"Confessedly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... point I am arguing just now. The point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... on the King of Prussia, I observed to Johnson, 'It would seem then, Sir, that much less parts are necessary to make a King, than to make an Authour; for the King of Prussia is confessedly the greatest King now in Europe, yet you think he makes a very poor ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... a true Cornishman!" said Tregarthen, laughing; "and in regard to the fairies I may tell you that we are not without a few of them, although giants confessedly preponderate." ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... has been selected, because the parting of Hector and Andromache is perhaps the most pleasing episode in the Iliad, while it is confessedly one of the most ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... strongly marked characters, how much faith is to be placed in the ability of the Mound sculptor to fix in stone the features and expressions of the human countenance, infinitely more difficult subject for portrayal as this confessedly is? ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... of England. In drama the lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute. Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything. It is for this reason that a play like Locrine, which is confessedly, by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive' plays. Marino Faliero, though an episode ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... foresaw every bad thing that could possibly happen and none of the bright spots. It was a most depressing interview, but it left no doubt in the minds of the hearers that it would be quite useless to order an attack to be undertaken by a Commander and Divisional Generals whose hearts were confessedly not in it, who saw a Turk behind every bush, a battalion behind every hill, and a ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... gainer after all. But I think it will be difficult to prove an error in this case. The gospel truth is "put the leaven into the lump;" and why the gospel should not be put into our amusements, even into those which are confessedly abused, I cannot see. The more liable to abuse they are, the more they need regulating; and the practical workings of this principle when men have the courage to face prejudice and carry it out, triumphantly vindicate it. The man who ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... manners and our souls. And this will be easily known if we feel our dispositions any way influenced thereby; and that they are so is evident from many other instances, as well as the music at the Olympic games; and this confessedly fills the soul with enthusiasm; but enthusiasm is an affection of the soul which strongly agitates the disposition. Besides, all those who hear any imitations sympathise therewith; and this when they are ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... by which a mighty regeneration is to be worked. The issues of such an education will justify the claims made for women in these pages; then the spirit of vanity will yield to the spirit of self-devotion: that spirit confessedly natural to Women, and only perverted by wrong education. Content with the sphere of usefulness assigned her by Nature and Nature's God, viewing that sphere with the piercing eye of intellect, and gilding it with ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... The difference is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals; the difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... time and must have had an account from eyewitnesses of the tragedy. The details which make D'Aunay so cruel and relentless are denied by a Mr. Moreau in his Histoire de l'Acadie Francaise (Paris, 1873). This book is confessedly written at the dictation of living members of the D'Aunay family, and is, from the beginning to the end, an undiscriminating eulogy of D'Aunay and an uncompromising attack on the memory of La Tour and his wife. He attempts to deny that the fort was seized by treachery, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... of a man who loved England well, but who loved Rome better; and Wolsey has received but scanty justice from catholic writers, since he sacrificed himself for the catholic cause. His scheme was bold and well laid, being weak only in that it was confessedly in contradiction to the instincts and genius of the nation, by which, and by which alone, in the long run, either this or any other country has been successfully governed. And yet he might well be forgiven if he ventured on an unpopular course ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... William Walker, a lad nineteen years old, the son of a wealthy Barbadoes planter, wrote in three weeks a tragedy entitled Victorious Love (4to, 1698), which is confessedly a close imitation of Southerne's theme. It was produced at Drury Lane in June, 1698, with the author himself as Dafila, a youth, and young Mrs. Cross as the heroine Zaraida, 'an European Shipwrack'd an Infant at Gualata'. Possibly Verbruggen ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... to desert him. His alleged intemperance, however, which the Romans (a peculiarly sober people) might perhaps exaggerate, and for which he gave the excuse of a thirst produced by disease contracted in the dungeon of Avignon—evidently and confessedly did not in the least diminish his attention to business, which, according to his biographer, was at that time greater than ever.)—is prudent, wary, provident—reigns a few weeks—taxes the People, in support of the People, and is torn to pieces! ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Lincoln, to use one of his characteristic Western phrases, had "blazed the way," and Mr. Johnson took up that trail. A few weeks after his inauguration he issued a Proclamation outlining a plan for the reorganization of the State of North Carolina. That paper was confessedly designed as a general plan and basis for Executive action in the restoration of all the seceded States. Mr. Lincoln had, of course, foreseen that that subject would come up very shortly, in the then condition of affairs ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... under their eyes; they were not inclined to grant strange powers of taxation to a new assembly distant by a week's journey. This was a point to which people could never have been brought except as the alternative to something confessedly worse. ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... hopefulness or zeal. There were still others who did not hesitate to predict defeat and to avow that it was only for professional honor or advancement that they continued to serve under the National flag. These last were confessedly soldiers of fortune. The war was an education for all who were in it, and many a man began with reluctance and half-heartedness who was abundantly radical before the conflict was over. There was, however, a considerable class who practised on ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... council, the chiefs of the thirteen fires. His own tribes had been wasted, by a long and bloody war. The nation they had so long clung to, and by whose artifice they had been led to engage in the strife, stood confessedly vanquished. A new power had arisen in the land, what bearing would it have on their ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... but he has followed the sensational accounts circulated by the newspapers, and the survivors find his work a mere travesty of the facts. The narrative, however, does not purport to set forth the truth, but is confessedly imaginative.] ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... further for using a word upon which writers in these confessedly commercial days appear to have set a taboo? Then a passage from "The Study of Literature" (Arlo Bates) may serve ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... skaters, the warmth of the red-brick house-fronts under the gauze of white fog, the gleams of pale sunlight on the cuirasses of the mounted soldiers as they receded into the distance. Sebastian van Storck, confessedly the most graceful performer in all that skating multitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of the frozen water-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its expression of a perfect impassivity, or at least of a ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... teaches its own great lessons of life. Yet one or two suggestions of interpretation may not be amiss, for it is confessedly one of the most mystical of modern dramas. It may perchance be considered as representing the strife between paganism and Christianity in the early centuries of the Church,—the powers of magic and the hot passions of the human heart ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; of men who came in some instances to [153] great fame and fortune, by way of a literary cultivation of "science." That science, it has been often said, must have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world, confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, must necessarily consist very much in criticism; and, in the case of the more excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all, the eloquent and effective interpreter, for the delighted ears of others, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... confessedly unjust to break faith with any one: to violate an engagement, either express or implied, or disappoint expectations raised by our own conduct, at least if we have raised those expectations knowingly and voluntarily. Like the other obligations of justice already ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Some of these writers may appear to be travelling rather too fast or too far, and their assumptions may wear more of the aspect of plausibility than of probability. But on their atmospheric and aqueous hypothesis, vegetation in abundance is confessedly a legitimate consequence. If a recent writer has liberty to condense into a sentence the conclusion from the negative premiss in the argument by saying, "As there is but a little appearance of water or air upon the moon, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Jesus the Christ, we are told, 'Spirit is all, the flesh profiteth nothing;' thus from all classes of conscientious but confessedly diverse thinkers, we find statements of universal truth, and this is what the hungry, starving world is seeking with more earnestness ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... as the ne plus ultra of bridge-building. A recent writer speaks of it as "confessedly unrivaled as regards its colossal proportions, its architectural effect, or the general simplicity and massive character of its details." It crosses the river by three arches, of which the central one has a span ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... circumstances," adds this impartial investigator, "with a husband and three children, if she does her own work, feels that her hands are full. How these mill-workers, many of them frail-looking, and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do two jobs is a mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging about, pale, hollow-eyed and listless, often needlessly sharp and impatient with the children. These children are not only not mothered, never cherished, they are nagged and buffeted. The mothers are not ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... case of a MS. in which words or clauses are clearly omitted with design; where expressions are withheld which are confessedly harsh or critically difficult,—whole sentences or parts of them which have a known controversial bearing;—Suppose further that the same MS. abounds in worthless paraphrase, and contains apocryphal additions ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the lot of each of them has been determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign country is to ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... subconscious comparison with his own work. He broods constantly as to whether he himself, in some happy conjuncture of quick mind and environing silence and the sudden perfect impulse, might have written something like that. He is (poor devil) confessedly selfish. On every page he is aware of his own mind running with him, tingling him with needle-pricks of conscience for the golden chapters he has never written. And so his reading is, in a way, the perfection of exquisite misery—and his writing ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... that you, too, had let it go without protest, I was glad, and afraid; too—afraid you hadn't observed it. Did you? And did you question the propriety of it? Since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's hook, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I had ceased to regard the volume ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the Tzentals of Chiapas, in 1712, it was clearly and confessedly under the leadership of the nagualistic priesthood, as I shall indicate ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... general reader. The margin will show the great care bestowed on the poem by the Revisers; and the fewness and trifling nature of the changes maintained by the American Company will also show, in a confessedly difficult Book, the somewhat remarkable amount of the agreement between the two Companies. On the Prophetical Books I do not feel qualified to speak except in very general terms; and for illustrations must refer the reader to the large ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... quantitative relation between intelligence and cerebral organisation. And if it is said that matter and motion cannot produce consciousness because it is inconceivable that they should, we have seen at some length that this is no conclusive consideration as applied to a subject of a confessedly transcendental nature, and that in the present case it is particularly inconclusive, because, as it is speculatively certain that the substance of mind must be unknowable, it seems a priori probable that, whatever is the cause of the unknowable reality, this ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... coffee on board steamers? Why does the tea generally taste of boiled boots? Why is the milk scarce and thin? And why do they have those bleeding legs of boiled mutton for dinner? I ask why? In the steamers of other nations you are well fed. Is it impossible that Britannia, who confessedly rules the waves, should attend to the victuals a little, and that meat should be well cooked under a Union Jack? I just put in this question, this most interesting question, in a momentous parenthesis, and ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lecturer on the Law of Real Property at the Law School of the Boston University, an office whose duties he performed with great credit to himself, and profit to those whom he addressed. So thoroughly was he master of his subject, difficult and intricate as it confessedly is, that in not a single instance, except during the lectures of the last year, did he take a note or scrap of memoranda ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... feeling at the moment. Not so with Rivenoak. This chief arose, stretched his arm before him in a gesture of courtesy, and paid his compliments with an ease and dignity that a prince might have envied. As, in that band, his wisdom and eloquence were confessedly without rivals, he knew that on himself would properly fall the duty of first replying to the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... humanity, of love for our neighbor and emulous zeal for professional skill and superiority therein—should, after a probation of so long a period, and recorded experience of at least two thousand years, still remain, as it confessedly does in most respects, so little understood and generally of ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... shooting on the bare hills, which, by the way, are wilder, more solitary far, and more aloof from the abodes of men, than any thing between Boston and the Green Bay, I do not of course speak; as it confessedly is the most wild and ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... confessedly an inadequate figure of speech. There is a sense in which the member cannot be amputated from the body, and the soul cannot be divorced from its union with Christ. But we are not dealing now with our integral oneness with ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... himself, and in all his best books he is the chief subject and the chief object. Yet when he came to write confessedly and consecutively about himself he found it no easy task. Dr. Knapp gives an interesting account of the stages by which he approached and executed it. His first mature and original books, "The Zincali," or "The Gypsies of Spain," and "The Bible in ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present not to be decided, and of which the decision ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... was, according to this mythology of the poet, the son of Chrusaor; and Chrusaor was confessedly of Egyptian original: so that, whatever the fable may allude to, it must have been imported into Boetica from Egypt by some of the sons of Chus. The Grecians borrowed this term, and applied it to Apollo; and from this epithet, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... a glimpse of the superstitions and customs of remote ages. Greek mythology is confessedly the creation of poets; and to the bards of our own country we are indebted for some of our strangest fictions. Fletcher of Saltoun must have been fully aware of the poetic influence; for he expressed himself as willing to let any one who pleased make the laws, if he were permitted ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... was burning Hilliard's vitals. He had tried to make light of the connection between Eve and that unknown man, even after her extraordinary request for money, which all but confessedly she wanted on his account. He had blurred the significance of such a situation, persuading himself that neither was Eve capable of a great passion, nor the man he had seen able to inspire one. Now he rushed to the conviction that Eve had fooled him ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... Tertiary, and between that period and the present; also that the later gradations are finer, so as to leave it doubtful whether the succession is one of species—believed on the one theory to be independent, on the other, derivative—or of varieties, which are confessedly derivative. The proof of the finer gradation appears to be forthcoming. Des Hayes and Lyell have concluded that many of the middle Tertiary and a large proportion of the later Tertiary mollusca are specifically identical ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... was the life of the Canadian, he had his places of worship, where he had a moral training which elevated him immeasurably above the peasantry of England as well as of his old home. The clergy of Lower Canada confessedly did their best to relieve the ignorance of the people, but they were naturally unable to accomplish, by themselves, a task which properly devolved on the governing class. But under the French regime in Canada, the civil authorities were as little anxious to enlighten the people ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... difficulty, thus confessedly pressing against both systems, is not capable on our principles, of a much more full and satisfactory conclusion. For we not only say, as Wesley does, that 'God knew that it was best, on the whole, ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... interpretation of the dreams, the famine came upon them in the eighth year; and because this misfortune fell upon them when they had no sense of it beforehand, [5] they were all sorely afflicted by it, and came running to the king's gates; and he called upon Joseph, who sold the corn to them, being become confessedly a savior to the whole multitude of the Egyptians. Nor did he open this market of corn for the people of that country only, but strangers had liberty to buy also; Joseph being willing that all men, who are naturally akin to one another, should have assistance ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints. In many instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions and friends. Why do we feel so sure that ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... who had confessedly dressed herself for dancing, but whose pretty face had by some means been overlooked, drawled towards us, and asked me why I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... considerations of time, and person, to some general and indefinite topic;—not one who knows how to enliven it by an agreeable digression: not one who can rouse the indignation of the Judge, or extort from him the tear of compassion;—or who can influence and bend his soul (which is confessedly the capital perfection of an Orator) in such a manner as shall best ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian audience by a play of Sophocles,—more especially ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... He treated me now confessedly as a cipher. The prince, the princess, my grandfather, and me—he had gathered us together, he said. I heard from him that the prince, assisted by him in the part of an adviser, saw no way of cutting the knot but by a marriage. All were at hand for a settlement of the terms:—Providence ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... did that—brought him nearer to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was, anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition. The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a point of Mr. Galbraith's poverty-stricken religion to denounce all superstitions, however diverse in character, with equal severity. To believe in the second sight, for instance, or ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... shrine, a nameless sense of something impure in the whole subject; an undefinable something in his way of looking at it, which has often made the purity of men—blameless in their outer life—- sadden and perplex me almost as much as the actions and words of confessedly impure men. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Mass. Rec. vol. iv. pt. 2, p. 58.] And it is a sign of the boldness, or else of the indiscretion, of those in power, that this crisis was chosen for striking a new coin, [Footnote: 1662, May 7.]—an act confessedly illegal and certain to give offence in England, both as an assumption of sovereignty and ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... centuries in Europe. I suspect that many of us are, after all, really camping temporarily in civilized conditions; and that going into the wilderness is an escape, longed for, into our natural and preferred state. Consider what this "camping out" is, that is confessedly so agreeable to people most delicately reared. I have no desire to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... could be making tour of the Regionic capitals with us, Dolly! There are swift little one-rail electric expresses running daily from one capital to another, but these are used only when speed is required, and we are confessedly in no hurry: Aristides wanted me to see as much of the country as possible, and I am as eager as he. The old steam-roads of the capitalistic epoch have been disused for generations, and their beds are now the country roads, which are everywhere kept in beautiful repair. There are no horse vehicles ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... it leads them in their desire to rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at a higher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order to keep up a false position. I have come across those who have fallen where this has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that such wrong ideas had been put into their heads. Young people now look upon many honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is a general rush for those which seem to offer ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... book form. He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools—"The Conchologist's First Book," it was called. This was unmistakably a mere "pot-boiler" and confessedly a compilation, but it set the little authors whose namby-pamby works the self-appointed Defender of the Purity of Style in American Letters had consigned to an early grave, like a nest of hornets buzzing about ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His "Odyssey," (1783,) his "Iliad," (1791,) and his "Luise," (1795,) were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other classic metres into England, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... in the Mysteries were all in reality Nature-Gods; none of whom could be consistently addressed as mere heroes, because their nature was confessedly super-heroic. The Mysteries, only in fact a more solemn expression of the religion of the ancient poetry, taught that doctrine of the Theocracia or Divine Oneness, which even poetry does not entirely conceal. They were not in any open hostility with the popular religion, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... requiring little enforcement; while, the main thing demanded of them being sermons in some sense their own—honey culled at least by their own bees, and not bought in jars, much was said about the plan and composition of sermons, about style and elocution, and action—all plainly and confessedly, with a view to pulpit-success—the lowest of all low successes, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... or composed and narrated to each other "interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest; it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet—you know me—for me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. I have a body myself; in the brown leaf, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... turned against him, a result for which we should then be directly responsible. If a general or universal request could be taken to show that lack of independence is operating to deprive the Filipino of his liberty and to estop him in the pursuit of happiness, the situation of affairs would be confessedly acute. But it is a fact patent to all who know the country, that the Filipino enjoys a freedom at least as great as that of the average American citizen, and is at complete liberty to pursue happiness in any way consistent with the law of the land and with the rights of others. We ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... even so great innocence as mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did. They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have been witnessed during the last hundred years this"—i.e., the re-discovery of the principle of Divine immanence—"is the greatest, the most revolutionary," it must certainly be of paramount importance that we should understand and apply that principle aright. Confessedly, it denotes a great and far-reaching change; can we, then, in the first instance, briefly and plainly state what this change is from, what it involves, and in what respect it is supposed to help us in dealing with ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... functions of his office, together with the chief editorship of the Revue de Theologie. His opinions are to be found in that periodical, and in several successful volumes of sermons. He professes to be neither satisfied with Rationalism in its destructive sense, nor with orthodoxy. He is confessedly one of the champions of the Critical School. Skepticism, he contends, is perfectly legitimate. We are authorized to doubt; our opinions are fallible; we must be prepared to change them whenever we think we can find better ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a creature possessed of a mind and reason.' Again, 'While we do thus, we act most agreeably to the right frame and constitution of our souls, and consequently most naturally; and all the actions of nature, are confessedly very sweet and pleasant'; of which very thing you say, 'the heathens had a great sense' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Dr. Johnson, is 'a vicious expression, probably corrupted from a phrase more pure, but now somewhat obsolete, ... "the brass is a-forging."' Yet, with a true Tory's timidity and aversion to change, it is not surprising that he went on preferring what he found established, vicious as it confessedly was, to the end. But was the expression 'vicious' solely because it was a corruption? In 1787 William Beckford wrote as follows of the fortune-tellers of Lisbon: 'I saw one dragging into light, as I passed by ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... The institution, on the part of Government, of an inquiry into the destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and remote districts, with a view of marking out places where elementary schools are particularly needed; and the holding out of special encouragement to whatever ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and which, from its inception in this department, has contributed so largely to the efficiency and growth of the organization. With the retrogression of the western departments, Massachusetts in this year went to the front in point of numbers, as confessedly also in perfection of organization and completeness of Grand Army work, and held that position until 1880, when Pennsylvania passed her in point of membership. It will be impossible in the limit of this article to speak ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... while, to allow free expression of opinion; and, with one exception, all present manifested a desire for another attack, in full force,—Howard, Meade, and Reynolds being especially urgent to this purpose. The one dissentient voice was Sickles; and he expressed himself, confessedly, more from a political than a strategic standpoint. He allowed the military reasons to be sound for an advance, and modestly refrained from putting his opinion against that of men trained to the profession of arms; though all allowed his right to a valid judgment. But he ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... private correspondence may fairly be inferred (exclusive of other evidence) from the style and manner in which they are conceived: for though plain and familiar, and sometimes animated, they are by no means exempt from such inaccuracies as must unavoidably occur in the rapid effusions of a confessedly inexperienced writer. ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... necessarily ascertain in what way it is malformed before he can understand how it became so, and for this purpose any scheme that will enable him readily to detect the kind of monstrosity he is examining, even though it be confessedly artificial and imperfect will be better than a more philosophical arrangement which circumstances ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... which I am by no means prepared to do, that the Sirdars are not treacherously or hostilely disposed to the British Government, of what advantage, what defence to us is the fidelity of the Chiefs, if they are confessedly unable to control the army which is as avowedly hostile to us? That which we desire to secure is a peaceful and well-governed neighbour, and a frontier free from alarms, nor demanding a permanent garrison of 50,000 ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... hostility there is no trace in the Memorabilia. Such a rivalry is more characteristic of an imitator than of an original writer. The (so-called) Symposium of Xenophon may therefore have no more title to be regarded as genuine than the confessedly ...
— Symposium • Plato
... filius Noae. The author of the Chronicon Paschale speaks of [245]Chus, as of the line of Shem: and Theophilus in his treatise to Autolycus does the same by [246]Mizraim. Others go farther, and add Canaan to the [247]number. Now these are confessedly the immediate sons of [248]Ham: so that we may understand, who was properly alluded to in these passages ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... importance, as well as the unexampled strangeness of the events, and also that strong additional stimulant, the mysterious uncertainty that hangs over the character of the man. If it be doubtful whether any history (exclusive of such as is confessedly fabulous) ever attributed to its hero such a series of wonderful achievements compressed into so small a space of time, it is certain that to no one were ever assigned so ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... eyeglasses, in the ninth chapter. And so on. We would not imply that all this is lacking in distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which Stevenson could give to his work. Ought one to look for it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a book ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... may ask, might have been the consequence if the cry of gold for the picking up had been raised earlier, in the time, say, of the dual government, when, as is well known, the people were discontented with a government which, excellent as it confessedly was for the times, had its own profit first of all to be considered, instead of coming, as it did, to a people which, rejoicing in its newly-found freedom, was not to be reckoned on for favoring any schemes of wildness or riot? I do not suggest ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... of the book is to establish that "miracles do not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles do happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... is no evil more destructive of the best interests of Society, or confessedly more difficult to deal with remedially, than that which is known as the Social Evil. We have already seen something of the extent to which this terrible scourge has grown, and the alarming manner in which it affects our ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... differ from high authority, I have not a thought of detraction. None can venerate the NESTORS in science who have enriched its annals, more than I, and though we reverse their judgments, their errors are confessedly ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... however superficial, by way of explanation. And we are compelled, moreover, to find a phrase which will put our own efforts in an ideal light—otherwise we cannot go on fighting. No nation can fight confessedly for a mean or base object. Every nation inscribes on its banner Freedom, Justice, Religion, Culture versus Barbarism, or something of the kind, and in a sense redeems itself in so fighting. It saves its soul even though bodily it may be conquered. ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... I., written twenty-five years later. It has been pointed out that Points of Misery, 1823, by Charles Molloy Westmacott (Bernard Blackmantle of the English Spy), contains the poem with slight alterations. But Westmacott reaped where he could, and his book is confessedly not wholly original. Lamb seems to me to admit authorship by implication fairly completely. Westmacott was only thirteen when ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... marriage feast, while from the circumstances it appeared that no marriage had taken place, we should experience no difficulty in explaining the apparent incongruity. But in this case there is no reason for adopting the exceptional, and the strongest reason for retaining what is confessedly the ordinary and natural signification of the term. The conception of the Redeemer as the bridegroom, and his redeemed people as the bride, lies too deep in Scripture and protrudes too frequently from its surface to leave any doubt concerning the allusion in the parable. The feast, introduced ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be regarded with disfavor by many, even the most temperate, of the judges trained ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Agriculture, confessedly the largest interest of the nation, has not a department nor a bureau, but a clerkship only, assigned to it in the Government. While it is fortunate that this great interest is so independent in its nature as to not have demanded and extorted more from the Government, I ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... of the Empress Irene, who had deposed her son Constantine VI., and put out his eyes, that she might have his place, the Byzantine throne was vacant, in the estimation of the Italians, who contended that the crown of the Caesars could not be worn by a woman. Confessedly it was time that the Pope should exercise the power reposing in him as Head of the Church, and take away from the heretical and effeminate Greeks the Imperial crown, and bestow it upon some strong, orthodox, and worthy prince ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of course, to every literary person, that Bentley attempted to amend Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and that, on the whole, he made a very signal failure. It has been a matter of great surprise on the part of many, that one who is so confessedly superior in the criticism of classical poetry, whose ear was so exquisitely sensitive and accurate when awakened by ancient lyres, should prove himself such a driveller in the presence of the grandest cathedral-music of modern times. Coleridge took occasion to observe ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... American public school system over the English, considered merely as an instrumentality for the general education of the masses of a people, and not for the production of any especially privileged or cultivated class, is generally ascribed the confessedly higher average of intelligence and capacity among (to use a phrase which is ostensibly meaningless in America) the lower orders. But the educational system of the country has been by no means the only factor in producing this result; and it may be worth while merely as a matter ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the antiquity and grounds of their rights as British subjects, and to the fact of their not being represented in Parliament, of the impracticability of being so, and "the oppressive Stamp Act, confessedly imposing internal taxes, and the late Acts of Parliament giving and granting certain duties in the British colonies, mainly tending to the same end," the Virginia House of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... author, or to this or that date. The attempt to find date or author for a genuine popular song is as futile as a similar search in the case of a Maerchen. It is to be asked, then, whether what is confessedly true of folk-tales,—of such stories as the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella,—is true also of folk-songs. Are they, or have they been, as universally sung as the fairy tales have been narrated? Do they, too, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... that God will banish those from his presence who long for it; and bring those to dwell in it who do not desire it! A supposition, which, in our view, carries its own confutation in it. For the all important inquiry is, confessedly, how to obtain salvation? The solution which the supposition exhibits, is this, by being willing ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... hatred of the Southern leaders who had hindered his advancement when Buchanan was elected President, and he was bubbling over with resentment against them. He introduced the subject to the President of the treatment to be awarded to the leaders of the rebellion when its powers should be confessedly broken, and he was earnest in demanding that Davis and other conspicuous leaders of the Confederacy should be tried, condemned and ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... entire, and that Cato was gone to Africa with a considerable body of men which he had collected after their flight, he lamented to his friends his great error, in suffering himself to be forced into an engagement on land, and making no use of those forces, in which he was confessedly stronger; nor even taking care to fight near his fleet, that, in case of his meeting with a check on land, he might have been supplied from the sea with another army, capable of making head against the enemy. Indeed, we find no greater mistake in Pompey's whole conduct, nor a more remarkable ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... novelist and man of letters, who is better known under his bizarre pseudonym of Stendhal, is a somewhat unusual figure among French writers. He was curiously misappreciated by his own generation, whose literary movements he in turn confessedly ignored. He is recognized to-day as an important link in the development of modern fiction, and is even discussed concurrently with Balzac, in the same way that we speak of Dickens and Thackeray, Emerson ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... aquiline, or retrousse; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one ideal, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... who ask pity for their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive that they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who make no bargain for apologies—it is this that men and women are urged to learn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike they ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... admittedly, unlettered; you are confessedly a chevalier of industry; personally you are exceedingly distasteful to me. But it is useless to deny that you are the most extraordinary man I ever saw.... How soon can you take ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth to the "savage soyle" of Ireland; his descriptions of the country, his dialogue on Irish affairs, his "Amoretti" and "Colin Clout's come home again," belong confessedly to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the spirits of birds and animals killed in hunting or offered in sacrifice come and live again upon the earth clothed with a body; and they believe, further, that they appear here for the special benefit of men, particularly Ainu hunters." The Aino, Mr. Batchelor tells us, "confessedly slays and eats the beast that another may come in its place and be treated in like manner"; and at the time of sacrificing the creatures "prayers are said to them which form a request that they will come again and furnish viands for another feast, as if it were an honour ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of the humanitarian, the liberal-orthodox and the devotional, but in all things confessedly religious, exerted themselves for the ten years named, unbroken. The death of one member of this group of leaders, the head of one of the three households peculiarly identified with its work, appreciably weakened the group. But in the thirteen years of its influence, it united ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... all the gods were born; were born infants; passed through the stages of helplessness and growth; from all which the inference was but too fatally obvious. Besides, there were grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers in the Pantheon: some of these were confessedly superannuated; nay, some had disappeared. Even men, who knew but little of Olympian records, knew this, at least, for certain, that more than one dynasty of gods had passed over the golden stage of Olympus, had made their exit, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the same ground. They have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality: they have alleged—as they had a fair right to do—the probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies have been enlisted—and who can blame them?—in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and—as they ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Protestant teachers, who destroy the whole intrinsic virtue of the Sacrament by giving to their followers nothing but bread and wine. The difference between them and us lies in this—that under one form we give the substance, while they under two forms confessedly give only ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... whole. Most carefully were all these circumstances weighed, and the foundations of the new Government laid upon principles of reciprocal concession and equitable compromise. The jealousies which the smaller States might entertain of the power of the rest were allayed by a rule of representation confessedly unequal at the time, and designed forever to remain so. A natural fear that the broad scope of general legislation might bear upon and unwisely control particular interests was counteracted by limits strictly drawn around the action of ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... philosophical and rhetorical writings were confessedly founded more or less on Greek originals.[16] The stores from which he principally drew in writing the Cato Maior are clearly indicated in several parts of the work. Passages from Xenophon's Oeconomicus are translated in Chapters 17 and 22. In Chapters 2 and 3 there is a close ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell |
