"Coarseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only to Shakespeare. As an exponent of the sentiments and atmosphere of his own time, we find in him what is found only in a few of the world's greatest writers. That he has not been more widely read in modern times, is attributed chiefly to the extraordinary coarseness of language which he constantly introduces into his pages. This coarseness is, in fact, so pervasive that expurgation is made extremely difficult to any one who would preserve some ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... licentiousness, rather than of poetry. With respect to the Iambics of Catullus, we may observe in general, that the sarcasm is indebted for its force, not so much to ingenuity of sentiment, as to the indelicate nature of the subject, or coarseness of expression. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... in its coarseness and simplicity, would not commend itself to our modern dudes; but, then, life is a terrible reality to these brothers, who, hearing the voice of God, have hastened to follow his call, fully realizing, that without the one thing necessary, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... insolence in wresting justice he himself admits! Yet how many points, both of the times and of the King's personal character, must be brought together before we can fairly solve the intensity of James's minionism, his kingly egotism, his weak kindheartedness, his vulgar coarseness of temper, his systematic jealousy of the ancient nobles, his timidity, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... have forecast the training of such a life, how should we have pictured it? Surely as sheltered from the coarseness of the world, delicately nourished, sedulously cultured; but God orders that this life should manifest itself in the house of the village carpenter, out of reach of schools, in a little wicked town, under the commonest conditions of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... animal prefixes, these indeed forming a very extensive list. But in some instances, "the name of an animal prefixed has a totally different signification, denoting size, coarseness, and frequently worthlessness or spuriousness." Thus the horse-parsley was so called from its coarseness as compared with smallage or celery, and the horse-mushroom from its size in distinction to a species more commonly ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... her niece a sentiment which she mistook for affection; her self-approbation was gratified at the contemplation of a being who owed every advantage to her, and whom she had rescued from the coarseness and vulgarity which she deemed inseparable from the manners of every Scotchwoman. If Lady Audley really loved any human being it was her son. In him were centred her dearest interests; on his aggrandisement and future importance hung her most sanguine hopes. She had acted ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... source of the vigor with which he describes these rude figures. The robustness of his animalism permits him fully to imagine all the simple sensations of these beings, while his pessimism, which tinges these sketches of brutal customs with an element of delicate scorn, preserves him from coarseness. It is this constant and involuntary antithesis which gives unique value to those Norman scenes which have contributed so much to his glory. It corresponds to, those two contradictory tendencies ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the fire threw humps on to straight backs, flattened good round breasts, wrote wrinkles on smooth faces, turned eyes and lips into shining gems, made white teeth yellow, cast a grotesque spell of the unreal on young shapes, of the horrible upon old ones. A sort of monkey coarseness crept into the red, upturned faces; their proportions were distorted, their delicacy destroyed. Essential lines of figures were concealed by the inky shadows; unimportant features were thrown into a violent prominence; the clean fire impinged abruptly on a night of black ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... lies midway; for certainly if there was much coarseness then, there is much cant and much squeamishness now, which could be excellently well ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... population, the holiday portion of the programme being preceded, of course, by a religious service in the chapel. The aspect of the place is then that of a fair, without the humour and fun, but, at the same time, without the noise and coarseness of similar holidays in England. Large rooms are set apart for panoramic and other exhibitions, to which the public is admitted gratis. In the course of each evening, large displays of fireworks take place, all arranged according to a ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... truth is, that, however much we may concede to the average spiritual superiority of woman, a great deal also depends on the inheritance and the training of the individual. Mrs. Farnham, like every refined woman, is often shocked by the coarseness of even virtuous men; but she does not tell us the other side of the story,—how often every man of refinement has occasion to be shocked by the coarseness of even virtuous women. Sexual disparities may be much; but individual disparities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... The coarseness of Skelton's satires and his open disregard of the clerical vows of chastity may justify some doubt of the value of the poet's influence on Henry's character; but he so far observed the conventional ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... planting in Gaul. But so often has this been repeated in the history of the world, one is compelled to recognize it as a part of the evolutionary method. Again and again have we seen old civilizations effaced by barbarians. But these barbarians with their coarseness and brutality have usually brought something better than refinement; a spirit so transforming, so vitalizing, that we are compelled to believe it was the end sought in the catastrophe we deplore: that is, a spirit of liberty, a sense of personal independence, without ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... we keep off coarseness of soul? How shall we keep our souls REFINED? that is, true and honest, pure, amiable, full of virtue, that is, true manliness; and deserve praise, that is, the respect and admiration of our fellow-men? By thinking of those ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... distinctly announces that he has not conformed to the candour of the age—who makes it his boast that he expresses himself throughout with the greatest plainness and freedom—and whose constant practice proves that by plainness and freedom he means coarseness and rancour—has no right to expect that others shall remember courtesies which he has forgotten, or shall respect one who ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... its humor and fancy is evidently the outcome of profound conviction and a genuine patriotism. The Attic comedy was produced at the festivals of Dionysus, which were marked by great license, and to this, rather than to the individual taste of the poet, must be ascribed the undoubted coarseness of many of the jests. Aristophanes seems, indeed, to have been regarded by his contemporaries as a man of noble character. He died shortly after the production of his ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... improvement on this; the composition is well balanced, full of force and animation, the weeping figures of the Maries and the solicitude of S. Veronica are very lifelike, although he has not entirely abolished his uncle's coarseness in the scowling, low-typed men. The Christ and the Virgin are, on the contrary, so refined as to induce the supposition that this force of contrast was intentional; the landscape is rather hard and crude in tone, the flesh tints smooth, and the handling ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... songs. Only think of the smart young candidate's headache next morning in the days when soda-water was not invented! And remember too that the representatives were not entirely free from sympathy with the coarseness of their constituents. Just at the period of Hogarth's painting, Walpole, when speaking of the feeling excited by a Westminster election, has occasion to use this pleasing 'new fashionable proverb'—'We spit in his hat on Thursday, and wiped it off on Friday.' It owed its origin to a feat performed ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... not mean mere coarseness or rusticity, for that were more pardonable; but a want of civility. In this sense of the term, I am prepared to censure one practice, which in the section on Politeness, was overlooked. I refer to the practice so common with young men in some circumstances ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... It had the little depressions and the smoothness to be noticed in the hands of truest charity; yet it had the ample outlines of the vigorously imaginative temperament, so different from the hard plumpness of coarseness or brutality. At the point where the fingers joined the back of the hand were the roundings-in that are reminiscent of childhood's simplicity, and are to be found in many philanthropic persons. His way of using his fingers was slow, well thought out, and gentle, though never lagging, that ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... whose incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation, of a man ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon—youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish, refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor, carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that the broadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity; and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, was never anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member of the French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a more delightfully amusing ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... speech was altogether characteristic of the man. It showed his stubborn wilfulness, his intense egotism, his coarseness of manner, and his affectation of eccentricity. But it exhibited also the fact that he thoroughly understood that he was liked by the bulk of Birmingham people, and that he knew the majority of unthinking ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... hand, of inferior merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity on occasion) are best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.) From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers. It lacks homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues. But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare's own ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... mind. Nothing will escape the memory:—nothing. The days of childhood, of youth, of middle age, of elder years will give in their report. The soul will see things then as they are, no longer tricked out in false and flattering guise. There, in all their miserable littleness, and coarseness, and meanness, and cowardice, bygone sins will rise up before the stern tribunal of the unsparing memory, each as it was, each as it is, each as GOD saw it at the time, each as GOD ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... had seen only the faces of savage women and still more savage men; for eight years his life had been steeped in bitterness, and all that was tender or romantic in his nature had been cramped, as in iron fetters, by the coarseness and stolidity around him. Now, after all that dreary time, he met one who had the beauty and the refinement of his own race. Was it any wonder that her glance, the touch of her dress or hair, the soft tones of her voice, had for him an indescribable charm? Was it any wonder that ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... touch but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure and ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a tall, thickly-set man, trim and smart in his attire, yet with a coarseness of feature which aroused Claire's instant antagonism. Compared with the face she had expected to see, the florid good looks which confronted her were positively repugnant. Before the obvious admiration of the black ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... more coarseness than his wife, upbraided Victorine for not striving for the rose with her sisters. "Were you but cured of your folly, child," he said, "there is no doubt of your success as Rosiere, for you are a great favourite, ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... their dressing-room, and thought themselves very scrupulous; but there were others, as there must be at all times, who, with feelings of true modesty and perfect delicacy, hesitated not to use all proper and rational liberty, yet shrunk instinctively from the least coarseness of thought or language, and never yielded to aught that was immodest in custom ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... learning in Wales in all his writings. He studied at Gloucester, and then at Paris, the greatest mediaeval university. We have it on his own authority that he was a model student. "So entirely devoted was he to study, having in his acts and in his mind, no sort of levity or coarseness, that whenever the Masters of Arts wished to select a pattern from among the good scholars, they would name Gerald before all others." Later he lectured at Paris on canon law and theology; his lectures, he tells us, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... she hurries up the fine old avenue that leads to her ancestral home. The ease of her port, the graceful dignity of her extreme haste, the heightened colour, and the glowing eye, are all very handsome, in spite of the coarseness in perspective. The poor footman can scarcely keep up with her; he has not found the last twenty years at Glanyravon productive of the same lightness of step to him, as to his young mistress, and wishes she ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country—all these are features in Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part of jester to the Athenian tyrant. But his jests were the vehicles for ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... came on, Carraway measured him coolly, with an appreciation tempered by his native sense of humour. He perceived at once a certain coarseness of finish which, despite the deep-rooted veneration for an idle ancestry, is found most often in the descendants of a long line of generous livers. A moment later he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes beneath the thick fair hair, the coating of dust and sweat over the high-bred curve ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... carbonate, and the percentage of worthless material in it varies somewhat It is coarsely ground, but the large pieces disintegrate in the soil much more rapidly than limestone would do. It contains a little nitrogen and phosphoric acid, partially available, as an offset to coarseness and some lack of purity, as compared with the highest grade of fine stone. It is profitable to buy oyster shell at limestone prices if used liberally enough to furnish a supply for a term of years. The oxide, or burned shell lime, would ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... maps show, and this trait gives to his statements and descriptions, when his own reputation is not concerned, a value beyond that of those of most contemporary travelers. And there is another thing to be said about his writings. They are uncommonly clean for his day. Only here and there is coarseness encountered. In an age when nastiness was written as well as spoken, and when most travelers felt called upon to satisfy a curiosity for prurient observations, Smith preserved a tone quite remarkable ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Deshoulieres, in an elaborate white deshabille, (it was really a fine picture, and, like the much decried and seldom read efforts of the poetess, better at the second look than at the first), had not reminded me, by the expression of the mouth, which is large, full, and sensual, of the peculiar coarseness of Madame de Stael's portrait by Gerard. When I saw it two years ago, at Coppet, in bright sunshine, I could not help being impressed by those red, vinous lips and the wide, aspiring nostrils. George Sand's face offers a similar peculiarity. In all those women who ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... Henry was now known as Henry III. of France. Soon after his coronation he married Louisa of Lorraine, a daughter of one of the sons of the Duke of Guise. She was a pure-minded and lovely woman, and her mild and gentle virtues contrasted strongly with the vulgarity, coarseness, and ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... noble sentiments and virtues that even in the present day command our admiration. We should then feel little surprised at seeing barbarity and heroism united, so much energy combined with so much weakness, and the natural coarseness of man in a savage state blended with the most sublime aspirations of ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... you have been, Mary," she said, "you can not enter into the feelings of one in my position, to whom the very tone even of coarse language is unspeakably odious. It makes me sick with disgust. Coarseness is what no lady can endure. I beg you will not mention Mr. Redmain ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... people. The best specimens of the English have the advantage in manliness of form and carriage; the American is superior in activity, in the expression of intelligence and energy in the countenance. The English peculiarities in their worst shape are, coarseness and heaviness of form; a brutal, dull countenance; the worst peculiarities among the Americans are, an apparent want of substance in the form, and a cold, cunning expression of features. I used often to wonder, when travelling in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, at ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... This coarseness of manners, which still prevailed in the nation, as it had in the court of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, could not but influence the familiar style of their humour and conversation. James I., in the Edict ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... extent of the man's coarseness. I asked one of my friends to go and give the low fellow ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... pretty skirt, and feeling the caress of the soft folds; looking down upon the brim of that beribboned little hat, and more often meeting the upturned blue eyes beneath it, Jim was suddenly struck with a terrible conviction of his own contrasting coarseness and deficiencies. How hideous those oiled canvas fishing-trousers and pilot jacket looked beside this perfectly fitted and delicately gowned girl! He loathed his collar, his jersey, his turned-back sou'wester, even his height, which seemed to hulk beside her—everything, in short, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... things, in a rather languid way; then at last came and sank down in a very low position at Wych Hazel's feet on the carpet. She was a pretty girl; might have been extremely pretty, if her very pronounced style of manners had not drawn lines of boldness, almost of coarseness, where the lip should have been soft and the eyebrow modest. The whole expression was dissatisfied and jaded to-day, over and above those lines, which even ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... the order of a particular cause, except through some other impeding cause; which other cause must itself be reduced to the first universal cause; as indigestion may occur outside the order of the nutritive power by some such impediment as the coarseness of the food, which again is to be ascribed to some other cause, and so on till we come to the first universal cause. Therefore as God is the first universal cause, not of one genus only, but of all being in general, it is impossible for anything to occur outside the order ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... an ideal of manhood to many women. He was largely built, but not ungainly—the coarseness of the hands being the chief indication of his peasant ancestry. His head was rather round, and strongly set on broad shoulders; the nose was straight and well formed; the dark eyes, however, were somewhat small, and the lower part ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... women, but where a martyr is wanted a woman can always be found to offer herself. She will clothe herself in cursing, like the ungodly, and perish in that Nessus shirt, a martyr to pure language. And then this dull cad swearing—a mere unnecessary affectation of coarseness—will disappear. And a very ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... and the unseen. Such are hardly the conceptions wherewith the brain of a cultivated woman would teem. It were too glaring treason to her sex and to her own nature. Although it must be said that there is no word of coarseness or bold suggestion of wickedness to be found upon any page. So far from it, we scarcely find recognized the crime to which the maidens are tempted, and we half-ignorantly wonder at the existence of compunctions, excited at we can scarcely say what. But the author ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... many degrees in the frankness with which this convention has been accepted, according perhaps to the coarseness of the canvas ground, perhaps to the personality of the worker. The animal forms at the top of Illustration 6 are uncompromisingly square; the floral devices on the same page, though they fall, as it were inevitably, into square lines, are less rigidly ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... tragedy of "Cato," and his "Essays" contributed principally to the "Tatler" and the "Spectator." The excellent style of his essays, their genial wit and sprightly humor, made them conspicuous in an age when coarseness, bitterness, and exaggeration deformed the writings of the most eminent: and these characteristics have given them an unquestioned place among the classics of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... parallel can be drawn between the two plays. The ethereal beauty of Vicente's lyrical auto, carved in delicate ivory, is far less varied and human: it has scarcely a touch of the cynicism and not a touch of the coarseness of Goethe's splendid work cast in bronze. It can be compared at most with such lyrical passages as Christ ist erstanden or Ach neige, Du Schmerzenreiche, Dein Antlitz gn["a]dig meiner Not, and as a whole is a mere lily of the valley by the ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... worthless ragamuffins of the Quarter, and it was a mystery to the ingenuous youths who absorbed his wisdom over a cafe table that Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his passion for beauty could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed to revel in the coarseness of her language and would often report some phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically as la fille de mon concierge. Cronshaw was very poor. He earned a bare subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of pictures for one or two English papers, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... "Spielmannsdichtung", or minstrel poetry, in the terseness and vigor of its language and in the lack of poetic imagery, but it is free from the coarseness and vulgar and grotesque humor of the latter. It approaches the courtly epic in its introduction of the pomp of courtly ceremonial, but this veneer of chivalry is very thin, and beneath the outward polish of form the heart beats as passionately and wildly as in ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and buffoons of the eighteenth century, is gaped at like a curiosity in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... whom she adored; she must meet—with politeness even if she could not with grace—the man whom she loathed. To one of Dorothy's spirit and fineness there dwelt in this an infamy, a baseness, of which Mr. Harley with his lucky coarseness of fiber escaped ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and genial novelist. 'I like your novel exceedingly,' said a lady; 'the characters are so natural—all but the baronet, and he surely is overdrawn: it is impossible to find such coarseness in his ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... During the twelve years succeeding his entry into public life he was one of the most conspicuous Reformers in the Province. Though not possessed of a liberal education, and though his demeanour and address were marred by a sort of impetuous coarseness, he was master of a rude, vigorous eloquence which under certain conditions was far more effective than the most polished oratory would have been. He was certainly the ablest stump orator of his time in this country, and there was no man in the Reform ranks who could so effectively conduct a difficult ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing one whom with special significance we call a brother poet. "Allen," he writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters.... What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness— sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling—dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators,—the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is swallowed, should ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... which it has been derived. She has transfused into her German or Scandinavian legends the imaginative and daring tone of the originals, without the mystical exaggerations of the one, or the painful fierceness and coarseness of the other—she has preserved the clearness and elegance of the French, without their coldness or affectation—and the tenderness and simplicity of the early Italians, without their diffuseness or languor. Though occasionally expatiating, somewhat ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... ever-returning dish of skinny, tough mutton, the veteran cock, smoked butter, and bitter coffee. Tea, sugar, wine, fish, vegetables, &c., were not, either for love or money, to be obtained anywhere. The coarseness and uniformity of our food, however, was as nothing compared with our dread of being starved to death; for even the few and inferior articles I have mentioned would fail us when ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... life was cynical and coarse. The cynicism was the natural outcome of his profession; the coarseness was his heritage by birth, as his sensual mouth, blubber lips, thick nose, and bull-neck attested. It was a strange freak of Fate which had made him the guardian of the morals of society and the upholder of law and order in a modern civilized community. ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Johnson writes:—'Dr Watts was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... deal with the appointed delegates of heaven, and I had encountered men, yes, and men not entitled to my reverence and regard, except as the chosen ambassadors of the church. One was low, ignorant, and vulgar. He took no pains to conceal the fact; he rather gloried in his native and offensive coarseness. The other was a smoother man, scarcely less destitute of knowledge, or worthier of respect. Looking back, at this distance of time, upon this strange interview, I am indeed shocked and grieved at the part which I then and there permitted myself to undertake. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... was there, Commandant of Artillery, a brave officer, but a bad man; Varin, a proud, arrogant libertine, Commissary of Montreal, who outdid Bigot in rapine and Cadet in coarseness; De Breard, Comptroller of the Marine, a worthy associate of Penisault, whose pinched features and cunning leer were in keeping with his important office of chief manager of the Friponne. Perrault, D'Estebe, Morin, and Vergor, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... for her country, there is nothing masculine, or as the phrase goes, "strong-minded" in her demeanor. She is a descendant of Oliver Cromwell, and has much of his energy and power of endurance, but none of his coarseness, being remarkably unselfish, and lady-like in her manners. During the earlier years of the war, she spent much of her time in visiting the towns of the territory assigned to the society, and promoting the formation of local Soldiers' Aid Societies, and it was due ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... avocations divide them all day, and whose sensibility is blunted by the coarseness of their education, are in no danger of being weary of each other; and, unless naturally vicious, you will see them generally happy in marriage; whereas even the virtuous, in more affluent situations, are not secure from this ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... which, he said, had been given in Berlin with the coarsest bluntness. He mentioned, as a striking instance of this, a brief chorus in C major of male and female nymphs in the third act. By the introduction of a more moderate tempo and very soft piano I had tried to free this from the original coarseness with which Devrient had heard it rendered in Berlin—presumably with traditional fidelity. My most innocent device, and one which I frequently adopted, for disguising the irritating stiffness or the orchestral ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... military, and official, of their countrymen. Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian; and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of Hogarth, we should ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... coarse longing. To her her bronzes had typified something that she valued in herself. Her immense vanity had not been blended with those passions which shake many women, which had devastated Lady Sellingworth. A coarseness in her mind made her love to be physically desired by men, but no coarseness of body made her desire them. And she had supposed that she represented the ultra modern type of woman, the woman who without being cold—she would not acknowledge that she was cold—was free from the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... speaks truly and well, you remember how Mr. Taylor, in that noble play, works out to our view the sad sight of the deterioration of character, the growing coarseness and harshness, the lessening tenderness and kindliness, which are apt to come with advancing years. Great trials, we know, passing over us, may influence us either for the worse or the better; and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Dryden added coarseness to strength in his remarks when he wrote of one of Settle's plays:—"To conclude this act with the most rumbling piece of ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... a little tired. It has been such a strange afternoon. And that poor little girl, Monsieur—does that woman care well for her? She has the coarseness of a peasant, and the child not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... over the disgust I felt at the coarseness of the men I met. Indeed I found amongst business-gentlemen what affected me with the same kind of feeling—only perhaps more profoundly—a coarseness not of the social so much as of the spiritual nature—in a word, genuine selfishness; whereas this quality was rather less remarkable ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's influence was perceptibly upon the wane. Even Colonel Colquhoun wearied of her—to Evadne's great regret. For Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's vulgarity and coarseness of mind were always balanced by her undoubted propriety of conduct, and her faults were altogether preferable to the exceeding polish and refinement which covered the absolutely corrupt life of a new acquaintance ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... which is always mixed with tenderness—mere sanguinary ferocity being terrible and odious, but never sublime. [Greek: Agathoi polydakrytoi andres]—Men prone to tears are brave, says the proverbial Greek hemistich; for courage, which does not arise from mere coarseness of organisation, but from that sense of dignity and honour which constitutes the generous pride of a high mind, is founded ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Water will not dissolve resin, but spirit will; and when spirit which holds resin in solution is dropped into water, the resin immediately separates in solid particles, which render the water milky. The coarseness of this precipitate depends on the quantity of the dissolved resin. Professor Bruecke has given us the proportions which produce particles particularly suited to our present purpose. One gramme of clean mastic is dissolved in eighty-seven grammes of absolute alcohol, and the transparent ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... it is one singularly hard to be endured. I remember to have heard a young man, accustomed from childhood to the better habits of the country, but who went to sea a lad, before the mast, declare that the coarseness of his shipmates, and there is no vulgarity about a true sailor, even when coarsest, gave him more trouble to overcome, than all the gales, physical sufferings, labour, exposures and dangers, put together. I must confess, I have found it ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... her my name, and that means immortality." For eight years Francoise was the dutiful wife of her crippled husband, nursing him tenderly, managing his home and his purse, redeeming his writing from its coarseness, and generally proving her gratitude by a ceaseless devotion. Then came the day when Scarron bade her farewell on his death-bed, begging her with his last breath to remember him sometimes, and bidding her ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... general use. Table salt will do very well, but it is rather expensive if large quantities of vegetables are to be preserved. The rather coarse salt—known in the trade as "ground alum salt"—which is used in freezing ice cream can be used. Rock salt because of its coarseness and impurities should ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... barrier between their sacred books and the dangerous uncanonical Scriptures, namely, the intrinsic difference between them, the dignity of the one, and the puerility of the other. Of the uncanonical Gospels Dr. Ellicott writes: "Their real demerits, their mendacities, their absurdities, their coarseness, the barbarities of their style, and the inconsequence of their narratives, have never been excused or condoned" ("Cambridge Essays," for 1856, p. 153, as quoted in introduction of "The Apocryphal ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... resume the dress or obligations of their sex. Many were clothed as the men were, in flannel shirt and boots; rode their mules in unfeminine fashion, but with much ease and courage; and in their conversation successfully rivalled the coarseness of their lords. I think, on the whole, that those French lady writers who desire to enjoy the privileges of man, with the irresponsibility of the other sex, would have been delighted with the disciples who were carrying their principles into practice ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... out when they tried to be his equals. When I told him that his sister and I were engaged, something happened which I simply can't and won't describe. It seemed to me like some monstrous upheaval of madness. But I suppose the truth is painfully simple. There is such a thing as the coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the most ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... blundered, but he dared not say a word by reason of the respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he took his revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base fawner and despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla let him scold, while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself by rubbing his long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like the good tactician that the Canon hinted ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... of fall of the torrent exceeds one hundred feet to the mile it does not usually exhibit these shelves of detritus. Below that rate of descent they are apt to be formed. Much, however, depends upon the amount of detritus which the stream bears and the coarseness of it; moreover, where the water goes through a gorge in the manner of a flume with steep rocky sides, it can urge a larger amount before it than when it traverses a wide valley, through which it passes, it may be, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... lyric, the greatest poet before the Augustan era. He was born 87 B.C., and enjoyed the friendship of the most celebrated characters. One hundred and sixteen of his poems have come down to us, most of which are short, and many of them defiled by great coarseness and sensuality. Critics say, however, that whatever he touched he adorned; that his vigorous simplicity, pungent wit, startling invective, and felicity of expression make him one of the great poets ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 'Eothen,'" wrote to me a now famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... use and value in exchange. (Polit., I, 3, Schn.) Similarly D. Hume, who allows a period of luxury, culture, industry, of trade and manufactures, of freedom and circulation of money, to be preceded by one in which the feeling of wants is not awakened, in which coarseness and idleness prevail, one in which agriculture is alone pursued, and monetary economy and freedom decline, and trade by barter obtains. (Discourses, passim, especially On Interest and on Money.) A similar contrast we find frequently, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... weary with all the world. Her home seemed poorer and meaner than ever; the boarders disgusted her with their coarseness; teaching was unrelieved drudgery; everything was distasteful. To her mother's renewed inquiries about the party she replied wearily, "My dress was poor and mean, mother; and had I spent our year's income on my toilet, it would have still been poor, compared with those I saw last ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... The word hildlng or hinderling—a low wretch; it is applied to Catharine for the coarseness of her behaviour. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... writer in the British Quarterly for January, says of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, applies with equal force to Mrs. Davis. "She seems to have been saved from the coarseness and strenuous tone of the typical strong-minded woman, although probably some of her opinions might shock staid people who are innocent alike of philosophy and the doctrines of the new era." Though in fact this typical strong-minded woman of whom we ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... And where, alas! may this knowledge, so painful and so humiliating, be better acquired than in a colony? There we have the human heart laid open before us without veil or disguise: there we see it in all its coarseness, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... translation of the Linnaean system of vegetation into English from the Latin. His illustrious coadjutors exacted of him fidelity to the sense of their author, and they corrected Jackson's inelegant English, weeding it of its pompous coarseness. Darwin had already conceived the design of turning the Linnaean system into a poem, which, after he had composed it, was long handed about in manuscript; and, I believe, frequently revised and altered with the most sedulous care. The stage on which he has introduced his fancied ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... thoroughness, that openness of mind, that absence of vulgarity which he finds everywhere in French literature; and to the want of a similar institution in England he traces that eccentricity, that provincial spirit, that coarseness which, as he thinks, are barely compensated by English genius. Thus, too, Renan, one of its most distinguished members, says that it is owing to the academy "qu'on peut tout dire sans appareil scholastique ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... conviction led him to believe was inefficient, and he daringly introduced fresh, to the no small indignation of the more cut and dry portion of the faculty, for whose hate he returned contempt, of which he made no secret. From an extreme coarseness of manner, even those who believed in his skill were afraid to trust to his humour: and the dislike of his brother-practitioners to meet him superadded to this, damaged his interest considerably, and prevented his being called in until extreme danger frightened patients, or ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... passion hate can rouse. You declared I must stay with you, because I durst not go back; I had broken rules and my fastidious relations would have no more to do with me. Something like that! In a sense, it wasn't true; but you said it with brutal coarseness. When I struck you I meant to hurt; I looked for something that ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... justice and of legal right were fixed, there was not among his contemporaries, in the courts of this State, an advocate, whose efforts were so nearly irresistible before a jury. He has command of sarcasm and invective, without coarseness. He attacks oppression, meanness and fraud as if they were offences not only against the public, but against himself. He has never strayed from the profession to engage in any speculations or occupations to divert his thoughts from pure law, except for two years from 1840, while he ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... no singers to execute, even if the composer had the ability to conceive. Thus Percell's melody, though often original and expressive, is nevertheless more often rude and ungraceful. In the words of a recent writer on this subject, "We are often surprised to find elegance and coarseness, symmetry and clumsiness, mixed in a way that would be unaccountable, did we not consider that, in all the arts, the taste is a faculty which is slowly formed, even in the most highly gifted minds." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... keen eyes could make nothing of these people, except that they stood upon their dignity. To him they appeared to be of gypsy race; or partly of wild and partly perhaps of Lancastrian origin; for they rather "featured" the Lancashire than the Yorkshire type of countenance, yet without any rustic coarseness, whether of aspect, voice, or manners. The story of their settlement in this glen had flagged out of memory of gossip by reason of their calm obscurity, and all that survived was the belief that they were queer, and the certainty that they would not ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the whole cast of his work being obliged not to take off the irony) where he could not show his indignation, hath shewn his contempt, as much as possible; having here drawn as vile a picture as could be represented in the colours of Epic poesy."[3] On these grounds Pope justified the coarseness of his allusions to Mrs. Thomas (Corinna) and Eliza Haywood. But a statement of high moral purpose from the author of "The Dunciad" was almost inevitably the stalking-horse of an unworthy action. Mr. Pope's reasons, real and professed, for giving Mrs. Haywood a particularly ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... pages octavo, and is entitled, "Scottish Pastorals, Poems, Songs, &c., mostly written in the Dialect of the South, by James Hogg. Edinburgh: printed by John Taylor, Grassmarket, 1801. Price One Shilling." The various pieces evince poetic power, unhappily combined with a certain coarseness of sentiment. One of the longer ballads, "Willie and Keatie," supposed to be a narrative of one of his early amours, obtained a temporary popularity, and was copied into the periodicals. It is described by Allan Cunningham as a "plain, rough-spun pastoral, with some fine touches in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... recommendation of poetical language is certainly derived from those general associations, which give it a character of dignity or elegance, sublimity or tenderness. Every one knows that there are low and mean expressions, as well as lofty and grave ones; and that some words bear the impression of coarseness and vulgarity, as clearly as others do of refinement and affection. We do not mean, of course, to say anything in defence of the hackneyed common-places of ordinary versemen. Whatever might have been the original character of these unlucky phrases, they are now associated with nothing but ideas ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... already been, by those offensive young men. She had a strange sense, too, that her friend had neglected her for the last half-hour, had not been occupied with her, had placed a barrier between them—a barrier of broad male backs, of laughter that verged upon coarseness, of glancing smiles directed across the room, directed to Olive, which seemed rather to disconnect her with what was going forward on that side than to invite her to take part in it. If Verena recognised that Miss Chancellor was not in report, as her father said, when jocose young men ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance, Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and beautiful. And something pitiable, and ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... (9). The coarseness and vulgarity of alcoholic eroticism produce in public places, as well as in private, an importunate and obscene form of flirtation, which is brutally and cynically opposed to all sentiments of propriety ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... preserved, the best specimen is My Nannie, O. This song, and the one entitled Mary Morison render the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imagination and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much that degrades the life and ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... thing more! will this dialogue never end? Well, sir. What the devil is it?" Then he added, as if aware of the coarseness and gross impropriety of that expression. "Excuse me, sir, but it is late, and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and disposition; and may even be found where the martyr's temper is altogether wanting. We recognize that there is certain serviceable, fustian, every-day piety, where, together with a great deal of spiritual coarseness, insensibility to venial sin and imperfection, there exists a firm faith that would go cheerfully to the stake rather than deny God, or offend Him in any grave point that might be considered a casus belli. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... months the best of the humorous designs have been selected and bound into a handsome quarto volume.[M] Pen and pencil combine in making its pages laughable, and there are many incisive thrusts at the weak spots in society, but without coarseness ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... "raised rich," or, as he otherwise stated it, "cradled in the lap of luxury." His father was one of those rich Illinois farmers who are none the less coarse for all their money and farms. Owing to reverses of fortune, Dave had inherited none of the wealth, but all of the coarseness of grain. So he walked into Squire Plausaby's with his usual assurance, on the second evening ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... elaborate rose-bud. There was an appearance of ultra-refinement about her, a look of that refinement which is in itself a weakness, a poverty of blood, so to speak, the opposite and more pleasing but equally unhealthy extreme of coarseness. She looked very pretty as, having left Ruth, she stood by Charles, passing her little pink hand over the lowest carvings, dim and worn with the heat of many generations of fires, and listened with rapt attention to his answers ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Tripeaud with his knee under the table, to remind him that he must not express himself in the princess's parlors in the same manner as he would in the lobbies of the Exchange. To repair the baron's coarseness, the abbe thus continued: "There is no comparison, mademoiselle, between people of the class you name, and a young ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... is pre-eminently one of those poems by which Chaucer may be triumphantly defended against the charge of licentious coarseness, that, founded upon his faithful representation of the manners, customs, and daily life and speech of his own time, in "The Canterbury Tales," are sweepingly advanced against his works at large. In an ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... to Mademoiselle de Guerchi how imminent was her danger. At first she had thought the commander's visit might be a snare laid to test her, but the coarseness of his expressions, the cynicism of his overtures in the presence of a third person, had convinced her she was wrong. No man could have imagined that the revolting method of seduction employed could meet with success, and if ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... most modest man present. More gentlemanly manners and address no court in Christendom need require; his resolute simplicity and candor, always under the guidance of a delicate taste, never for a moment degenerated into coarseness or disregard even of the prejudices of others. His life, even in these minute particulars, showed how the whole man is harmonized by the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... did not undervalue the aesthetic side of existence. "So many think that we missionaries live a sort of glorified glamour of a life, and have no right to think of any of the little refinements and elegancies which rest and sooth tired and overstrained nerves—certainly coarseness and ugliness do not help the Christian life, and ugly things are not as a rule cheaper than beautiful ones." Her conviction was that a woman worth her salt could make any kind of house beautiful. At the same time she believed—and proved ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... fell queerly on the room. Mr. Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs. Baines's curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr. Scales had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex. Further, he had no suspicion of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a wrong version of it, Dick. I only convey the coarseness of the rejoinder, and I can give you no idea of the ineffable grace and delicacy which made her words sound like a humble apology. Her eyelids drooped as she curtsied, and when she looked up again, in a way that ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in colouring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the Roman School are absent: so also is their vigour. But where the grace of form and colour is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the readers of my novel will feel that in reckoning on such assistance, and being ready to take his bride, so to speak, from the hands of her protector, Dmitri showed great coarseness and want of delicacy. I will only observe that Mitya looked upon Grushenka's past as something completely over. He looked on that past with infinite pity and resolved with all the fervor of his passion that when once Grushenka told him she loved him and would marry him, it would mean the beginning ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... pounds to a tall Irishman, to join his famous body-guard, a regiment of men who were each over six feet high. He would kick women in the streets, abuse clergymen for looking on the soldiers, and insult his son's tutor for teaching him Latin. But, abating his coarseness, his brutality, and his cruelty, he was a Christian, after a certain model. He had respect for the institutions of religion, denounced all amusements as sinful, and read a sermon aloud, every afternoon, to his family. His son perceived ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... skilfully accounts for the discrepancy between the coarseness of his life and the refined beauty of much of ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... collect out of our dramatists from Elizabeth to Charles I. proofs of the manners of the times. One striking symptom of general coarseness of manners, which may co-exist with great refinement of morals, as, alas! vice versa, is to be seen in the very frequent allusions to the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in the conversation of virtuous ladies. This ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge |
