper of such results, comparing these Islands with Madeira? surely does not ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Princesses, his daughters, who took their friends there, and indeed all the women went to it if they pleased. One day the Duchesse de Gesvres took it into her head to go to Trianon and partake of this meal; her age, her rarity at Court, her accoutrements, and her face, provoked the Princesses to make fun of her in whispers with their fair visitors. She perceived this, and without being embarrassed, took them up so sharply, that they were silenced, and looked down. But this was not all: after the collation ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... later, he, too, passed over to the majority, and his friend, the Parisian violin-maker Vuillaume, bought the "Messie" from Tarisio's heirs, along with about two hundred and fifty other fiddles, many of which were of the greatest rarity and value. Vuillaume kept the "Messie" in a glass case and never allowed any one to touch it, and many anxious days he passed during the Commune, fearing for his musical treasures. However, they luckily escaped the dangers of the time, ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... strings of shell-money about their waists in manifold rows. The women wear a bunch of leaves in front and behind. The weapons are the same as elsewhere, except that here we find the feathered arrows which are such a rarity in the Pacific. It is surprising to find these here, in these secluded valleys among the pygmy race, and only here, near Talamacco, nowhere else where the same race is found. It is an open question whether these feathered arrows are an original ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... corn, and sell it too at a good price, the hotels in the neighborhood being glad to get possession of the rarity. Hope was radiant at the result of her determination: the Pessimist smiled a grim approval when she counted up and displayed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... discovered in the Tarim basin[922] date from this period. The absence in them of Buddhist personal names and the rarity of direct references to Buddhism indicate that though known in Tibet it was not yet predominant. Buddhist priests (ban-de) are occasionally mentioned but the title Lama has not been found. The usages of the Bonpo religion seem familiar to the writers and there are ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Pauline were expostulating with him on the rarity of his visits, Juliette bent down and whispered to Helene, who, despite her supreme indifference, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... expected gratis, she would simply have whisked her duster, and said that the lodgings for such people must be looked for down the alley. However, Mrs. Busk, our new landlady, although she had a temper of her own (as any one keeping a post-office must have) was forced by the rarity of lodgers here to yield many points, which Mrs. Strouss, on her own boards, would not even have allowed to be debated. All this was entirely against my wish; for when I have money, I spend it, finding really no other good ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity here—perhaps an ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... ventures all turned out well. He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who advised him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself; so Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it. Soon afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was served up at the king's table—there, inside the body of the fish, was the ring; and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods had restored him his gift, and that his destruction was determined ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hour we drew up only two loaches and an eel. I could not say why the brigadier aroused my curiosity; his rank could not have any influence on me; ruined noblemen were not even at that time looked upon as a rarity, and his appearance presented nothing remarkable. Under the warm cap, which covered the whole upper part of his head down to his ears and his eyebrows, could be seen a smooth, red, clean-shaven, round face, with a little ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... given the foregoing tale almost at full length because it has not, so far as I know, appeared before in any other than its native Sicilian dress, and because analogous stories are not common in collections from Mediterranean countries. This rarity is not, I need hardly say, from any absence of the mythological material, and perhaps it may be due to accident in the formation of the collections. If the story were really wanting elsewhere in Southern ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity, and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,—and this is a point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,—that he is amazed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Later on, in the Swiss mountains, it sometimes happened that I was enveloped in a cloud which, intercepting light and sound, cut me off from the rest of the world. A sojourn in one of these clouds gives to the surprised traveller, by reason of its rarity, a series of curious impressions. But twenty-seven months in a cloud is a long time! A very long time! Three times each day, with a noise of falling iron, the door of my cell opened, and on the threshold appeared two ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the table in Victorian days was the moderator lamp, the principle of which was a spring forcing the oil up through the burner—but such lamps have no claim upon the curio hunter either for beauty of form or rarity of material. These lamps, which burned colza or seed oil, were superseded in time by paraffin and petroleum lamps. Now and then some wonderful invention flashed across the scene, but although various modern improved burners ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... and it was not against his inclination, but con amore, that the latter set about butchering the "goup." Swartboy knew how precious a morsel he held between his fingers,—precious, not only on account of its intrinsic goodness, but from its rarity; for although the aard-vark is a common animal in South Africa, and in some districts even numerous, it is not every day the hunter can lay his hands upon one. On the contrary, the creature is most difficult to capture; though not to ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... mutual confidence of the electors, a calm national mind, and what I may call rationality—a power involving intelligence, yet distinct from it. It demands also a competent legislature, which is a rarity. In the early stages of human society the grand object is not to make new laws, but to prevent innovation. Custom is the first check on tyranny, but at the present day the desire is to adapt the law to changed conditions. In the past, however, continuous legislatures were rare because they were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... vessel well manned and appointed was waiting for him; into which the king and queen heaped presents of gold and silver, massy plate, apparel, armour, and whatsoever things of cost or rarity they judged would be most acceptable to their guest; and the sails being set, Ulysses, embarking with expressions of regret, took his leave of his royal entertainers, of the fair princess (who had been his first friend), and of the peers ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and explain to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or show him the thickness of the paper and the glory of the black-letter in an ancient book. Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and begun on his own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his father will listen greedily to the stories he has to tell ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... literature—was indeed regarded by his companions as an authority in its more imaginative ranges, and specially in matters belonging to verse, having an exceptionally fine ear for its vocal delicacies. This is one of the rarest of gifts; but rarity does not determine value, and Walter greatly overestimated its relative importance. The consciousness of its presence had far more than a reasonable share in turning his thoughts to ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... among the books of Topham Beauclerc in 1781. It is spoken of in "The French Academy" [1589] as having "lately passed the press;" but Lodge himself, in his "Alarum against Usurers," very clearly accounts for its extreme rarity: he says, "by reason of the slenderness of the subject (because it was in defence of plaies and play-makers) the godly and reverent that had to deal in the cause, misliking it, forbad the publishing;" and he charges Gosson with "comming by a private unperfect coppye," ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... argument that pheasant-covers have saved as well as destroyed. Wood-pigeons could scarcely exist in such numbers without the quiet of preserved woods to breed in; nor could squirrels. Nor can the rarity of such birds as the little bearded tit be charged on game. The great bustard, the crane, and bittern have been driven away by cultivation. The crane, possibly, has deserted us wilfully; since civilisation in other countries has not destroyed it. And then the fashion of making natural ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Amalia was of about two years' standing, he never opened a letter from her without his hands trembling. They certainly did not often write to each other; and it was probably the rarity of the occurrence which accounted for its affecting him so much, as in truth a deep love for her had taken root ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere—where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity—there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... independent. We got jobs in offices, at forty kroner a month. Because now there was no longer anything in the least extraordinary about us students—we were no rarity, there were hundreds of us—forty kroner was the most they gave us. Thirty went to Father and Mother for our keep, and ten for ourselves. It wasn't enough. We had to have pretty clothes for the office, and we were young, we liked to walk ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... and, though it would have been easy to reach the next one before night, I was obliged to stay, as my men wanted to return and others could not possibly go on with me without the preliminary talking. Besides, a white man was too great a rarity to be allowed to escape them, and their wives would never have forgiven them if, when they returned from the fields, they found that such a curiosity had not been kept for them to see. On entering ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Christian to exercise the virtue of love. Considering the evident rarity of love among men, this admonition is necessary. He particularly warns Christians not to wonder at the world's hatred and desire for their death. Such was the hate of Cain for his brother, of which the apostle has just spoken. The world's hate, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... four o'clock I dined with the landlord, in company with a commercial traveller. The dinner was good, though plain, consisting of boiled mackerel—rather a rarity in those parts at that time—with fennel sauce, a prime baron of roast beef after the mackerel, then a tart and noble Cheshire cheese; we had prime sherry at dinner, and whilst eating the cheese prime porter, that of Barclay, the only ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... receptions—the fashionable classes, who are far more loyal to England for the most part than the English themselves, their fringe, and then the wealthier of the tradespeople. It is proven every day that a democracy is the happiest hunting ground for a man with a title. The very rarity of the distinction makes it more precious to those who value it, and the titled governors of one of our great colonies occupies a position which is vastly higher in public esteem than that of his fellow-noblemen at home. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... seems to me to underrate the rarity of this peculiar gift in his brilliant essay on Defoe's Novels in Hours ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the transits of the planet should occur with corresponding frequency. This is not the case; the transit of Venus is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and a hundred years or more will often elapse without a single one taking place. The rarity of these phenomena arises from the fact that the path of the planet is inclined to the plane of the earth's orbit; so that for half of its path Venus is above the plane of the earth's orbit, and in ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Delphi, of which we possess an extremely detailed account in the pages of Pausanias, depicted the sack of Troy and the descent of Odysseus into Hades. But it is worth remarking, in view of the extreme rarity of historical subjects in Greek relief- sculpture, that in the Stoa Poicile (Painted Portico) of Athens, alongside of a Sack of Troy by Polygnotus and a Battle of Greeks and Amazons by his contemporary, Micon, there were two historical scenes, a Battle of Marathon and a Battle of OEnoe. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... becoming so varied, that a number of women of natural ability and character are realizing some definite aim in a perfect way. But these are sporadic cases, representing usually some definite interest rather than a full intellectual life, and resembling also in their nature and rarity the elevation of a peasant to a position of eminence in Europe. Nowhere in the world do women as a class lead a perfectly free intellectual life in common with the men of the group, unless it be in restricted and artificial groups like ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... similitude of tiny fish can be vouched for by people far more careful of their facts than Hamed—fish which have intruded themselves on the oysters and have been encased in nacre. Probably the rarity which fell into Hamed's hands was the pearly presentment of a crustacean, for marine frogs are infinitely rarer than pearls. Several molluscs admit tenants, one particular species a rotund crab; but in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... to see me!" exclaimed the astonished baron. "You must be either romancing or mad, my good Pierre! There is no gentleman in the world who can have anything to say to me. However, for the rarity of the thing, you may bring in this extraordinary mortal—if such there really be, and you are not dreaming, as I shrewdly suspect. But tell me his name first, or hasn't he ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Alas! for the rarity Of Christian charity Under the sun! Oh! it was pitiful! Near a whole city full, Home ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... yet,' I interrupted, not desiring the invitation she seemed about to force herself to utter; 'and I fear there are not many in this neighbourhood who will appreciate the rarity and value of the library—if the other rooms should turn out as rich ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... rhyme follows in construction the rules laid down for the single rhyme. The accents must be alike; the preceding consonants must differ and the vowels and the remaining syllables of the words be identical. "Double" goes perfectly with "trouble" and "bubble," while "charity," "clarity" and "rarity" all rhyme. ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... would have as fine clothes, if your mothers had to spin all the cloth? She knit, too, O, so fast! as well in the dark as the light. I have known her to knit a coarse stocking easily of an evening—her fingers flew along the needles! Cotton cloth was a great rarity among us. I remember once my mother had a cotton gown, and it ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... place indeed—this schloss. The deeper we penetrated into it, the more absorbed and interested did I become. Such piled-up, profusely scattered treasures of art it had never before fallen to my lot to behold. The abundance was prodigal; the judgment, cultivation, high perception of truth, rarity and beauty, seemed almost faultless. Gems of pictures—treasures of sculpture, bronze, china, carvings, glass, coins, curiosities which it would have taken a life-time properly to learn. Here I saw for the first ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a man who was, or who seemed to be, taller than he; a slim man, having but one thing in common with the detective: his black morning-coat fitted him as perfectly as the dress-coat had fitted the inspector. An irreproachably attired man is a greater rarity than most people realise; and Zoe Oppner wondered why, even in that moment of ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... exclaimed the Count. "A pretty villa, embowered by trees! a rarity in these regions. I wonder whether the inhabitants are as attractive as their residence: so lovely a spot may be the abode of the most graceful of sylphs. Even at this distance we can see what pretty creepers adorn its trellised ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... which had previously reigned was made to contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness of his native earth ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in a moment ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... I, too, went out to stretch my limbs, which were stiff and bruised from four hours' jolting in a springless carriage, always on the point of overturning. We should have done better to have come on horseback in the usual way; but Rashid, having chanced upon the carriage, a great rarity, had decided on that way of going as more fashionable, forgetful of the fact that there was ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... Luckily for his reputation, he exceeded the general standard of imperial splendor not less as the patron of the amphitheatre than in his more important functions. It is recorded of him—that in one missio he sent forward on the arena a hundred lions. Nor was he less distinguished by the rarity of the wild animals which he exhibited than by their number. There were elephants, there were crocodiles, there were hippopotami at one time upon the stage: there was also the rhinoceros, and the still rarer crocuta or corocotta, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... appealed to him, and her other qualities—her reserved graciousness with its tinge of dignity, her insight and her comprehension—had also had their effect; but they had only awakened admiration and respect. He desired her as one desires an object for its rarity and preciousness; but this, as she had told him, was not enough. Behind her physical and mental attributes, and half revealed by them, there was something deeper: the real personality of the girl. It was elusive, mystic, with a spark of immaterial ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... has so truly interpreted the Indian mind—no one, transcribing Indian thought into our literature, has retained so high and serious a level, and quite apart from the rarity of themes ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... in crossing the higher parts of the Andes not one of the party suffered from the rarity of the air. Many travellers experience sickness, giddiness, and extreme exhaustion from this cause in those regions. Some have even died of the effects experienced at the greater heights, yet neither Manuela, nor Lawrence, nor Quashy was affected in the slightest degree. We can assign no reason ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... Wicliffe wrote in Latin, and his words were of great rarity, it may excite inquiry how poor Bunyan was conversant with is opinions. This is easily solved. Foxe gives a translation of Wicliffe's doctrines in his Martyrology, the favourite ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the rural bivalve) gets homesick and loses his sprightliness, replied, with the pleasantest smile in the world, that the chicken she had been helped to was too delicate to be given up even for the greater rarity. But the word "shell-oysters" had been overheard; and there was a perceptible crowding movement towards their newly ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fitted up with things that match. Everything is in bronze—inkstand, paper-weight, match-box, etc.—and there is always a lighted candle standing on it by which he and the gentlemen can light their cigars. There is a carpet on the floor, a rarity in Germany, and Liszt generally walks about and smokes and mutters, and calls upon one or the other of us to play. From time to time he will sit down and himself play where a passage does not suit him, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... him, saying, "We have sent you abundance of myrrh and frankincense, that for the future you may not be stingy to the gods." Among the treasures and other booty that was taken from Darius, there was a very precious casket, which being brought to Alexander for a great rarity, he asked those about him what they thought fittest to be laid up in it; and when they had delivered their various opinions, he told them he should keep Homer's Iliad in it. This is attested by many credible authors, and if what those ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... to emphasise the novelty and rarity of his literary adventures. But his attitude to Jamieson is very strange. As early as 1806 Robert Jamieson (1780-1844) had published a volume of Popular Ballads, in which he had translated several of the kjaempeviser and had pointed out their value in relation to the ancient Scottish poems of ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... not characterise the immediate parents, and therefore cannot have been derived from them, frequently appearing in the offspring of two breeds when crossed, which peculiarities never appear, or appear with extreme rarity, in these same breeds, as long as they are {40} precluded from crossing. As this conclusion seems to me highly curious and novel, I will ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Doddiscombsleigh, whose chief feature is its church. The chancel is early Decorated, the nave and north aisle Perpendicular, and in the windows of this aisle, and more especially in the east window, is some good stained glass—a rarity in the churches in this neighbourhood. The subject, a rather uncommon one in England, is the Seven Sacraments, and, as the old glass was no longer intact, the window has ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... often with parsimony of writing: but you may discover by the extent of my paper, that I design to recompence rarity by length. A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;—a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something. Yet it must be remembered, that he who continues the same ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... inferred from the legal decisions, but these are only where the penalty had already been commuted from death or punishment to payment or restitution. They are better taken as examples of civil law. But this distinction is not the cause of their rarity or absence. When a man had to be put to death, scourged, or exiled, there was no need for a written bond. Hence the only references which we have outside the Code and the phrase-books, are the penalties set down in marriage-contracts for conjugal infidelity, or for breach of contract voluntarily ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... colour of the lower parts, which are a blackish-grey. The upper parts are sometimes as black as a mole, sometimes grizzled with brown" ('Mammiferes,' p. 284). The brown specimen with the dark belly is evidently a rarity. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... of the cougar's occasionally itself making the attack, and dogging to his death some unfortunate wayfarer. Many others laugh such tales to scorn. It is certain that if such attacks occur they are altogether exceptional, being indeed of such extreme rarity that they may be entirely disregarded in practice. I should have no more hesitation in sleeping out in a wood where there were cougars, or walking through it after nightfall, than I should have ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... how to profit by these terrible diamonds, in her way. He pointed out to her that her farm lay right in the road to the diamonds, yet the traffic all shunned her, passing twenty miles to the westward. Said he, "You should profit by all your resources. You have wood, a great rarity in Africa; order a portable forge; run up a building where miners can sleep, another where they can feed; the grain you have so wisely refused to ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... Russia. Glaciation of Scotland. Mammoth in Scotch Till. Marine Shells in Scotch Glacial Drift. Their Arctic Character. Rarity of Organic Remains in Glacial Deposits. Contorted Strata in Drift. Glaciation of Wales, England, and Ireland. Marine Shells of Moel Tryfaen. Erratics near Chichester. Glacial Formations of North America. Many Species of Testacea and Quadrupeds survived ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... biographically, perhaps also historically, than otherwise. It is true, we hear now and then of some virtuoso playing the Variations, Op. 2, or the Fantasia on Polish airs, Op. 13, nay, we may hear even of the performance of the Trio, Op. 8; but such occurrences are of the rarest rarity, and, considering how rich musical literature is in unexceptionable concert-pieces and chamber compositions, one feels on the whole pleased that these enterprising soloists and trio-players find neither much encouragement nor many imitators. While ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... consider here. The absence, or rather the rarity, of mother-right survivals in some civilisations cannot be counted as proof that the maternal system never existed. As I have shown in the earlier chapters of this book, the mother-age was a transitional stage, between the very early brute-conditions of the family and the ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... in the book called, 'Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar school, chap. 8.'" Notwithstanding a title so pretentious, it contains a translation of no more than the first 567 lines of the first Book, executed in a fanciful and pedantic manner; and its rarity is now the only merit of the volume. A literal interlinear translation of the first Book "on the plan recommended by Mr. Locke," was published in 1839, which had been already preceded by "a selection from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, adapted to the Hamiltonian system, by a literal and interlineal ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the exception, where the people itself is only the army in mufti. In its mere aspect to the eye it was something like an invasion by a strange race. The English professional soldier of our youth had been conspicuous not only by his red coat but by his rarity. When rare things become common they do not become commonplace. The memory of their singularity is still strong enough to give them rather the appearance of a prodigy, as anyone can realise by imagining an army of hunchbacks or a city of one-eyed ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... rule, sons are more desired than daughters, as they increase a man's power and authority, and because they alone can keep up the superstitious rites which are deemed necessary for the salvation of the father's selfish old soul. Now the non-existence or extreme rarity of conjugal attachment—not to speak of affection—is painfully indicated by the circumstance that wives were, among many races, valued (apart from grossly utilitarian and sensual motives) as mothers only, and that the men had a right, of which they commonly ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Clement, there are two sorts of rarity in books; the one absolute, the other conditional or contingent. There are rare editions of very common books. There are books of almost common occurrence in public libraries, which are rarely seen in ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... and glinted down Upon the world they shadowed: some have lived And cleft their times with such a whistling swoop That plodding minds seemed reeling 'tother way— Men who had suffering-purified their souls To angel rarity, that they might scan, Like old Elijah, e'en the throne of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... in a neat little wooden mansion approached by a courtyard. I gained admittance by ringing a bell (then a rarity in Moscow), and was received by a mincing, smartly-attired page. He either could not or made no attempt to inform me whether there was any one at home, but, leaving me alone in the dark hall, ran off down a still darker corridor. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... experience of Lucetta—all that it was, and all that it was not. There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity—even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete. But Farfrae was not of those. It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank which his loss ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Acropolis, a perfectly bare wall (the one on the left as you go up to the Propylaea). Well! I wonder if a book independently of what it says, cannot produce the same effect! In the exactness of its assembling, the rarity of its elements, the polish of its surface, the harmony of its ensemble, is there not an intrinsic virtue, a sort of divine force, something eternal as a principle? (I speak as a Platonist.) Thus, why is a relation ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... loveliness—its envelope of associations, of memories and recurrences, had no great destiny. She packed it up and took it away with her quite as if she had been a woman who had come to sell a set of laces. The laces were as wonderful as ever when taken out of the box, but to admire again their rarity you had to send for the woman. What was above all remarkable for our young man was that Miriam Rooth fetched a fellow, vulgarly speaking, very much less than Julia at the times when, being on the spot, Julia did fetch. He could paint Miriam day after day without any agitating blur ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... regard to the Procrustes. Baxter making no objection, the subscribers who might wish their copies delivered sealed were directed to notify the author. I sent in my name. A fine book, after all, was an investment, and if there was any way of enhancing its rarity, and therefore its value, I was quite willing to enjoy ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... and the Emperor said to him, "At least say something, Marshal." There had been for some time a little coolness between him and the Emperor, and his Majesty reproached him with the rarity of his visits, but he could not dissipate the cloud which darkened every brow; for the Emperor's secret had not been as well kept as he had hoped. After supper the Emperor ordered Prince Eugene to read the twenty-ninth bulletin, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Indios del Peru), by the brother Domingo de San Thomas, published in Valladolid in 1560, and republished in the same year with an appendix, being a Vocabulary of the Quichua. The demand for the first edition appears to have been considerable; or, what is more likely, from the extreme rarity of the work, the careful author {195} suppressed or called in the first edition, in order to add, for the benefit of his purchasers, the vocabulary which he had found time to prepare ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... brotherhood, a peculiar preciousness. These books are esteemed for curiosity, for beauty of type, paper, binding, and illustrations, for some connection they may have with famous people of the past, or for their rarity. It is about these books, the method of preserving them, their enemies, the places in which to hunt for them, that the following pages are to treat. It is a subject more closely connected with the taste for curiosities than with art, strictly so called. We are to be occupied, not ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... barred by a strip of clear white moonlight. They agreed that these were most unusual-looking creatures. How unusual any naturalist would have been glad to tell them; for these were that great and prized rarity, the Evening Grosbeak. So, too, in the pine woods they were showered by bits of cones, and looked aloft to make out a distant little bird busily engaged in tearing the cones to pieces. They laughed at his industry, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... Rodd. This sale, which will occupy eleven days, will close on Friday next: and on Saturday they will sell the last portion of Mr. Rodd's, books, which will consist entirely of works relating to Ireland, including several of great curiosity and rarity. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... great, because their beauty, which consists in their luster and their sonorous ring,(722) gives them great value in use; and because, at the same time, their rarity in nature makes the supply of them relatively small,(723) and not susceptible of increase at pleasure.(724) As they contain so large a value in so small a volume, they are adapted to transportation ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... that she had measured him rather scantily the year before, that he was as much in love as the feebler passions of the age permitted (for though Miss Chancellor believed in the amelioration of humanity, she thought there was too much water in the blood of all of us), that he prized Verena for her rarity, which was her genius, her gift, and would therefore have an interest in promoting it, and that he was of so soft and fine a paste that his wife might do what she liked with him. Of course there would be the mother-in-law to count with; but unless she was perjuring herself ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide. To have told my secret would have given me away—made a mere show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke. I made no plans in the street. My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... copies of the 6th Decade were destroyed by fire, and the few that are to be met with are generally, if not always, deficient in some leaves. The title-page to this copy (as in Mr. Grenville's) is supplied by the title to the 4th Decade, and a few leaves are wanting. For the rarity of this work, see Bibliotheca Grenvilliana, ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... is almost the reverse of this: we value a gift in proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating its possessor from the rest of his fellow-men; whereas, in truth, those gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from our species, useless to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are not the most godlike, but the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... has the further advantage of throwing light on the special sanctity ascribed to mistletoe which grows on an oak. The mere rarity of such a growth on an oak hardly suffices to explain the extent and the persistence of the superstition. A hint of its real origin is possibly furnished by the statement of Pliny that the Druids worshipped the plant because they believed it to have fallen from heaven and to be a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... native evergreens, and none of cultured, save a stunted cedar, that grew, or, rather, refused to grow, in our front yard at home; and thus they have ever attracted me exceedingly—the charm of rarity and novelty being added for me ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... generally commoner than the males.) The small size of the males in comparison with the females (a peculiarity which is sometimes carried to an extreme degree), and their widely different appearance, may account in some instances for their rarity in collections. (92. See, on this subject, Mr. O.P. Cambridge, as quoted in 'Quarterly Journal of Science,' ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... mentions five reappearances, only one of which was to any considerable number of people. According also to the gospel writers, the reappearances were few; they were without preparation, and nothing seems to have been known of where he resided between each visit; this rarity and mysteriousness of the reappearances of Christ (whether dictated by fear of his enemies or by policy) would heighten their effect, and prevent the Apostles from knowing much more about their master than the simple ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... 'tis the greatest Affront imaginable to call a Woman Mistress, though but a retail Brandy-monger. Adieu.—One thing more, to morrow is our Country-Court, pray do not fail to be there, for the rarity of the Entertainment: but I shall see you anon at Surelove's, where I'll salute thee as my first meeting, and as an old Acquaintance in England—here's Company, farewel. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... who in 1597 first gave the world a specimen of Rommany in his curious book "De Literis et Lingua Getarum" (which specimen, by the way, on account of its rarity, I propose to republish in another work), believed that the Gipsies were Nubians; and others, following in his track, supposed they were really Cophtic Christians (Pott, "Die Zigeuner," &c., Halle, 1844, p. 5). And I must confess ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... in many facets, and clear set in massive gold. This precious stone, said to be a chrysoprasus, had been given to the Bishop by a Russian prince, in acknowledgment of a great service rendered him when he came on pilgrimage to Rome. The rarity of these gems arose partly from the fact that the sovereigns of Russia had decreed that they should be held exclusively for royal ornament, forbidding their use or purchase by ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... documents discovered in the Tarim basin[922] date from this period. The absence in them of Buddhist personal names and the rarity of direct references to Buddhism indicate that though known in Tibet it was not yet predominant. Buddhist priests (ban-de) are occasionally mentioned but the title Lama has not been found. The usages of the Bonpo religion seem familiar to the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... water carries a road, often a hard causeway. A considerable system of railways takes advantage of the same natural narrow issues; but even to those familiar with the country, the complexity of these narrow dry gates or defiles, and their comparative rarity (contrasted with the vast extent of waterlogged soil or of open pool), render an advance against any opposition perilous, and even an unopposed advance slow, and dependent upon very careful Staff work. Columns in their progress are for hours out of touch one with the other, and an unexpected ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... beagles. Stoats, foumarts, polecats, et id genus omne, are becoming scarcer every year; although the writer was recently told of a marten-cat—probably the Pine-marten (martes abietum)—being killed in a tree, and sold for 10s. as a rarity. I was a witness of the following:—Walking, in the small hours of the morning, in a parish contiguous to Woodhall, on my way to a stream where I was going to fish, I saw a hare in a field adjoining the road, which was leaping about in a most extraordinary fashion, starting ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... had a hand in it. And yet, had these coincidences then been observed, they would certainly—now that strong suspicions had been directed to the man from the extraordinary character of his nocturnal precautions—not have passed without investigation. But the remoteness of Bristol, and the rarity of newspapers in those days, caused these indications to pass unnoticed. Bristol knew of no such Knutsford highwayman—Knutsford knew of no such Bristol murder. It is singular enough that these earlier grounds of suspicion against X were not viewed as such ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... undisturbed unity, readiness, and practical energy of every branch of the public service; the devotion of each one in his own sphere to the common end; the general co-operation in the means by which that end was to be reached; the remarkable rarity of treason, even of self-seeking; the steadfast exercise, amid the comfortlessness of camps and the temptations of the council-hall of the ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... passion is no rarity to-day, yet scarcely since the date of Philip Bourke Marston's 'Song Tide' has such an arresting and whole-hearted example of this class of poetry been issued by any English author as the volume which Mr William Luther ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... our undertaking—"the rarity to run mad without a cause, without the least constraint or necessity," the exercise of that "refined and exquisite passion"—stamped me a disciple of Don Quixote, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the high notes in some voices exceptionally endowed by nature, it seems as though all singers, no matter what their natural range, have made it the one object of their training to strive after a vocal attainment whose rarity appears to be almost its only justification to be considered as an artistic merit. Why should these ever vanishing "top notes" be so much craved and striven for? Can it be said that, as regards each individual voice, these notes are higher in a scale of excellence than the rest? What ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... worthy of that noble constituency, and is a very pretty piece of composition. In electing him, he says, they have covered themselves with glory, and England has been true to herself. (In his preliminary address he had remarked, in a poetical quotation of great rarity, that nought could make us rue, if England to herself ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... generally wages, salaries, remunerations of all kinds, are in pretty exact relation to the value of the services performed—this value being of course determined, in a great degree, by the easiness or difficulty of the work, the commonness or rarity of the faculties and skill required for it, the risk of non-success in the profession, and so forth. Many a good fellow who feels that his income is inconveniently small, and wonders why it is not greater, might have the mystery ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... summer parlour, or LANAI, as they call it here, roofed, but practically open. There you will find the lamps burning and the family sitting about the table, dinner just done: my mother, my wife, Lloyd, Belle, my wife's daughter, Austin her child, and to-night (by way of rarity) a guest. All about the walls our South Sea curiosities, war clubs, idols, pearl shells, stone axes, etc.; and the walls are only a small part of a lanai, the rest being glazed or latticed windows, or mere open space. You will see there no sign ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sanctuary, the wonder being accepted as proof of a ghostly presence. For example, in the forest near Olevuga a man planted some coco-nut and almond trees and died not long afterwards. Then there appeared among the trees a great rarity in the shape of a white cuscus. The people took it for granted that the animal was the dead man's ghost, and therefore they called it by his name. The place became a sanctuary; no one would gather the coco-nuts and almonds that grew there, till two Christian converts set the ghost at defiance ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... me a delightfully warm welcome. They were not of the folk we meet in fashionable drawing-rooms who conceal all such feelings as they may chance to possess beneath the impenetrable mask of a conventional placidity. 'The Man with the Iron Mask' was, no doubt, a rarity and a marvel in his own age: in modern London no one would turn his head to give him a second look! No, these were real people. When they looked pleased, it meant that they were pleased: and when Lady Muriel said, with a bright smile, ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... olivine) was regarded in Shakespeare's time and earlier as of exceptional rarity. The fine peridots of the Chapel of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral were believed to be emeralds of extraordinary size and were once valued at $15,000,000, although they are really worth barely ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... answered. "I'm going back to weave my basket. There is nothing to surpass the orchids in rarity and wondrous beauty." ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... man," he suddenly began, in a dry, sharp, snuffling voice.—"That is a rarity nowadays. Allow me to congratulate you. You have ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... pocket scale conveyed by pilgrims and reverenced by the Arabs, but the body of any Faky who in lifetime was considered unusually holy is brought from a great distance to be interred in some particular spot. In countries where a tree is a rarity, a plank for a coffin is unknown; thus the reverend Faky, who may have died of typhus, is wrapped in cloths and packed in a mat. In this form he is transported, perhaps some hundred miles, slung upon a camel, with the thermometer above 130 degrees ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... the intellectual tendencies of capital I speak generally. Not only individual capitalists, but great corporations, exist, who are noble examples of law-abiding and intelligent citizenship. Their rarity, however, and their conspicuousness, seem to ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... very laconic, indeed almost pantomimic; and they walked up and down by the long pink frames with true diplomatic strides. The display was really extraordinarily beautiful: and the particular forms and colors of the different flowers, the advantages of one over the other, and their rarity, gave at last occasion to a sort of conversation which appeared to get quite friendly; at which we others rejoiced the more because we saw the most precious old Rhine wine in cut decanters, fine fruits, and other good things spread upon a table in a neighboring bower. But ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... crisp, tender, very juicy, sugary and highly aromatic—a first-rate dessert apple, in use from December to February." In my opinion it comes next, though longo intervallo, to Cox's Orange Pippin, but it wants good land to make the best of it. It may with confidence be produced as a rarity across the walnuts and the wine to the connossieur ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... an enviable one. Once upon a time, when a red lamp had been a novelty, and the power to write "M. D." after his ordinary signature a delicious dignity, a patient had been to him a prodigy, something precious for its rarity, even if it called him away from his dinner or ruthlessly rang him up in the middle of the night. But that was a long time ago, in the days of his impecunious youth; and now, in his prosperous middle-age, he would often have willingly bartered a good ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... grows "cooler," has a much larger bloom, varies in hue from purest white to deepest red, and flowers in May or June. The most glorious of these things, however, is O. vex. superbum, a plant of the greatest rarity, conspicuous for its blotch of deep purple in the centre of the lip, and its little dot of the same on each wing. Doubtless this is a natural hybrid betwixt the Antioquia form and Odontoglossum Roezlii, which is its neighbour. ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... would on the psychical side involve an accentuated individualism and hence a greater possibility of genius. This view has been supported by John Hunter, Burdach, Darwin, Havelock Ellis, and others. Ellis, in the chapter on "The Artistic Impulse" in Man and Woman, says, "The rarity of women artists of the first rank is largely due to the greater variational tendency of men." Now, this biological fact is certainly of great importance, if it can be proved. But can it? It has recently been contested by ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... orchis, is this far more chaste showy lady's slipper which Dr. Gray has called "the most beautiful of the genus." Because the plants live in inaccessible swampy places, where only the most zealous flower lover penetrates, they have a reputation for rarity at which one who knows a dozen places to find colonies of the stately exquisites during a morning's walk, must smile with superiority. Wine appears to overflow the large white cup and trickle down its sides. Sometimes unstained, pure white chalices are found. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... L11 11s.; and Mr. Willock, a bookseller, bought the magnificently illuminated Pliny by Jenson of 1472, for L18 18s.: of which Maittaire has said so many fine things. The French books, and all the works upon the Fine Arts, were of the first rarity, and value, and bound in a sumptuous manner. Winstanley's Prospects of Audley End brought L50. An amusing account of some of the pictures will be found in Mr. Beloe's "Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books," vol. i. 166. 71. But consult also Nichol's Anecdotes ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... directions of a will first allowed to regulate the devolution of authority over the household, and consequently the posthumous distribution of property. The difficulty of deciding the point arises from the rarity of Testamentary power in archaic communities. It is doubtful whether a true power of testation was known to any original society except the Roman. Rudimentary forms of it occur here and there, but ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... prime fun," replied the mischievous boy, "but it's no rarity to me. I 'm used to it, you know. But you would delight in it, especially with bare feet. That way it is jolly, better than wading in a brook. Suppose you try ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... hand, the best men, if known, are not left in the cold shade of official disfavor. "Post nubila Phoebus," was the expression of Nelson, astonished for a rarity into Latin by the suddenness with which the sun now burst upon him through the clouds. "The Admiralty so smile upon me, that really I am as much surprised as when they frowned." On the 6th of January, 1793, the First Lord, with many apologies for previous neglect, promised to ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... front. Now and again an outburst of raucous humor echoed above the babble of cockney tongues. The maudlin clamor of "a pore lone lidy 'oos 'subing 'ad desarted 'er" failed to arouse anyone's curiosity. Ladies in their cups are not a rarity in Walthamstow. In side streets, lads in khaki, many of them fresh from fields of slaughter "somewhere in Flanders," sported boisterously with their factory-girl sweethearts or spooned in the shadows. Everywhere ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... has too long prevailed. I hear that I am accused of rating my books at too high a price, at a price which no other person would demand. To answer this accusation, it is necessary to inquire what those who urge it, mean by a high price. The price of things, valuable for their rarity, is entirely arbitrary, and depends upon the variable taste of mankind, and the casual fluctuation of the fashion, and can never be ascertained, like that of things only estimable ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... literature! How thoroughly is the non-development of a permanent literature the exception rather than the rule! And, even when records come into existence, how numerous are the chances against their preservation. Destruction is the common law: continuance a happy rarity. For extraordinary phenomena we must have ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... before the emperor," was the universal cry; and the morrice dancer was placed before a slight, but easy and handsome, figure of a young man, splendidly attired, having a cincture and tiara of peacock's feathers, then brought from the East as a marvellous rarity; a short jacket and under dress of leopard's skin fitted closely the rest of his person, which was attired in flesh coloured silk, so as to resemble the ordinary idea of an Indian prince. He wore sandals, fastened on with ribands of scarlet silk, and held in his hand a sort of fan, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... network. Network traffic reflects the joint contributions of a larger population of users and increasing use per user. Today one sees serious applications involving moving images across the network—a rarity ten years ago. LARSEN recalled and concurred with BESSER's main point that the interesting problems occur at the ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... It stands on a hill without the city, has a rock for its foundation, and is surrounded with walls of a vast height and solidity. You go up to the castle by a way hewn out of the rock, and which is so easy of ascent, that loaded horses and camels get up without difficulty. The greatest rarity in this castle is Joseph's well, so called, either because the Egyptians are pleased with ascribing what is most remarkable among them to that great man, or because such a tradition has been preserved in the country. This is a proof, at least, that the work in question is very ancient; ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... on as much as she would, till the storm exhausted itself, and she settled into the trust that Giles would soon grow weary and return. The good man felt bound to show her all hospitality, and the civilities to country cousins were in proportion to the rarity of their visits. So Mrs Headley stayed on after Tiptoff's return to Salisbury, and had the best view feasible of all the pageants and diversions of autumn. She saw some magnificent processions of clergy, she was ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... modern free thought to assimilate some elements from the old faith A wide breach still remains Heresy, however, no longer traced to depravity Tolerance not necessarily acquiescence in scepticism Object of the foregoing digression The rarity of plain-speaking a reason why it is painful Conformity in the relationship between child and parent Between husband and wife In the education of children The case of an unbelieving priest The case of one who fears to lose his influence Conformity ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... ample warrant that no just pretense 50 Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 55 Which Claus of Innsbruck ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... says:—"A nest was once brought me which was declared to belong to this species; it was a very small neat fabric, of ordinary shape, made with moss and grass, and contained three small pure white eggs. The rarity of the bird makes me doubt if the nest really belonged ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... lavender water. These pucheros are very pleasing to the eye, on account of the tasteful arrangement of the flowers; but their powerful fragrance affects the nerves. They vary in price, according to the rarity of the fruits and flowers of which they are composed. Some cost as much as six or eight dollars. A puchero de flores is one of the most acceptable presents that can be offered to ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... dragon, who eats the sun, and leaves us in the dark until the blazing orb has been mended. Numerous instances are ready to the memory of any one of us, in illustration of the tendency existing among men to ascribe to supernatural, fantastic causes, events wonderful only by their rarity. All that we daily see differs from these things no more than inasmuch as it is at the same time marvellous and common. We know very well that the moon, seen once by all, would be regarded as an awful spectre: open only to the occasional vision ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... preferment in the Church. On the death of his father he inherited a fortune of about three thousand pounds a year, which enabled him to acquire a library of not less than four thousand five hundred volumes, remarkable for their rarity and beauty; seven portfolios of drawings by the great masters, and a hundred portfolios of prints, many of which were almost priceless; and in addition to these a splendid collection of coins and gems, and a ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... profession, even that of the actor, which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity, and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,—and this is a point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,—that he is amazed "by the accuracy and propriety with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... competing minstrels. Bermondsey and Walworth alone occupied the nails. Scarcely any bets were made. They seemed an impecunious assemblage, gathered for mere sport. One gentleman did, indeed, offer to stake "that 'ere blowsy bob," as though a shilling in his possession were a rarity of which his friends must be certainly aware. What was the occult meaning of the epithet "Blowsy" I could not fathom, but there were no takers; and, after the windows had been opened for a few minutes to clear the atmosphere, they were closed again; the door locked; the two markers ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... witness how much, as a father, I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always followed you in thought, and how I feared to trouble you with my writings. In sooth, I make it my first care, that since there is nothing else to commend my letters, that their rarity may commend them. Next, as out of that most vehement desire after you which I feel, I always fancy you with me, and speak to you, and beheld you as if you were present, and so, as always happens in love, soothe my grief by a certain vain imagination of your presence, it is, in truth, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... at the Executive Mansion may have been at later dates, those owned and used by President Jefferson were the best the world produced—vintages of rarity, selected as could have been done only by one of the nicest taste. Rumor had it that none other than Senor Yrujo, minister from Spain, recipient of many casks of the best vintages of his country that he might entertain with proper dignity, had seen fit to do a bit of merchandizing ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... King: he meant what he said to-day. Who shall vouch for his to-morrows? One word further. Doth not the fewness of anything make the fulness of it in estimation? Is not virtue prized mainly for its rarity and great baseness loathed as an exception: for were all, my lord, as noble as yourself, who would look up to you? and were all as base as—who shall I say—Fitzurse and his following—who would look down upon them? My lord, you have put so many of the King's household out of communion, ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... is owing to the rarity of the atmosphere that southern nations, with their keen intelligence due to the heat, are very free and swift in the devising of schemes, while northern nations, being enveloped in a dense atmosphere, and chilled by ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... so—except to the historian. But your real collector values a thing for its rarity. I don't suppose the buyers of Americana sit up reading them all night—old Jefferson ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Greek scholar when he opens one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and direct. What does ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... other birds are, so to say, never out of our eyes; they let themselves be seen of us continually; but a vulture is a very rare sight, and you can seldom meet with a man that has seen their young; their rarity and infrequency has raised a strange opinion in some, that they come to us from some other world; as soothsayers ascribe a divine origination to all things not produced either of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... hermetic to bar the poison, yet admit some oxygen; or else, the place may have been absolutely air-tight at the time of the cloud, and some crack, which I have not seen, opened to admit oxygen after the poison was dispersed: in any case—the all-but-infinite rarity of the chance! ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... its own excrement, and does no little injury." Again, "I have often observed the caterpillar of a little moth that takes its station in damp old books, and there commits great ravages, and many a black-letter rarity, which in these days of bibliomania would have been valued at its weight in gold, has been snatched by these ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon's invitation. An 'At Home' at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for twelve years, not indeed, since old ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the oldest rocks in the Catoctin Belt and occupy most of its area. They are also prominent from their unusual character and rarity. ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness; we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... that I am alone in my room, and journalizing, it behooves me to gather up and record some of those words, precious from their rarity. Flora and I, in our merry nonsense, had a mock dispute, and referred the matter to Miss Etty ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... by John Grot's house are found many small pleasant buckies and shells, beautified by diverse colours, which some use to put upon a string as beads, and account much of their rarity. It is also observed of these shells that not one of them can be found altogether like another, and upon the review of the parcel I had I discovered some difference among them which variety renders them ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... intimate friend of the Circourts, a man, Reeve wrote, 'of great wit and discernment.' In 1873 he had printed, for private circulation, a small volume of Pensees, Maximes et Reflexions, a copy of which he gave Reeve, who 'highly valued it for its intrinsic merit and its rarity.'] Back to London ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... people; character,—high, spotless, saintly character,—is a far rarer thing in this world than talent or even genius. Character is an infinitely better thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity. And yet so true is it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent, and even bodily strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one there either understands or values or pursues moral character, though it is the strength and the beauty and the sweetness ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... only brings it forth when the discussion has begun to wane. Or a proposal may be made at the very first by one member of the Staff that is accepted at once with acclamation—an event, however, of the utmost rarity; or again, as is usually the case, the final decision may be gradually and almost painfully evolved from this symposium of professional wits and literary politicians. This is the time when the men are apt to ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... which he lives or the sunset which he has just seen. If he seriously tries to comply with your request, you will probably be surprised both by the difficulty he has in his attempt, and the little that he really can say upon these familiar subjects. The interesting story teller is a rarity, which is only another way of saying that the ability to narrate and describe needs cultivation. There is no better opportunity possible than that of the ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... perhaps sometimes indirectly tending to destroy it. All dainty (as distinguished from nourishing) food, and means of producing it; all scents not needed for health; substances valued only for their appearance and rarity (as gold and jewels); flowers of difficult culture; animals used for delight (as horses for racing), and such like, form property of this class; to which the term 'luxury,' or 'luxuries,' ought exclusively ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... the ardent sun embrowns the children of the soil, fair locks and eyes of azure are prized in proportion to their rarity. No wonder, then, that Federico found favour in the sight of the dark-browed and inflammable Madrilenas. Many were the tender glances darted at him from beneath veil and mantilla, as he took his evening stroll upon the Prado; oftentimes, when he passed along the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... undisturbed—began to bully me, I, observing that my wife, in the most perfect contrast to him, was most kind and amiable towards me who had neglected her so much, the idea occurred to me of becoming a model husband—a rarity, a curiosity, at the court; and I had an idea of getting very ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... languages, and kinds, upon all subjects, and in all sorts of trims; from those which are displayed in 'Peacock Place,' to the ragged inhabitants of 'Duck Row.' The room in which I am now writing contains two thousand four hundred volumes, all in good apparel; many of them of singular rarity and value. I have another room full, and a passage full; book-cases in both landing places, and from six to seven hundred volumes in my bed-room. You have never seen a more cheerful room than my study; this workshop, from which so ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... I have known as much as L10 asked for a copy; but a first edition (a rarity) may be purchased sometimes of a respectable ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... what might be their tempter's motive, the pair thought primarily of the white slave's well-preserved beauty and the rarity of women in the far West. With that came a stinging remembrance of her glaring Hayle likeness and then of their father's old scheme—averted by their mother—to sell the girl forever out of sight and reach. And then came the pleasanter ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... sir. Now and then a poor artist stops here, and sometimes tourists wander this way; but it is a life-time rarity to meet with a rich cosmopolitan like yourself, who is willing to help us along ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... answered him in a pleasant way, that I had spoken the truth. Happily an Englishman, it seems, is a rarity ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others, Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... be," said I. "But they are not nearly so highly appreciated. I suppose it is because poetry is not so much a rarity now. We have so many mediocre poets, that our taste is more exigent. I dare say, if a very bright, particular star should arise, we would honour him; but we have no bright particular star; and, thus, we learn to read poetry without reflection. Forty years ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... ailments; while his rations and everything about him were continually saturated; and to make up the catalogue of his troubles, he, on more than one occasion, lost himself in the bush. Now, however, he said, he had got used to all these inconveniences; which, after all (from the rarity of their occurrence), he considered slight; and as to the wet, since he had been put up to the dodge of keeping his bed dry, it did not concern him in the least. He liked the independence of his life, though it was a little dull; and his wages being good, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... winter, toward which he had looked forward with joyful anticipation, which became the way of the cross for him, where each stopping-place meant the end of a love and loyalty. Florie's best quality, his rarity, was of course gone; from now on he was always on hand, after all, and more than that, he was no longer the bringer of joy, the messenger of the thawing breeze, as ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and more convinced, that in our eagerness, for novelties, we daily lose plants by far more ornamental than the new ones we introduce; the present, a most charming spring plant, with which the Gardens abounded in the time of PARKINSON, is now a great rarity; its blossoms, which are uncommonly brilliant, come forth in April, and, like those of many other plants, appear to advantage only when ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 4 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... rule, we may say that, while the apsidal chancel is foreign to no part of England, and occurs in unexpected places, as in the chapel of Old Bewick, Northumberland, it is never general in any single region. Its rarity is an important fact. Were our parish churches the work of masons sent out from the larger churches and monasteries, we should expect to find it a common feature; for in those buildings the apsidal plan prevailed. But, in the hands of local masons, its ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... and, on the afternoon of the 15th of February, swept round an intervening cape, and came in sight of the infant settlement of Astoria. After eleven months wandering in the wilderness, a great part of the time over trackless wastes, where the sight of a savage wigwam was a rarity, we may imagine the delight of the poor weatherbeaten travellers, at beholding the embryo establishment, with its magazines, habitations, and picketed bulwarks, seated on a high point of land, dominating a beautiful little bay, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria. These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when the beautiful young widow ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
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