"Desultory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desultory conversation, he strolled away from Varhely, and gradually approached Marsa, who, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes lowered, seemed absorbed in contemplation of the ceaseless flow ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... her adherence to religious principle and the Acts of Congress. For the law, merely as law, she had the profoundest veneration, viewing the heterogeneous statutes passed from time to time by desultory legislators much as if they had in some mysterious way been handed down from Mount Sinai along with ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... all was quiet—except for the unearthly sounds emanating from the nostrils of one Tich sleeping in the reserve troughs with one side of his features buried in an inch of brown mud. Desultory conversation came down from the wide trough "Old man Casey" had dug and had adorned with an empty whisky bottle found in the grass. He was looking at it lovingly where it stood mouth downwards: for the obvious reason, he observed, that its ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... quotes a passage from one of his own speeches in which any change in the order would destroy the rhythm. Cicero gives various clausulae which his ears told him to be good or bad, but his remarks are desultory, as also are those of Quintilian, whose examples were largely drawn from Cicero's writings. It was left for modern research to discover rules of harmony which the Romans obeyed unconsciously. Other ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... to write again, I would endeavour to give it. But I began and wandered forward, like one in a pleasant country, getting to the top of one hill to see a prospect, and to the bottom of another to enjoy a shade, and what wonder if my course has been devious and desultory, and many of my excursions altogether unprofitable to the advance of my journey. The Dwarf Page is also an excrescence, and I plead guilty to all the censures concerning him. The truth is, he has a history, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... scheme, von Schalckenberg had, as I have said, made certain arrangements which, after a little desultory talk with M'Bongwele, he proceeded to carry out. The first impression which he desired to produce upon the king was that of our invulnerability to injury; and with this object he produced a little red rosette, which ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... his trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti. A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much desultory fighting, in which several—and the dentist, I believe, amongst the number—bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am reminded of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who had been a very careless and desultory attendant, sometimes upon the Catholic chapel, sometimes upon the Protestant church, now became a very regular frequenter of the latter place of worship; the object of his worship being not the Creator, but the creature, whom, if he missed from ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... if practicable, to make good their losses already incurred. From Virginia and the New England states, where they were few in number, they had mostly fled, and their estates had been confiscated. In New York and South Carolina, where they remained in great numbers, they were still waging a desultory war with the patriots, which far exceeded in cruelty and bitterness the struggle between the regular armies. In many cases they had, at the solicitation of the British government, joined the invading army, and been organized into companies and regiments. The regular troops defeated ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... of desultory reading so-called, of the habit of general information, and of the habit of going about noticing ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Our people are and will be readers. They are generally prepared to make a good use of books of a higher order than those offered to them in so cheap and attractive a form by our enterprising publishers. Now, either their energies will be wasted in a desultory course of reading, by which they will gain only a superficial knowledge of almost every conceivable subject, or they must be furnished with the means, which they are so well prepared to use to advantage, of going to the bottom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... chances of royalty. But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected to find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... July there was desultory fighting, and on the 3d, General Shafter telegraphed to the Secretary of War that he was considering the withdrawal of his troops to a strong position, about five miles in the rear. The Secretary ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... a rambling, desultory sort of fashion and quite a low tone of voice, as if he were ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the East, fate was against the independents, where the weakness of Mario had caused the loss of Cuman. In other sections, the troops had rebelled against the authority of Bolvar, and had begun to fight in the same desultory way as before. All this was not sufficient to shake the constancy and faith of Bolvar. He addressed a letter to Pueyrredn, Supreme Director of the Provinces of the River Plata, using these ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... for themselves," is often inconsiderately said. Where children see only a part they cannot judge of the whole; and from the superficial view which they can have in short visits and desultory conversation, they can form only a false estimate of the objects of human happiness, a false notion of the nature of society, and false opinions ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... listless mood changing to animation; anecdotes, or anything of that desultory kind, being far more acceptable to ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... him with his poor mother. How softened were all his thoughts about that difficult and troublesome lady! As it happened, he had a good deal of desultory medical knowledge, for the problems and perils of the body had always attracted his pessimist sense. Yet it did not help him much at this juncture. At one moment he said to himself, "eighteen months—she will live ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the 3d the battle was renewed, but the enemy seemed to have expended his energy in the assault of the previous night, and the firing along the lines was desultory until stopped by my sending the following letter within the ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... population had by these rather desultory methods been increased to a few over four hundred souls. The majority could not be described as welcome guests. They had rarely come into the country with the deliberate intention of settling but rather as a traveler's chance. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... weeks passed in this desultory fashion, then Cornstalk and Black Hoof returned to the village with three warriors and a negro woman. The woman had been captured at Sapling Grove within three hundred yards of Captain Evan Shelby's house, the woman told me. She also ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Of the previous winter she had passed three months with some relatives in England, and there she had learned to ride to hounds, had first met Gerard Maule, and had made acquaintance with Lady Chiltern. Gerard Maule had wandered to Italy after her, appearing at Florence in his desultory way, having no definite purpose, not even that of asking Adelaide to be his wife,—but still pursuing her, as though he wanted her without knowing what he wanted. In the course of the Spring, however, he had ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... a thin red line that stretched across the Plains of Abraham. But the Americans dared not face it. The newly arrived ships might, they feared, carry a force up the river and cut off retreat; so, after some desultory skirmishing, the investing army fled. It was now commanded by General Wooster, for Arnold had gone to Montreal. The flight soon became a panic. Arms, clothes, food, private letters and papers were thrown away. Nairne was in command ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... so with the Pilgrim's Progress. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work, he said, was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... few people in the Baccarat Room, some twelve men, and four or five ladies who were broken up into groups, and talking with one another in the intimate, desultory fashion in which people talk who meet daily in pursuit of ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sight—we opened with a volley of small shot. We peppered one another with harmless comments on the weather and the state of the crops. He advanced cabbages and I countered with sugar-beets. I am quite aware that there are good tacticians who deprecate the use of skirmish lines and the desultory fire of the musketry of small talk. They would advance in grim silence and open at once with the crushing fire ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... questions that were put to him. There never was anything to be called conversation at the dinner-table at Beech Park; and the general practice was in no danger of being departed from on the present occasion. The Earl hated to converse—it was a bore; and he now merely exchanged a few desultory sentences with his son, as he ate his olives and drank his claret. Lady Juliana, indeed, spoke even more than her usual quantity of nonsense, but nobody listened to it. Lady Emily was somewhat perplexed in her notions about her ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... and few things make a man more angry than for his wife to aspire to it. No such ideas had ever troubled me; I had more important things to think of, or, at any rate, something to be better carried out. And of all these desultory thoughts it came that I packed up that odious but very lovely locket, without further attempt to unriddle it, and persuaded my very good and clever Mrs. Busk to let me start right early. By so doing I could have three hours ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... enclosed the premises, and the typical well of the country lifted its curving pole in the front yard only a few feet from the roadway. Two women were seated on the worn stone slab in the opening that served for a gate, evidently basking in the afternoon sun and engaged in desultory chat. When Leigh dismounted from his wheel and asked for a drink of water, they moved slightly to let him pass, and he went up to the well to help himself. He lowered and raised the dripping bucket, not without awkwardness and a sense of pleasure in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... two large collections of epic poetry. The one comprised poems relating to the great events and enterprises of the Heroic age, and characterised by a certain poetical unity; the other included works tamer in character and more desultory in their mode of treatment, containing the genealogies of men and gods, narratives of the exploits of separate heroes, and descriptions of the ordinary pursuits of life. The poems of the former class passed under the name of Homer; while those of ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... consolation of having received an education. His nature revolted at the religious formalism of priestcraft; his mind turned in disgust from the scholastic husks of its superficial knowledge. What he had learned came from inborn capacity, from desultory reading, and from the untutored imaginings of his garden at Brienne, his cave at Ajaccio, or his barrack chambers. What more plausible than that he should first turn to the land of his birth with some hope of happiness, usefulness, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... you of it." Tabs spoke with an equal quietness. To any one watching they would have appeared to be two handsome men of the soldier type engaged in desultory conversation. "I have to accuse you of it. I want you to glance through ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... U.S. regulars—Van Rensselaer being wounded in six places—hurried his men under the shelter of the overhanging rocks, keeping up an intermittent fire, and waited for reinforcements. For almost two hours this desultory firing continued. With the cessation of the storm and arrival of broad daylight, six more boats attempted to reach the Queenston landing. One boat was sunk by a discharge of grape from Dennis's howitzer; another, with Colonel Fenwick, of the U.S. artillery, was swept below the ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Book" were still dubious, Scott offered him the editorship of an Anti-Jacobin magazine. Irving declined it, first on the ground of his dislike for politics, and second on account of his irregular habits of mind. "My whole course of life has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would a weathercock. Practice and training may ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... them glancing at me as if they wondered what sort of person I could be—as though I had become something different from a girl by answering questions in the witness-box. By two o'clock we were back in court again; and how changed everything seemed! All that desultory feeling of the morning was gone, and as I looked about over the faces I could see how every one's mind was fixed on the same thing. A woman whom I did not know, jostling at my shoulder as I went in, confided to me ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... pleased look of one who had unexpectedly found a sympathetic intelligence. "Do I? This is interesting. Let's sit down." In their desultory rambling they had reached, quite unconsciously, the large boulder at the roadside. Mamie hesitated a moment, looked up and down the road, and then, with an already opulent indifference to the damaging of her spotless skirt, sat ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... quotations from them in the volumes on Wit and Humor, Imagination and Fancy, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and the rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would have followed, but he had not read these since ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows. The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... shelter of comparative security. After I had gone outside the firing gradually fell off, the stockade was unoccupied, the insurgents' flag was struck, and whatever fighting was then going on was confined to the further slope of the hill on which the stockade was situated. As some desultory firing was still going on, I advanced about fifty yards down the gully, in order to insure safety by getting upon lower ground; by this time, with the exception of an occasional cheer from the military or police, everything was perfectly quiet, and from where I stood neither soldier ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... Turkish border. It was midday. V—— was quietly breakfasting in his tent, the horses picketed, the men smoking or asleep. Suddenly the sound of firing was heard about a mile off, not sharp and loud, but slow and desultory, like the pop, pop, pop of a rifle or revolver. V—— was not in the least alarmed, but, the firing continuing for some time, he thought well at last to inquire into the matter. What was his surprise, on emerging from his tent, to ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... scholarships and fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools, there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree. No one ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and see her flowers in the bay window of the drawing-room, which she had fitted up as a tiny conservatory; while her mother sat down to the piano and played dreamy music in a desultory fashion. I like dreamy music, although it always makes me melancholy— indeed, all music affects me the same way, in spite of my not being by any means what you would call a sad person. On the contrary, I am supposed to be one of the most light-hearted fellows ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... task, had learned books and other things not mentioned in the curriculums of the schools she sent him to—and when the bag was reported by Phoebe to be empty, he had returned with inward relief to the desultory life of the Hart ranch ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... the great marksman, who had fired that shot. He liked to think that it was so, and he rejoiced also at this certain evidence that the little garrison was as dauntless as ever. He watched the Alamo for nearly an hour, and he saw that the firing was desultory. Not more than a dozen cannon shots were fired during that time, and only three or four rifles replied from the Alamo. Toward noon the firing ceased entirely, and Ned knew that this was in very fact and truth the lull ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Preface that the pages which follow do not pretend to be a history of piracy, but are simply an attempt to gather together, from various sources, particulars of those redoubtable pirates and buccaneers whose names have been handed down to us in a desultory way. ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... secure the picket, the regiments went forward, just as a desultory firing from the front showed that the alarm had been given by Sullivan's attack. Pushing on, a sight of the enemy was gained,—a confused mass of men some three hundred yards away, but in front of them two guns were already being wheeled into position by artillerists, with the obvious purpose ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... with oaths unknown to all but them, While some essayed to frame the words of prayer, Or to articulate the stern command, And one, in most supreme authority, Declaimed a ponderous regal ordinance, But heard a sea of unfamiliar sounds, Confused and desultory turbulence, and dissonance of harsh, discordant tones, Instead of due attention and applause; Nor were his words and usual forms of speech Respected by the idle, wondering craft, Which lately ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... when a box of Havanas stood open on the table. During the momentary lull thus occasioned, I caught the Major's twinkling eyes glancing evasively toward me, as he leaned whispering some further instructions to Tommy, who again took up his desultory ballad, while I turned and fled for the street, catching, however, as I went, and high above the laughter of the crowd, the satire of this quatrain to ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... duties as a landlord, whatever the danger; though of course she, poor thing, could hardly be expected to see it in that light. He evidently viewed this absenteeism as the cause of the wreck of Dermot's youth, and those desultory habits of self-indulgence and dissipation which were overcoming that which was good and noble in him; and the good old man showed that he blamed himself for what he had conceded to his sister in the first shock of her misfortune. Harold had told him of the warm feeling shown ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to talking, even the public school children and students in all the higher institutions were profoundly interested. The press and the pulpit broke their silence and from all over the state came the echo. It was the firing of the signal guns. The response came desultory, as the rattle of musketry in a skirmish, then heavier from the bigger guns, as is the case in all reformatory work. The criticisms and comments were varied, often amusing, reflecting the agitation from ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... the Bonnaxes, as they were on their way to join the Flat-heads; and the former tribe not being able to effect the intended junction, threw itself among the Cayuses and Nez-perces. These three combined nations, after a desultory warfare, gave way before the second war-party; and the Bonnaxes, being now rendered desperate by their losses and the certainty that they would be exterminated if the Shoshones should conquer, joined the Callapoos and Umbiquas, to make one ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter. He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let them know that he considered himself above them. His reading was desultory; in fact, everything he did was desultory. He was not selfish in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather was he distinguished by a large and liberal open- handedness; but he was liberal also to himself to a remarkable ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... by which Butler attracted some readers and revolted others throw no shadow over his writings. He is a placid enlightened professor, whose real good feeling and frequent shrewdness should not be overlooked in consequence of the rather desultory and often superficial mode of reasoning. This, however, suggests a final ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... through the evening; Elizabeth played cribbage with Mr. Rhodes, and Elsie gave snatches of desultory music at the piano; every time her fresh young voice rang out in joyous song Elizabeth started, as if an unseen dagger had ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... stated that this practice was due to the exhaustion of the soil. That, however, is open to question, for five or ten years' desultory cultivation on the part of the Indian would scarcely exhaust the soil so much that people would go to the great labor of making new clearings and moving their villages. Moreover, in the Southern States it is well known today that the soil is exhausted much more rapidly than farther north because ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... came to Banklands one pleasant summer day, watched the busy people with a desultory sort of interest, and ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... interest. 'I have had a good deal of conversation,' wrote the Duke, 'with old Tierney at Cassiobury about you.... I find with pleasure that he has a very high opinion of your debating powers; and says, if you will stick to one branch of politics and not range over too desultory a field, you may become eminently useful and conspicuous in the House of Commons.... The line I should recommend for your selection would be that of foreign politics, and all home politics bearing on civil and religious ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... A desultory conversation followed for about an hour, when the steam-whistle sounded, and the up-train arrived. The Colonel got on board, and bidding us 'good-night,' went on to Wilmington. Andy then proposed we should look up sleeping accommodations. It was useless to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... had been carried on hitherto by Bessie. In a lamentably desultory fashion it is true; but now that, for economy's sake, they had restricted themselves to a fire in only one sitting-room the poor child's tuition had to be abandoned. It would have been impossible to live within the four walls wherein the elder daughter and the ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... is here related came to the knowledge of the writer in desultory conversations with Hodgkinson, and two other persons now in America. "I have very often," said John, "reflected on the success of our stratagems, and could not help inferring from it a truth which moral philosophers have ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... want of order, a rambling, unconnected, desultory manner, is commonly objected; as Hume styles it, "extreme carelessness of method;" and this is so often observed, as to be justly an object of dread. But this is occasioned by that indolence and want of discipline ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... is much the same affair, whether it be a tea merely, or a musicale, or a literary occasion. If merely a reception, conversation and the desultory chat of society, the drifting about and the greeting of friends, and incidentally the cup of tea and its dainty accessories, fill a half-hour or so very pleasantly; and though inconsequent so far as any plan or motive is concerned, such meeting and mingling may have all the ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... employment of this unripe time of half-awakened manhood is, however, unsatisfactory enough. There is much reminiscence of early Edinburgh days, with their law studies, and tutoring, and translating, in Teufelsdroeckh's desultory period. The climax of it is in those scornful sentences about Aesthetic Teas, to which the hungry lion was invited, that he might feed on chickweed—well for all concerned if it did not end in his ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... desultory firing was kept up from the outside, which was replied to scatteringly from within the hospital. Those inside were either not good marksmen, or excitement had spoiled their aim. If a face appeared at a window, a dozen pistol shots from the ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... her money so foolishly; and declared that the things were always considered to belong to the daughter, and were given up without the slightest objection when she applied for them in the name of Miss B. This statement produced a desultory conversation, which was terminated by the solicitor remarking, that the principal object, the return of Miss B., had been lost sight of. Mr. B. then said, he had paid for the education and every charge of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... navigate; How to make the winning hazard with an effort sure and strong; How to play the maddening comet, how to sing a comic song; How to 'utilize' Professors; how to purify the Cam; How to brew a sherry cobbler, and to make red-currant jam. All the arts which now we practise in a desultory way Shall be taught us to perfection, when we own the Ladies' sway." Thus I spake, and strove by speaking to assuage sweet Clio's fears; But she shook her head in sorrow, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... conceived. The Sarras men had all emerged from the khor, and had dismounted, the beasts being held in groups of four, while the rifle-men knelt in a long line with a woolly, curling fringe of smoke, sending volley after volley at the Arabs, who shot back in a desultory fashion from the backs of their camels. But it was not upon the sullen group of Dervishes, nor yet upon the long line of kneeling rifle-men, that the eyes of the spectators were fixed. Far out upon the desert, three squadrons ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... troops he directed them into the mountains, and marched from the wall of Antoninus even to the very extremity of the island; but this year, 208, was also barren of fruits. Fifty thousand Romans fell a prey to fatigue, the climate, and the desultory assaults of the natives. Soon after the entire country north of the Antonine wall, was given up, for it was found that while it was necessary for one legion to keep the southern parts in subjection two were required to repel the incursions of the Gael. Incursions from the north again broke ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... and foretopgallant mast. It falling nearly calm, the Bristol and Lion got out their boats and were towed by them to her support. The two other French ships of the line got up during the forenoon of the 21st, so that the action that afternoon, though desultory, might be called general. ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... bushes and from the slopes of the adjacent hills, gave no sign, at first, of their presence; but seeing that the marines were comparatively few in number, they finally plucked up courage, and about five o'clock Saturday afternoon began a desultory, skirmishing attack which lasted the greater part of that day and night, and, indeed, continued, with an occasional intermission, for three or four days and nights. Major Cochrane, who described the fight to me, said that he slept only an ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... this subject, it may not be uninteresting to my readers to receive some desultory anecdotes that I have heard concerning one or two of the leading monsters, by whom the horrors upon which I ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... lonely-looking after the glare of the hot September sun and the noisy crowd that thronged the sward outside. Evidently a performance had just taken place on the elevated platform beyond, for a few yokels seemed to be lingering in a desultory manner as if preparatory to ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... PFiveyears later the first commercial movement was made by the erection of a distillery for the purpose of providing an adequate supply of the basis of early western commerce—whisky. The trade operations were of a promiscuous and desultory character until about the year 1810, when a log warehouse was built by Major Carter, on the bank of the lake, between Meadow and Spring streets, and this was speedily followed by another, built by Elias and Harvey Murray, which became the centre of business and gossip for the village ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... school, Beulah went to the house where they were boarding. Claudia met her rather awkwardly, but Beulah kissed her as if nothing had ever occurred to mar their intercourse; and, after some desultory conversation, asked her what they expected ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... had been happily thrown together by nature, they were no less happy in the circumstances which attended their progress and development. They were refined, not by a course of solitary study, but by desultory reading, and chiefly by living intercourse with the brightest geniuses of her age. Thus trained, they acquired a pliability of movement, which gave to all their exertions a bewitching air of freedom and negligence. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... have been brief. But Austria was jealous of Prussia, and Prussia afraid of the friendship which was forming between Austria and England, and Catharine, the empress of Russia, keeping all uncertain about her designs upon Poland—with the result that the war upon France was conducted in a desultory and ineffectual manner. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the colony maintained with Philip, a great Indian Chief, or Sachem, as they were called, who seemed a messenger sent from Satan to buffet them. His cruelty was great—his dissimulation profound; and the skill and promptitude with which he maintained a destructive and desultory warfare, inflicted many dreadful calamities on the settlement. I was, by chance, at a small village in the woods, more than thirty miles from Boston, and in its situation exceedingly lonely, and surrounded with thickets. Nevertheless, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... that threatened the prosperity of the East and West India Companies in which so many merchants and investors were deeply interested. Any admission of a Spanish monopoly or right of exclusion would have spelt ruin to thousands. The diplomatic discussions, however, went on for many months in a desultory and somewhat futile manner; and meanwhile though hostilities did not actually cease, the campaign of 1633 was conducted in a half-hearted fashion. The death of Isabel on November 29, 1633, shattered finally any hopes ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... old Bournemouth!—is to hand, and contains a statement of pleasure in my letters which I wish I could have rewarded with a long one. What has gone on? A vast of affairs, of a mingled, strenuous, inconclusive, desultory character; much waste of time, much riding to and fro, and little transacted or at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... England, to renew the solicitations of the colony for aid in another attempt on Quebec. Though unsuccessful in this application, the government of the province was bestowed on him; and, in this character, he returned to Boston. A desultory war continued to be carried on, which, without furnishing any events that would now be interesting, produced heavy expense, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... evidently had passed the point where the Indians could find obstructions to place on the track. Neale saw through a port-hole that the Sioux were dropping back from the front of the train and were no longer circling. Their firing had become desultory. Medicine Bow was in sight. The ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... of our hero, Edward Waverley, was of a nature somewhat desultory. In infancy, his health suffered, or was supposed to suffer (which is quite the same thing), by the air of London. As soon, therefore, as official duties, attendance on Parliament, or the prosecution of any of his plans of interest or ambition, called his father ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... finished. She wiped him in a desultory fashion, and went upstairs, returning immediately with his shifting-trousers. When he was dried he struggled into his shirt. Then, ruddy and shiny, with hair on end, and his flannelette shirt hanging over his ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Heights. The resulting operations which should have been carefully co-ordinated and vigorously supported, were weak and indecisive. As the day wore away Lee took advantage of the delays and the opportunities which they offered him, and assumed the offensive. There was much severe but desultory and disconnected fighting. The Union generals with their officers and men did their best, but Burnside was on the opposite side of the river and could neither give intelligent orders nor act promptly upon the suggestions which were sent to him from the field. There was no chance for maneuvering. ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... of the Pacific Hotel in desultory conversation with Captain Chunn, Hardy and Rogers. He brought his clenched hand down on the padded leather arm of the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier generations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced the desultory psychology of his predecessors to a system, so that for us the moralizing tendencies of the seventeenth century in France seem to have found their final expression less in the sob of Pascal's conscience than in the resigned ironic nonchalance of La Rochefoucauld, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the Excursion, 1728; a desultory and capricious view of such scenes of nature as his fancy led him, or his knowledge enabled him, to describe. It is not devoid of poetical spirit. Many of the images are striking, and many of the paragraphs are elegant. The cast ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... I wander? shall the muse, For golden baits, her simple theme refuse? Oh, no! but while the weary spirit greets The fading scenes of childhood's far gone sweets, It catches all the infant's wandering tongue, And prattles on in desultory song. That song must close—the gloomy mists of night Obscure the pale stars' visionary light, And ebon darkness, clad in vapoury wet, Steals on the welkin ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... of desultory attacks; but there was no assault, though Duvivier had boasted that he had the means of making a successful one. He waited for the ships which did not come, and kept the Acadians at work in making ladders and fire-arrows. At length, instead of aid from Louisbourg, two small vessels appeared from ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... "See this clever boy of mine, and only think how much better I could do it myself." Yet it contains some admirable passages on Shakespeare, if not on Hazlitt; and it would be impossible to deny that its hinted condemnation of Hazlitt's "desultory and capricious acuteness" is just enough. On the other hand, how significant is it of Jeffrey's own limitations that he should protest against Hazlitt's sympathy with such "conceits and puerilities" as the immortal ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the sounds alone, the fugitives crouching in the interior of the altar estimated that about a dozen people had entered the church. They seemed to rush forward a few paces and then halt, as though staring about them; then followed a few brief, desultory movements, and silence. Finally, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... desultory conversation about the work which Houston knew to be only preliminary, during which Mr. Rivers moved about in a nervous, restless manner, ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... Bently, "but I took the liberty of going to him and asking if he would let me take it this turn. I hope you fellows don't mind." The talk thus flowed on in a desultory fashion amid ever thickening clouds of tobacco smoke, and Grant Herman, sitting for the most part quiet, had a whimsical idea in looking at his half-extinguished cigar. Certain excellent cigars, his thoughts ran, have a way of burning sluggishly about the middle, and without actually going ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... return in the springtime of his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically borne, as pathetic entries ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much longer upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished these few desultory remarks—slender contributions towards a subject which has fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better understood by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers of to-day. If, however, we have awakened ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alarms if any gas should come too near. An hour later I was relieved in the Command Post and turned in. As I was undressing, I heard the wind rising again and the telephonists next door baling out their dug-out. We were keeping up a desultory fire all night to harass any further attacks that might be attempted. The Major, who had been out on a Front Line Reconnaissance that morning in the neighbourhood of Merna, had come in for some very heavy shelling and returned ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... sir—I will avail myself of your kindness.' She took his proffered arm, and they began slowly to promenade the principal avenue of the conservatory, engaged at first in that polite and desultory discourse which might be supposed to arise between a lady and gentleman who meet under ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... was a well-known fact that there was no heavy ordnance at the Castle. All day long, Marlanx's men, stationed in the upper stories of houses close to the walls, kept up a constant rifle fire, their bullets being directed against the distant windows of the Castle. That this desultory fusillade met with scant response at the hands of Quinnox, was quite apparent to the uneasy, champing watchers ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... detached from the life of the present day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. "C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible," said this ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the flanking party redoubled, and were accompanied by a desultory firing, which the four men opposing them answered in the same way. Then I saw the sparkling water of the pool cut off from my sight, and knew that a body of men stood on the slope ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... from Ottawa. A large force of volunteers was again called out, but in the first encounter the whites were beaten, which success encouraged the Sacs and Foxes so much that they spread themselves over the whole of the country between the Mississippi and the Lake, and kept up a desultory warfare for three or four months against the volunteer troops. About the middle of July, a body of volunteers under General Henry of Illinois pursued the Indians into Wisconsin, and by forced marches brought them to action near the Mississippi, before the United States troops, under General ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... debate was desultory and heavy. Mr Disraeli made a long speech for the sake of making a speech. Mr Roebuck was bitter ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... in the window-seat in his front room, his book close to the bleared pane, striving to find light enough by which to study. Outside it was raining in a weary, desultory way, and the heavens were leaden-hued. Livingston's quarters were on the front of that big lemon-yellow house at the corner of Oak and King Streets, about equidistant from campus and field. The outlook to-day was far from inspiriting. When he raised ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... principles that rule in all departments of the science, and learns to feel as much as to know what is in harmony with the system and what not. The other is, to get an outline of the system, by the aid of commentaries, and to fill it up by the desultory reading of treatises and reports, according to the bent of the student, without much shape or certainty in the knowledge so acquired, until it is given by investigation in the course of practice. A good deal of law may be put together by a facile or flexible man, in the second ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... of desultory talk. Although the men did not make him, save for here and there a casual reference, the subject of their conversation, Paul, with the Vision shimmering before his eyes, was sensitive enough to perceive in a dim and elusive way that he was at the back of each man's ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... majority of those who "live on the river," as the phrase goes, have the reputation of being pilferers; farmers tell sad tales of despoiled chicken-roosts and vegetable gardens. From fishing, shooting, collecting chance driftwood, and leading a desultory life along shore, like the wreckers of old they naturally fall into this thieving habit. Having neither rent nor taxes to pay, and for the most part not voting, and having no share in the political or social life of landsmen, they are in the State, yet ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... style himself El-Hichmakani, a facetious "lackab" or surname, meaning "Of No-hall, Nowhere." He had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his "couplets." To a natural facility, a knack of language learning, he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit; of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian, besides Persian, his mother-tongue, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... After some more desultory talk they separated and Steve went back to join Nancy on the porch where he thought he ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... Daffingdon had given over all mention of Japan, and had left off the shy, desultory house-hunting that had occupied the spare hours of their engagement. This great question with the bank must be settled first. Nor was Virgilia sure that Daff was proving to be all she had fancied him. He had shown less head than he might have shown in planning the scheme, and less spunk ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... marched off to quarters and the Harbins, with Jane Cable, repaired at once to the Oriente, where they were to live prior to taking a house in Ermita or San Miguel. The campaign was not being pushed vigorously at this time; it was the rainy season. Desultory fighting was going on between the troops and the insurgents; there were numerous scouting and exploring expeditions into the enemy's country. The famous round robin of the correspondents had been sent to the United States by this time, taking severely to task the army censorship which ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... carnation in his buttonhole, but the boy's quick eye caught the marks of a certain wear and tear in the face which neither his bath nor his valet had been able to obliterate. The thin lips—thin for a man so fat, and which showed, more than any other feature, something of the desultory firmness of his character—drooped at the corners. The eyes were half their size, the snap all out of them, the whites lost under the swollen lids. His greeting, moreover, had lost ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to win the world's cold ear, Nor, prized by those he loved, its blame could fear; Its praise he left to those who, at their will, The ingenious strain of torturing art could trill! Content, as random fancies might inspire, If his weak reed, at times, or plaintive lyre, He touched with desultory hand, and drew Some softened tones, to Nature not untrue. 140 The leaves, O Derwent! on thy bosom still Oft with the gust now fall—the season pale Hath smote with hand unseen the silent vale, And slowly steals the verdure from the hill; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... then became desultory and, finally, when the gleemen began the well known piece de resistance, the battle of Brunanburgh, Edwy yawned and Redwald looked sleepy, while the old thane actually slept in his huge armchair, and was awakened only by the cessation ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... patriot, I mean." Merthyr was tempted to discharge him at first, but controlled his English antipathy to babblers, and discovered him to be a serviceable fellow. Toward nightfall they heard shots up a rock-strewn combe of the lower slopes; desultory shots indicating rifle-firing at long range. Darkness made them seek shelter in a pine-hut; starting from which at dawn, Lorenzo ran beating about like a dog over the place where the shots had sounded on the foregoing day; he found a stone ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into a small breakfast-room, I found myself in the presence of an elderly gentleman—very grave, business-like, and respectable-looking. I presented Mr. Hunsden's letter; he received me very civilly. After a little desultory conversation he asked me if there was anything in which his advice or experience could be of use. I said, "Yes," and then proceeded to tell him that I was not a gentleman of fortune, travelling for pleasure, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... Delights of Dougherty, The Desultory Hints and Maxims for Anglers Distinguished Visitor, A Dorgs, On Dogs Tale, A Down the Bay Drainage under Difficulties Dreadful State of Things out West, The Dubious English Dwarf ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... little one-room hut there was no place for guests. Presently the men drifted out to the chip pile, where they lingered a while in desultory talk. Roxy and Johnnie, partly undressed, occupied the one bed; and later the host and his guest came in and lay down, clothed just as they were, with their feet to the ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... at fighting heat, he sat erect, half turned, and fired back until every shot in his magazine was exhausted. As a result, several of the pursuers dropped from the chase; but it was hotly maintained by the others, who also kept up a desultory shooting. ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... Next arrived Miss Knight, who remained all the time I was there. Princess Charlotte was very gracious—showed me all her bonny dyes, as B—-would have called them—pictures, and cases, and jewels, &c. She talked in a very desultory way, and it would be difficult to say of what. She observed her mother was in very low spirits. I asked her how she supposed she could be otherwise? This QUESTIONING answer saves a great deal of trouble, and serves two purposes—i.e. ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... claims, and that the knowledge which is unimparted, is necessarily a barren talent, and is lost to society, like the miser's concealed hoard, by the death of the proprietor. His studies were also under the additional disadvantage, that, being pursued for the gratification of a desultory longing after knowledge, and directed to no determined object, they turned on points rather curious than useful, and while they served for the amusement of the student himself, promised little utility to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... inquiry, it cannot be considered noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti differed strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius he was most nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader: Rossetti was eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a number of valuable old works of more interest to him from their plates than letterpress. Of this kind were Gerard's Herbal (1626), supposed to be the source of many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which Rossetti was a member; ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... spirit she bore it patiently, though it entailed many long hours of wearisome confinement to the house and sofa. During these hours of enforced idleness, she indulged in frequent "brown studies," for her firm and decided character was curiously tinged with romance. She had received but a desultory education; her uncle, though providing her amply with all the means of learning, yet chafed continually against the application which was necessary for her profiting ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... pursuits; if anything more than pride and better than pride mingled with it, the father's discernment could not reach so far. He had a love for knowledge too, that from a child made him eager in seeking it, in ways both regular and desultory; and tastes which his mother laughingly said would give him all the elegance of a woman, joined to the strong manly character which no one ever doubted he possessed. She looked mostly at the outside, willing, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... house had been set in order, and Sylvia was at one front window in the cool sitting-room, with a basket of mending, and Henry at another with a library book. Henry was very restless in these days. He pottered about the place and was planning to get in a good hay crop, but this desultory sort of employment did not take the place of his regular routine of toil. He missed it horribly, almost as a man is said to miss a pain of long standing. He knew that he was better off without it, that he ought to be happier, but he knew that ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... spurting over the Luneta curb, eyes wide open, fixedly staring at that Heaven where the priests had taught all those centuries agone that Justice abides. The troops filed past the body, for the most part silently, while desultory cries of "Viva Espana!" from among the "patriotic" Filipino volunteers were summarily hushed by a Spanish artillery-officer's stern rebuke: "Silence, you rabble!" To drown out the fitful cheers and the audible murmurs, the bands struck up Spanish national airs. Stranger ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Malatesta, the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatal error of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church, and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist. Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of this long desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradual aggrandisement and consolidation for the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... article;—that the success of that article led to the continuation of the subject in other articles, and so on, till, eventually, twelve monthly numbers made up a book. A story thus originated could not be other than sketchy and desultory, and open to the captiousness of over-fastidious criticism: it was never meant to be a work of high pretension—only one of those easy trifles which afford a laugh, and require to be read in the same careless spirit of good humour ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... paper originally appeared, it formed the text for an editorial article in the Daily News, in which Mr. Andrew Lang's sign manual was not to be mistaken. Mr. Lang brought my somewhat desultory discussion very neatly to a point. He admitted that we habitually use "Americanism" as a term of reproach; "but," he asked, "who is reproached? Not the American (who may do as he pleases) but the English writer, who, in serious ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... see a real shindig" he said. "Then you'll have something to talk about." In January, there was a letter in the mail from Jim Oss, my acquaintance of the train on which I came West. We had been carrying on a desultory correspondence, but ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... with the gall and hysop of Harry Glen's humiliation was the martyr feeling that his holiest affections had been ruthlessly trampled upon by a cold-hearted woman. His desultory readings of Byron furnished his imagination with all the woful suits and trappings necessary to trick himself out ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Sally was occupied in the garden digging in a desultory fashion. As soon as there was no further danger of the ground freezing the Camp Fire girls were planning ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... a horse into, and the door was merely a wide, worm-eaten board placed on end. In the middle of the night I heard a noise—yea, a rattle. The said board fell down, inwards, almost upon me. A light was flashed swiftly into my eyes, and desultory remarks which suddenly escaped me were rudely interrupted by shrill screams. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... forces and the foe was now pretty nigh over, and the combatants had long since swept past us; pursuers and pursued having alike disappeared in the bush surrounding the native town or lost to sight amid the smoking ruins, where some little desultory skirmishing was still ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... great allowances for your misunderstanding me. You, by long habits of composition and a greater command gained over your own powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to torment, e.g., ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... '79.—To-day one of the newspapers of St. Louis prints the following informal remarks of mine on American, especially Western literature: "We called on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat desultory conversation abruptly asked him: 'Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?' 'It seems to me,' said he,'that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products, in agriculture, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... she therefore begged to resign the position of Miss Pomeroy's instructress. Now, as each new teacher had begun a system of her own which she had not had time to develop, it may be easily seen that the little knowledge which Zillah possessed was of the most desultory character. Yet after all she had something in her favor. She had a taste for reading, and this led her to a familiarity with the best authors. More than this, her father had instilled into her mind a chivalrous sense of honor; and from natural instinct, as well as from his teachings, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... obscurity of night through narrow channels, in shoal water, and with silence and celerity, over a naval armament of the usual kind, though of far superior force. You would then perceive with what efficacy the counsel of Demosthenes to your countrymen might be carried into effect by desultory attacks on the enemy; and, in fact, you would perceive that steam-vessels, whenever they shall be brought into war for hostile purposes, will prove the most formidable means that ever has been employed in naval warfare. Indeed, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... popular science, travels, biographies; each as it came to hand. The intellectual disease of the time took hold upon him: he lost the power of mental concentration, yielded to the indolent pleasure of desultory page-skimming. There remained in him but one sign of grace: the qualms that followed on every evening's debauch of mind, the headachey impression that he was going through a morbid experience which somehow ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... 1782, the settlements only suffered from the accustomed desultory warfare of the savages. No numerous collection of Indians had crossed their border,—no powerful army of warriors, threatening destruction to the forts, those asylums of their safety, had appeared among them.—But the scene was soon ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the enemy's reconnoitring parties and our outposts during the latter part of January, the main attack was not developed until Feb. 2, when the enemy began to move toward the Ismailia Ferry. They met a reconnoitring party of Indian troops of all arms, and a desultory engagement ensued, to which a violent sand storm put a sudden end about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The main attacking force pushed forward toward its destination after nightfall. From twenty-five to thirty galvanized iron pontoon boats, seven and a half meters in length, which had ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was some firing in front, together with an alarm that the Yankee cavalry was upon us. The ambulances were sent back; but some of the wounded jumped out, and, producing the rifles which they had not parted with, they prepared to fight. After a good deal of desultory skirmishing, we seated ourselves upon a hill overlooking Hagerstown, and saw the enemy's cavalry driven through the town pursued by yelling Confederates. A good many Yankee prisoners now passed us; one of them, who was smoking a cigar, was a lieutenant of cavalry, dressed ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... browsing, but from the actual process itself. I have heard it strenuously denied that any such absorption occurs; the bits taken are too small, the motion of the browser is too rapid, the whole process is too desultory. Let us see. In the first place a knowledge of authors and titles and of the general character of their works is by no means to be despised. I heard the other day of a presumably educated woman who betrayed in a conversation her ignorance of Omar Khayyam—not lack of acquaintance ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Northern Virginia; but Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan, was preparing another great army, which was to march to Richmond and crush out the rebellion. Lee was standing on the defensive. Along the whole line of the frontier, from New Orleans to Tennessee, desultory fighting was going on, and in these conflicts the Confederates had generally the worse of things, having there no generals such as Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet, who had made the army of ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... sodden clothing, and sunk in soft sticky mud over the ankles. All night long they had peeped over the parapet, or fired through the loopholes at the German trench a hundred yards off. And all night long they had been galled and stung by that 'desultory rifle fire' that the despatches mention so casually and so often, and that requires to be endured throughout a dragging day and night before its ugliness and unpleasantness can ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... client, if thus liable to new allegations and suggestions, for which he came unprepared, from a reliance that those publicly given were all against which he need arm himself, and that, if those were disproved, he was cleared; while the desultory and shifting charges of the managers put him out in every method of defence, by making it impossible to him to discern where he might be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), chiefly known to modern readers by one of Macaulay's essays. Southey was as assailable as Mill. His political economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and disjointed. In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... A desultory fire was kept up through doors and loop-holes. But now the whole country had become thoroughly aroused, and sundry military companies from neighboring towns and counties poured into Harper's Ferry. Brown himself at length realized the hopelessness of his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... the furtiveness could now be detected—but he succeeded in captivating all my sympathy. Long after dinner was over, and the salle empty, we sat smoking our cigars, and discussing politics, literature, and art in that suggestive desultory manner which often gives a charm to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... in question were the fruit of inquiries begun indeed as a relief from weightier cares; but as it was not in their author's nature to rest satisfied with desultory and superficial results in his treatment of any subject, so his archaeological papers more resemble the exhaustive treatises of a leisurely student, than the occasional efforts of one overwhelmed in ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to feel that something ought to be done to save him from the fearful consequences of popular feeling. Let us hasten to the town, and procure what assistance we may: but a few persons, well organised and properly armed, will achieve wonders against a desultory and ill-appointed multitude. There may be a chance of saving him, yet, from the imminent danger which ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... more hours; taking the quite unenthusiastic, business-like interest in literature and politics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory, more cynical, more misanthropic and tittle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... desultory, however, and spiritless, like everything else about the place that night, greeted us as Mrs. Ashley opened the door leading directly ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... sort of thing, Mockwooders agreed, that "explained" the Strangs. It was the desultory gossip of fashionable breakfast tables how Evelyn Strang was frequently seen at the gardener's cottage, talking to the poor mother about her youngest. The gardener's wife had other children, all strong and hearty. These went to school, survived the rigors of "regents" examinations, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... early settlement. His first education was received at Brooklyn, to which his f. had removed while W. was a young child. At 13 he was in a printing office, at 17 he was teaching and writing for the newspapers, and at 21 was editing one. The next dozen years were passed in desultory work as a printer with occasional literary excursions, but apparently mainly in "loafing" and observing his fellow-creatures. It was not till 1855 that his first really characteristic work, Leaves of Grass, appeared. This first ed. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Mary's Church, standing close to the site of North Gate, lengths of the wall, with a tower at intervals, form thrillingly medieval foregrounds for the Cathedral towers. In Pound Lane the wall continues in a furtive and rather desultory fashion until it ends at the West Gate. Opposite Lady Wootton's Green there still remain indications of a narrow postern, which is generally accepted as that through which Queen Bertha was wont to pass on her way to her devotions at St. ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... parsimony which is dear to philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion. Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred here and now, and stretched outwards, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... and annexed by Portugal; the Portuguese king, expelled by the French in 1808, fled to his colony, which was made a kingdom 1815, and an empire in 1822. The emperor, Pedro II., was driven out in 1889, and a republic established on the federal system, which has been harassed ever since by desultory civil war. The capital is Rio Janeiro; Bahia and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... interview with Mr. Spanker, followed by a long, desultory gossip, brought me another couple of hours nearer the final reward of my orthodox upbringing. In another hour, my horses were saddled, and I was having a drink of tea and a bit of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy |
