"Effeminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consider only the martial exploits of the celebrated Duke de Vendome, we have the idea of an Heroe full of spirit and impetuosity; but this idea would be very imperfect as a representation of his character, if we did not know likewise that he was slovenly, voluptuous, effeminate, ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... to themselves. A warm breath of scent and vitality came up to him. Both men and women below were lightly clad, bare-armed, open-necked, as the universal warmth of the city permitted. The hair of the men was often a mass of effeminate curls, their chins were always shaven, and many of them had flushed or coloured cheeks. Many of the women were very pretty, and all were dressed with elaborate coquetry. As they swept by beneath, he saw ecstatic faces with eyes ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... stage-performers there, both in word and in deed, he put him to death. [426 A.D.] Thus Valentinian took over the power of the West. But Placidia, his mother, had reared this emperor and educated him in an altogether effeminate manner, and in consequence he was filled with wickedness from childhood. For he associated mostly with sorcerers and those who busy themselves with the stars, and, being an extraordinarily zealous pursuer of love affairs with other men's ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... right ears. Bengalis, unlike the rest of the Hindus, do not paint sectarian signs on their foreheads. The only trinket they do not completely despise is an expensive necklace; but even this is not common. Contrary to all expectations, the Mahrattis, with all their little effeminate ways, are the bravest tribe of India, gallant and experienced soldiers, a fact which has been demonstrated by centuries of fighting; but Bengal has never as yet produced a single soldier out of its sixty-five million inhabitants. Not a single Bengali is to be found in the native regiments of the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... suggested. Entering the drawing-room, he had leisure to look about him. It was a beautiful room, large and lofty; luxury was evident on every hand, but it was not the luxury that palls or offends. Each object was graceful, and possessed its own intrinsic value. The atmosphere was too effeminate to appeal to him, but he acknowledged the taste and artistic delicacy it conveyed. Almost at the moment of acknowledgment the door opened to ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... which they devoted a considerable portion of Sunday morning. They might then be seen in groups, combing and brushing each other's hair, which hung down very long behind, and then tying up the tails with a bit of blue cotton tape. The captain was a young man, tall and slight, with a very effeminate air, and as unlike his first lieutenant as he well could be. Still his countenance was not bad, and he smiled in a pleasant way ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... do not suppose me to be so effeminate a character!' I cried. 'An old soldier of Napoleon is certainly beyond suspicion. But, dear lady, to what end? and how is the society of these excellent ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had cleansed the Augean stable, and performed all the other labours enjoined him by Euristheus, found himself a slave to the softnesses of the heart; and he, who wore a club and a lion's skin in the cause of virtue, condescended to the most effeminate employments to gratify a criminal weakness. Hannibal, who vanquished mighty nations, was himself overcome by the love of pleasure; and he who despised cold, and want, and danger, and death on the Alps, was conquered and undone by the dissolute ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... the half-breed was impassive—even sombre as he worked at the blanket. "It's all owin' to politics," continued the cowpuncher, rolling and lighting a cigarette. "Politics, an' the fact that the cow country is in its dotage. Choteau County is growin' effeminate, not to say right down effete when a lynchin', that by rights it would be stretching its importance even to refer to it in conversation, is raised to the dignity of a political issue. As everyone knows, a hangin' is always a popular play, riddin' the community of ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... taunt this worthinesse, 120 Of which remaine such liuing monuments Ingrauen in the eyes and hearts of men. Although the oppression of distressed Rome And our owne ouerthrow, might well drawe forth, Distilling teares from faynting cowards eyes, Yet should no weake effeminate passion sease Vpon that man, the greatnesse of whose minde And not his Fortune made him term'd the Great. Pom. Oh I did neuer tast mine Honours sweete Nor now can iudge of this my sharpest sowre. ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... for ever from our minds, my countrymen, all such unworthy ideas of the K—g, his Ministry, and Parliament. Let us not suppose, that all are become luxurious, effeminate and unreasonable, on the other side the water, as many designing persons would insinuate. Let us presume, what is in fact true, that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation, though a few ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... that they had not the privilege to eat at home, and so to come without appetite to the public repast: they made a point of it to observe any one that did not eat and drink with them, and to reproach him as an intemperate and effeminate person that was ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thou preparing for the Trojan nation! Even now Pallas is fitting her helmet, and her shield, and her chariot, and her fury. In vain, looking fierce through the patronage of Venus, will you comb your hair, and run divisions upon the effeminate lyre with songs pleasing to women. In vain will you escape the spears that disturb the nuptial bed, and the point of the Cretan dart, and the din [of battle], and Ajax swift in the pursuit. Nevertheless, alas! the time will come, though late, when thou shalt defile ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... black or malign disposition, an effeminate disposition; an hard inexorable disposition, a wild inhuman disposition, a sheepish disposition, a childish disposition; a blockish, a false, a scurril, a fraudulent, a tyrannical: what then? If he be a stranger in the world, that knows not the things ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... that I fear you will be led astray and forget your errand. For the people whom you will see in the country through which you have to pass, do nothing but amuse themselves. They are very idle, gay and effeminate, and I fear that they will lead you astray. Your path is beset with dangers. I will mention one or two things which you must ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... good, all that springs from weakness is bad. The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one shall also help them thereto." Nietzsche partly divined the kind of reception moral values of this stamp would meet with at the hands of the effeminate manhood of Europe. Here we see that he had anticipated the most likely form their criticism would take (see also the last two verses of ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to Florence see outside the Florence Club effeminate elegants in English-made suits of blue serge, and brown boots, and they sigh to think that such specimens of humanity are the representatives of a noble race. Disguise it as you may, poor Italy is sadly decadent. Her glory has passed, her nobile ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the light people of this country (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate), that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst in that splenetic mood we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... from modern religious life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present impoverishment began. "Let us hear less about the mansions of the blest and more about the housing of the poor!" Men revolted against an effeminate contemplation, which had run to seed, in favor of an active philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the common life. But, my brethren, pulling a plant up is not the only way of saving it from running to seed. You can accomplish by a wise restriction what ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... bigger than your hand in Shantung not a thousand miles from Weihaiwei, and the German Legation is consequently somewhat irate. It was noticed at our club, for instance, which, by the way, is a humble affair, that the German military attache, a gentleman who wears bracelets, is somewhat effeminate, and plays vile tennis and worse billiards, had a "hostile attitude" towards the British Legation—that is, such of the British Legation as gather together each day at the "ice-shed"—which happens to be the club's peculiar Chinese name. The military attache is somewhat irate, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... peculiar among intelligent Americans, had been adopted con amore, and, as it were, taken to her bosom by Miss Petrie. Her ears had taught themselves to feel that there could be no vitality in speech without it, and that all utterance unsustained by such tone was effeminate, vapid, useless, unpersuasive, unmusical,—and English. It was a complaint frequently made by her against her friends Caroline and Olivia that they debased their voices, and taught themselves the puling British mode of speech. "I do know the gentleman," said Wallachia;—and Lady Rowley ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... conquests. Two engagements, [481] the one near the Hellespont, the other in the narrow defiles of Cilicia, decided the fate of his Syrian competitor; and the troops of Europe asserted their usual ascendant over the effeminate natives of Asia. [49] The battle of Lyons, where one hundred and fifty thousand Romans [50] were engaged, was equally fatal to Albinus. The valor of the British army maintained, indeed, a sharp and doubtful contest, with the hardy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... your wife shall be a strumpet, and yourself by consequence a cuckold. The goddess, whom you shall not find propitious nor favourable unto you, is Minerva, a most redoubtable and dreadful virgin, a powerful and fulminating goddess, an enemy to cuckolds and effeminate youngsters, to cuckold-makers and adulterers. The god is Jupiter, a terrible and thunder-striking god from heaven. And withal it is to be remarked, that, conform to the doctrine of the ancient Etrurians, the manubes, for so did they call the darting hurls ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... are at night used to eke out the appointments for sleep,—the first to soften the floor to the bones of the sleepers, the second to serve for pillows. These, especially the former, are looked upon by the genuine soldier as effeminate; while the greenhorn bitterly complains of them as a very satire ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... a meal much accounted of. It was reckoned effeminate to require more than two meals a day, though, just as in the verdurer's lodge at home, there was a barrel of ale on tap with drinking horns beside it in the hall, and on a small round table in the window a ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and fanatical populace forgot its orgy of blood to acclaim a violinist. And what a violinist! He was one of the most effeminate and grotesque individuals in the world. I can see him yet, strutting along with his long hair, his ample rear, and his shoes with their little quarter-heels, which gave him the appearance of a fat cook dressed up in men's clothes ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... new fashionable friends there, I bade good-by for ever to my dear old father. I had begged my husband to take me by way of Heidelberg to his old castle in the Vosges; but I found an amount of determination, under that effeminate appearance and manner, for which I was not prepared, and he refused my first request so decidedly that I dared not urge it. 'Henceforth, Anna,' said he, 'you will move in a different sphere of life; ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... industrious, and modest youth could not easily be so happily united in another as they were in Jonathan, albeit his handsome expressive face bore the impress of traits which were perhaps a little too soft, and almost effeminate, and his diminutive and weak but elegant bodily frame bespoke a tender intellectual spirit. When he reflected further that the two children had always been together, and how evident had been their ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... senses, with a perversive wryness and convulsion of the muscles, all which are great lets and impediments to the act of generation. Hence it is that Bacchus, the god of bibbers, tipplers, and drunkards, is most commonly painted beardless and clad in a woman's habit, as a person altogether effeminate, or like a libbed eunuch. Wine, nevertheless, taken moderately worketh quite contrary effects, as is implied by the old proverb, which saith,—That Venus taketh cold, when not accompanied by Ceres and Bacchus.[221] This opinion is of great antiquity as appeareth by the testimony of Diodorus the ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... penalty of raillery upon his swelling pride and vanity, sarcasm that tried the paternal patience as well as his own. Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy that comes from a high estimate of one's self. He was well favored in looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and carefully shod feet. He would have been called a "dude" had the word been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father's social pretensions. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... matter of training; the same courage and military instinct are inherent in English, Scotch, and Irish alike, but no comparison can be made between the martial value of a regiment recruited amongst the Gurkhas of Nepal or the warlike races of northern India, and of one recruited from the effeminate peoples of the south. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... "In these effeminate times, there are not such strong men as there were when I was young. If a nobleman now happens to shatter a cuirass, to bend a crossbow without the aid of the crank, or to bend a cutlass between his fingers, he immediately considers himself a very strong man. But in times of yore, girls ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... are not all the Mischiefs it occasions. Did it cause none of them, but were it entirely wholesome, as Balm or Mint, it were yet Mischief enough to have our whole Populace used to sip warm Water in a mincing, effeminate Manner, once or twice every Day; which hot Water must be supped out of a nice Tea-Cup, sweatened with Sugar, biting a Bit of nice thin Bread and Butter between Whiles. This mocks the strong Appetite, relaxes the Stomach, satiates it with trifling light Nick-Nacks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... to the eye, attainable by a geometrical pattern so simple. Yet, with all this high merit, it is not a base which could be brought into general use. Its brilliancy and piquancy are here set off with exquisite skill by its opposition to mouldings, in the upper part of the building, of an almost effeminate delicacy, and its complexity is rendered delightful by its contrast with the ruder bases of the other buildings of the city; but it would look meagre if it were employed to sustain bolder masses above, and would become wearisome if the eye were once ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... came nearer I saw that he was handsome in an effeminate sort of way, with a slight lady-like sort of figure, a blond mustache, so light in color as to be almost invisible at a distance, and fine girlish eyes of a light blue. As he saw me in turn he gave me a good-morning in a cheery tone, and I returned his ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... to have understood the sweet and harmonious placing of Monosyllables, and has practised it with so great a Variety, as discovers in him a peculiar Delight, even to Fondness; for which however, I cannot blame him, notwithstanding this may be reputed the Vice of our Sex, and in him be thought effeminate. But let the Reader judge ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... attributed to the invention of an Italian, and the custom thus started rapidly spread "in good society" on the Continent of Europe. Thomas Coryate, a noted traveller, is said to have introduced them into Germany, and afterwards into England, where their use was at first much ridiculed as effeminate, the "fork-carving" traveller being spoken of ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... habit of consistency. She was reported as calling a hat a "hot," a rat a "rot," of teaching her little sister to read from the primer, "Is the cot on the mot?" Pronunciation became a test of character. The soft "r" and the hard "a" were taken as proofs of effeminate hypocrisy. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the sphere God made them for—the home. Said Gladstone, 'Woman is the most perfect when most womanly.' There is nothing, I think, more despicable than a masculine, mannish woman, unless it be an effeminate, sissy man. Dr. Clarke voiced my sentiments when he said: 'Man is not superior to woman, nor woman to man. The relation of the sexes is one of equality, not of better or worse, of higher and lower. The loftiest ideal of humanity demands that each shall be perfect ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... inferior worth; I say, may be; for I cannot recollect any one instance in which I have a right to suppose it. But, surely, to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, not being yourself a poet;—to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly on the images of another's vision,—is an unworthy and effeminate thing. A jeweller may devote his whole time to jewels unblamed; but the mere amateur, who grounds his taste on no chemical or geological idea, cannot claim the same exemption from despect. How shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... expedient that the girls receive this domestic training, the boys of the family should not be exempt from their share of the responsibility. You need not dread that this kind of work will make your boy unmanly or effeminate. It will rather teach him to be more considerate of women, more appreciative of the amount that his mother and sisters have to do, and less careless in imposing ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... more dangerous than the latter. Also, because his conduct is more difficult to uncover and because he is more difficult to conquer than the liar. Dishonesty is, however, a specially feminine characteristic, and in men occurs only when they are effeminate. Real manliness and dishonesty are concepts which can not be united. Hence, the popular proverb says, "Women always tell the truth, but not the whole truth.'' And this is more accurate than the accusation of many writers, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... who enjoy each other's company and so pair off and freely express their feelings as they do in the previous stage and also in the one that follows. The boys of these couples are generally those of effeminate tendencies who have been accustomed to play with girls instead of with boys. They are never very highly respected by the other boys, and later, at adolescence, are tolerated by the girls rather than respected and sought by them. Again there are individuals who are very timid in their general ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Persons upon whom it has been performed are called eunuchs. It was a very common custom in ancient times, being usually prompted by the jealousy of rulers, who allowed no males but eunuchs to associate with their wives and concubines. The effect upon the male is to render him effeminate in appearance and weak in mind. If performed before puberty, the growth of the beard is scanty, and the voice never acquires that deepness of tone ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... to be vain of his person, how effeminate! If such a one happens to have genius, it seldom strikes deep into intellectual subjects. His outside usually runs away with him. To adorn, and perhaps, intending to adorn, to render ridiculous that person, takes up all his attention. All he does is ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style; with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands—rings upon the fingers in those days—which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail. His principal anxiety ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... An effeminate-looking young man, foppishly dressed, followed the servant into the room, and made it impossible for Florence to deny herself, as she ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... serious grief she and her husband had experienced was the loss of two young children. Edouard, though delicate from his birth, had nevertheless passed the trying years of infancy and early adolescence; he was them nearly fourteen. With a sweet and rather effeminate expression, blue eyes and a pleasant smile, he was a striking likeness of his mother. His father's affection exaggerated the dangers which threatened the boy, and in his eyes the slightest indisposition became a serious ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... promotion, contented with the inferior rank of "Knight," sitting in theatre and circus below men whom his own hand had raised to station higher than his own. Absorbed in unsleeping political toil, he wore the outward garb of a careless, trifling voluptuary. It was difficult to believe that this apparently effeminate lounger, foppish in dress, with curled and scented hair, luxuriating in the novel refinement of the warm bath, an epicure in food and drink, patronizing actors, lolling in his litter amid a train of parasites, could be the man on whom, as Horace tells us, civic anxieties and foreign dangers ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... link-boy at marriages, also a "night-cap" drunk before bed and lastly an effeminate; one who perambulavit omnium cubilia (Catullus). See Encolpius' pun upon the Embasicete in Satyricon, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... never seems to have expressed just himself, save in those tragic portraits of himself and of his wife, of which there are three here in the Pitti (188, 280, 1176). He has been called the faultless painter, and indeed he seems to be incapable of fault, to be really a little effeminate, a little vague, bewildered by the sculpture of Michelangelo, the confusion of art in Florence, the advent of the colourists, of whom here in Tuscany he is perhaps the chief. It is no intellectual passion you find in that soft, troubled work, where from every picture Lucrezia ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... head of this formidable chimera—John Rex, the forger—was absent, but the two hands, or rather claws—the burglar and the prison-breaker—were present, and the slimly-made, effeminate Crow, if he had not the brains of the master, yet made up for his flaccid muscles and nerveless frame by a cat-like cunning, and a spirit of devilish volatility that nothing could subdue. With such a powerful ally outside as the mock maid-servant, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... friend, comrade, adviser—standard of men and morals—all and more was his beloved uncle. No thought of his heart but he had given him, and never once had he been misunderstood. He could put his arm about his uncle's neck as he would about his mother's and not be thought effeminate or childish. And the courtesy and dignity and fairness with which he had been treated; and the respect St. George showed him—and he only a boy: compelling his older men friends to do the same. Never letting him feel that any foolish act of his ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Peace, would be incredible elsewhere; and yet it is this lawlessness which has come to be accepted as part and parcel of what is called "policy" in China because in the fifty years preceding the establishment of the Republic a weak and effeminate mandarinate consistently sought safety in surrenders. It is this lawlessness which must at all costs be suppressed if we are to have a happy future. The Chinese people have so far contented themselves by pacific ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... entire pavement, so that it was impossible to precede them without getting into the carriage-way, thus greatly obstructing and inconveniencing all other passengers. Lounging at a funeral pace, and leaving not the smallest opening, it was evident that 325 these effeminate animals had purposely united themselves for public annoyance. Sir Felix, irritated by this palpable outrage on decorum, stepped forward, with hasty determined stride, and coming unexpectedly and irresistibly in contact, broke at once ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the throne from his death (about B.C. 1280) to B.C. 1100. Ten princes of the name of Ramesses, and one called Meri-Tum, bore sway during this interval, each of them showing, if possible, greater weakness than the last, and all of them sunk in luxury, idle, effeminate, sensual. Ramesses III. provoked caricature by his open exhibition of harem-scenes on the walls of his Medinet-Abou palace. His descendants, content with harem life, scarcely cared to quit the precincts of the royal abode, desisted from all war, and even devolved the task of government ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... precautions to abolish the means and habitudes of war, had effected a disastrous change in his character. The hardy and heroic qualities which had conducted him to the throne, were softened in the lap of indulgence. Surrounded by the pleasures of an idle and effeminate court, and beguiled by the example of his degenerate nobles, he gave way to a fatal sensuality that had lain dormant in his nature during the virtuous days of his adversity. The mere love of female beauty ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... I should be ashamed if I had such a son; so effeminate, and so given to drinking; tying up his hair in a ribbon, indeed! and spending most of his time among mad women, himself as much a woman as any of them; dancing to flute and drum and cymbal! He resembles any one rather than ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... manage a child who persisted in justifying 'naughtiness' upon general principles. He was rather inclined to be indolent, and his mother regrets that he is not so persevering as Frederick (Gibbs). His great temptation, he says himself, in his childhood was to be 'effeminate and lazy,' and 'to justify these vices by intellectual and religious excuses.' A great deal of this, he adds, has been 'knocked out of him'; he cannot call himself a sluggard or a hypocrite, nor has he acted like a coward. 'Indeed,' he says, 'from my very infancy I had an instinctive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... upon was a mere a priori one, viz., that I had always been tied to the apron-string of women or girls; which amounted at most to this: that, by training and the natural tendency of circumstances, I ought to be effeminate—that is, there was reason to expect beforehand that I should be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite of such general presumptions, I really were not. In fact, my brother soon learned better than any body, and by a daily experience, how entirely he might depend ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... had taken a good degree at Oxford, and then set himself to qualify for the Bar. His personal appearance likewise indicated a mixture of races—tall and well-knit, he suggested a strong and determined nature; on the other hand, there was something almost effeminate in the regularity of his features, and his lips were somewhat sensuous. A passing stranger would be immediately attracted by him. Blue eyes, brown hair, and well-formed features, together with a sunny and kind-hearted ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... as a cold-blooded, highly schooled person, absolutely devoid of sentiment. His face was stony, his eyes were cool, even his linen partook of his own unruffled calm. He seemed by no means effeminate, yet he was one of those immaculate beings upon whom one can scarcely imagine a speck of dust or a bead of perspiration. His hair—what was left of it—was parted to a nicety, his clothes were faultless, and he had an air of ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... for luxurious enjoyment and sudden wealth, which renders those who seek them dependent on those who supply them; to substitute for republican simplicity and economical habits a sickly appetite for effeminate indulgence and an imitation of that reckless extravagance which impoverished and enslaved the industrious people of foreign lands, and at last to fix upon us, instead of those equal political rights the acquisition ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... objection to being disowned, so he could teach the Spaniards to be more careful how they handled Englishmen. What came of it will be the subject of the next lecture. Father Parsons said the Protestant traders of England had grown effeminate and dared not fight. In the ashes of their own smoking cities the Spaniards had to learn that Father Parsons had misread his countrymen. If Drake had been given to heroics he might have left Virgil's lines inscribed above the broken arms of Castile ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... Colonel, who named eight or nine for the meal. Nine Mr. Honeyman agreed to with a sigh. The incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel seldom rose before eleven. For, to tell the truth, no French abbot of Louis XV. was more lazy and luxurious, and effeminate, than our polite ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... many of them that neither Chrysippus' nor Didymus' volumes are large enough to contain them. I would only desire you to consider this, that if so great doctors may be allowed this liberty, you may the more reasonably pardon even me also, a raw, effeminate divine, if I quote not everything so exactly as I should. And so at last I return to Paul. "Ye willingly," says he, "suffer my foolishness," and again, "Take me as a fool," and further, "I speak it not after the Lord, but as it ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... inflanked wals, but he became an open marke to a whole showre of arrowes. This disaduantage, together with the womens dismay, & decrease of victuals, forced a surrender to those Rakehels mercy, who, nothing guilty of that effeminate vertue, spoyled their goods, imprisoned their bodies, and were rather by Gods gracious prouidence, then any want of will, purpose, or attempt, restrayned ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... if ever the joie de vivre was so generally prevalent in England as in those spacious days. Such a national mood is in danger of being followed by a lapse into an effeminate hedonism, from which England as a whole was saved by the antagonistic development of the essentially masculine if crude puritanism, whose vital spirit had already begun to take possession of a large proportion of the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... unsettled state of the Border counties, and the fierce and sometimes treacherous nature of the inhabitants, made travelling there upon the King's business a matter of some difficulty and danger. There was no fear of Gaston's growing effeminate or turning into a mere pleasure hunter; and he soon made himself of great value to his master, not only by his undaunted bravery, but by his success in diplomatic negotiation — a success by no means expected by himself, and a surprise ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... object. There are occasions in almost every man's life when to know how to cook, to sew, to "keep the house," to wash, starch, and iron, would be valuable knowledge. Such knowledge is no more unmasculine and effeminate than ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... those that live in a kitchin not stink of the grease. Give me, with your favour, leave to say, 'twas you first lost the good grace of speaking; for with light idle gingles of words to make sport ye have brought it to this, That the substance of oratory is become effeminate ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... satirist of the eighteenth century, founded a school of satire, which proved most beneficial to the country. His poem, "The Day," is distinguished by fine irony and by the severity with which he attacks the effeminate habits of his age. He lashes the affectations and vices of the Milanese aristocracy with a sarcasm worthy of Juvenal. The satires of D'Elei, Guadagnali, and others are characterized by wit and beauty of versification. Those ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... upon which the fabric was couched, are preferred by men of letters for books and for correspondence, while highly polished modern plate papers, with surfaces much more glossy than any preparation of vellum, are now rejected by them as finical and effeminate. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... a young man of scientific training, indolent manners, effeminate appearance, hidden energy, and absolute courage, lounged through the doors of the Atlas Building. Since his rescue from the volcanic island that had witnessed the piratical murder of his old employer, Doctor Schermerhorn, the spectacular dissolution ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... and of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. These unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their mothers, in the same manner as ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... church! where is it? Had not churchmen pray'd, His thread of life had not so soon decay'd: None do you like but an effeminate prince, Whom, like a ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... unsurpassed. He shrinks from no danger, he dreads no foe, he yields to no superior. No shoals are too dangerous, no seas too boisterous, no climate too rigorous for him. The burning sun of the tropic cannot make him effeminate, nor can the eternal winter of the polar seas paralyze his energies. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... young lady must have gone away with the idea that I was a combination of longshore lout and effeminate dilettante, with the financial resources of the former. She might as well have that idea as any other, I supposed, but, in her eyes, I must be more of a freak than ever. I should take care to keep out of the sight of those eyes as much as possible. But that the millionaire's ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pure as the day he was born, having been trained as many a brave young man was then, to look upon profligacy not as a proof of manhood, but as what the old Germans, and those Gortyneans who crowned the offender with wool, knew it to be, a cowardly and effeminate sin. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and the exterior graces of his person were such, that nature perhaps never formed anything more complete: His face was extremely handsome; and yet it was a manly face, neither inanimate nor effeminate; each feature having its beauty and peculiar delicacy: He had a wonderful genius for every sort of exercise, an engaging aspect, and an air of grandeur: in a word, he possessed every personal advantage; but then he was greatly deficient in mental accomplishments. He had no sentiments but such ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... toward the platform where Lysia had just silently made her appearance,— and springing from their seats they broke into a boisterous shout of acclamation and welcome. One young man whose flushed face had all the joyous, wanton, effeminate beauty of a pictured Dionysius, reeled forward, goblet in hand, and tossing the wine in air so that it splashed down again at his feet, staining his white garments as it fell with a stain as of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his thorough Americanism of training and sympathy. Surcharged with European learning, he yet remained at heart the Lexington farmer's-boy, and his whole atmosphere was indigenous, not exotic. Not haunted by any of the distrust and over-criticism which are apt to effeminate the American scholar, he plunged deep into the current of hearty national life around him, loved it, trusted it, believed in it; and the combination of this vital faith with such tremendous criticism of public and private sins formed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 89 (a.u. 665)] (Par.) Cato,[64] the greater part of whose army was effeminate and superannuated, found his power diminished in every direction: and once, when he had ventured to rebuke them because they were unwilling to work hard or obey orders readily, he came near being overwhelmed with a shower of missiles from them. He would certainly have been killed, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... weight, Amber on pipes from Stamboul glows, And, joy of souls effeminate, Phials of crystal scents enclose. Combs of all sizes, files of steel, Scissors both straight and curved as well, Of thirty different sorts, lo! brushes Both for the nails and for the tushes. Rousseau, I would remark in passing,(12) Could not conceive how serious Grimm Dared calmly cleanse his ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... make a few observations on these curious people. Generally, the Tanelkums are reckoned amongst the most effeminate and civilised of the Tuaricks of the north; and, indeed, such appears to be their character, as developed in our transactions with them. Some of them have more the manners of merchants than camel-drivers; and the mercantile character always tames men in the desert. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... visit nor letter from my father, I was in tolerable bliss. Julia's kisses were showered on me for almost anything I said or did, but her admiration of heroism and daring was so fervent that I was in no greater danger of becoming effeminate than Achilles when he wore girl's clothes. She was seventeen, an age bewitching for boys to look up to and men to look down on. The puzzle of the school was how to account for her close relationship to old Rippenger. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the settlement we picked up many curious and interesting facts. Like most of the wild tribes of Mindanao, that of the Mandayas is athletic and robust. The faces of the men are somewhat girlish and effeminate, while the expressions of the warriors are unique. Upon their countenances cunning, cruelty, and diabolical resource are stamped indelibly. In front of every house a wooden idol stands, while inside, on ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the London 'fury' should be more thorough and more productive than the 'fury' of Antwerp, at the memory—of which the world still shuddered. And these professional soldiers had been taught to consider the English as a pacific, delicate, effeminate race, dependent on good living, without experience of war, quickly fatigued and discouraged, and even more easily to be plundered and butchered than were the excellent burghers ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... means so effeminate as his person. His 22 intimate freedmen and slaves, who were allowed a licence unusual in private households, dangled before him the baits for which he was greedy: the luxuries of Nero's Court, the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... game to play, for it meant conspiracy; and so long as the Lennoxes and their effeminate, lanky son were basking in Elizabeth's favour, the English queen held her trump card. But Lady Lennox was intriguing and ambitious, the head of English Catholic disaffection, and could only be held to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Media, having found means to get into the palace, and having with his own eyes seen Sardanapalus in the midst of his infamous seraglio; enraged at such a spectacle, and not able to endure that so many brave men should be subject to a prince more soft and effeminate than the women themselves, immediately formed a conspiracy against him. Belesis, governor of Babylon, and several others, entered into it. On the first rumour of this revolt, the king hid himself ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... scarcely told his ninth year; and the soft, auburn ringlets, descending half-way down the shoulders; the rich and delicate bloom that exhibits at once the hardy health and the gentle fostering; the large deep-blue eyes; the flexile and almost effeminate contour of the harmonious features; altogether made such an ideal of childlike beauty as Lawrence had loved to paint or Chantrey model. And the daintiest cares of a mother, who, as yet, has her darling all to herself—her toy, her plaything—were ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nobles were hunting, hawking, feasting, drinking, making love, minstrelsy, and chess. Intellectual ability formed no part of their accomplishments, and a knowledge of reading and writing was commonly regarded as effeminate. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Caffreland, or even face them as an enemy in the field. The Boers have generally manifested a marked antipathy to any thing but "long-shot" warfare, and, sidling away in their emigrations toward the more effeminate Bechuanas, have left their quarrels with the Caffres to be settled by the English, and their wars to be paid for by ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... their own manners are as gross as they make it their boast to show their morals. Hence, some two or three pegs higher, and not more, are such very very fine scoundrels as the Pelhams, &c.; shallow, watery-brained, ill-taught, effeminate dandies—animals destitute apparently of one touch of real manhood, or of real passion—cold, systematic, deliberate debauchees, withal—seducers, God wot! and duellists, and, above all, philosophers! How could any human being be gulled by such ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Yes—I have heard that Mr. Leigh excels in everything that is distinctly English—riding, shooting, and all that kind of thing. He is not effeminate." ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of Lessing, who had no sympathy with the effeminate sentimentality of the time, was severe. "We cannot," he said, "imagine a Greek or a Roman Werther; it was the Christian ideal that had made such a character possible." Goethe, he thought, should have added a cynical chapter (the more cynical the better) to put Werther's ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... hills that you can get an appetite, and then the author would say, 'Nothing had ever tasted so good as those trout, yanked from the brook and cooked to a turn on the sizzling coals. She looked at the stalwart young man, so skilfully frying the flapjacks, and contrasted him with the effeminate fops she had met on Fifth Avenue.'... But meanwhile, squaw, you'd better tear some good dry twigs off this bush ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... his labors and savings would go for naught, for he was supremely disappointed in his son, the crown-prince Frederick. The stern father had no sympathy for the literary, musical, artistic tastes of his son, whom he thought effeminate, and whom he abused roundly with a quick and violent temper. When Prince Frederick tried to run away, the king arrested him and for punishment put him through such an arduous, slave- like training in the civil and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of some ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... purpose, in these somewhat fragmentary observations, was to protest against the reasoning which would divest punishment of its proper and distinctive character, which, spreading about weak and effeminate scruples, would paralyse the arm which bears the sword of justice. One writer would impugn the right of society to put its arch-criminals to death; another controverts its right to inflict any penalty whatever, which has not for its direct object the reformation of the criminal. So, then, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... the Canadian labourer, old fur cap with ears, and moccasins. At his feet stood a small tin pail with a cover. His face was pale and singularly well-cut. His hair was black and very smooth and shiny; a very slight moustache gave character to an otherwise effeminate countenance and his eyes were blue, very light blue indeed and mild in their expression. We smiled involuntarily as the conductor departed. The man was the first ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Temple on July 28, 1763:—'My departure fills me with a kind of gloom that quite overshadows my mind. I could almost weep to think of leaving dear London, and the calm retirement of the Inner Temple. This is very effeminate and very young, but I cannot help it.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his mother's son, an effeminate fellow," his father, Andrei Nikolaevitch, was wont to say of him:—"but, on the other hand, he likes to go to God's church.... And ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... narrative, with a general truth as to the course of events, a greater amount of error as to particulars than we should have expected. The Sung Emperor Tu Tsong, a debauched and effeminate prince, to whom Polo seems to refer, had died in 1274, leaving young children only. Chaohien, the second son, a boy of four years of age, was put on the throne, with his grandmother Siechi, as regent. The approach of Bayan caused the greatest alarm; the Sung Court made humble ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... apparently a paradox, rung in my ears. The solitude became intolerable—I placed my hand on the beating heart of Idris, I bent my head to catch the sound of her breath, to assure myself that she still existed—for a moment I doubted whether I should not awake her; so effeminate an horror ran through my frame.—Great God! would it one day be thus? One day all extinct, save myself, should I walk the earth alone? Were these warning voices, whose inarticulate and oracular ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... not! But wherefore waste I precious hours with thee! Thou art her darling mischief, her chief engine, Antony's other fate. Go, tell thy queen, Ventidius is arrived, to end her charms. Let your Egyptian timbrels play alone, Nor mix effeminate sounds with Roman trumpets, You dare not fight for Antony; go pray And keep your cowards' holiday in ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... criticism," says Magoon, "are usually the product of obtuse sensibilities and a pusillanimous will. Plutarch tells us of an idle and effeminate Etrurian, who found fault with the manner in which Themistocles had conducted a recent campaign. 'What,' said the hero, in reply, 'have you, too, something to say about war, who are like the fish that has a sword, but no heart?' He is always the severest censor ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... like a feather in the air, poised on one of his stubborn fingers; when he kissed her each hair of his beard seemed like a pale, taut wire, so stiff and resolute was it. Her Uncle Ivan was a flabby, effeminate creature in comparison. Then, as she had grown older, she had realised that he was a dangerous man, dangerous to women, who loved and feared and hated him. Vera said that he had great power over them ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... enough, but had no great charms of understanding; a sister rather silly; and the incomparable Harriot, whose wit was as sound as her judgement solid and sterling, free from affectation and all little effeminate arts and airs. Reason governed her thoughts and actions, nor could the greatest flow of spirits make her for a moment forget propriety. Every thing in her was natural grace, she was always consistent and uniform, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... Devious, obvious, impervious, trivial Worm Vermicular Whale Cutaceous Wife Uxorious Word Verbal, verbose Weak Hebdomadal Wall Mural Will Voluntary, spontaneous Winter Brumal Wound Vulnerary West Occidental War Martial Women Feminine, female, effeminate Year Annual, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... field in the latter end of May. On the twentieth day of that month he arrived at his camp in Flanders with all the effeminate pomp of an Asiatic emperor, attended by his women and parasites, his band of music, his dancers, his opera, and, in a word, by all the ministers of luxury and sensual pleasure. Having reviewed his army, which amounted to about one hundred and twenty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... classicists, wrote for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age questi tempi della virtu sconosciutta." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... noble-minded mother, who caused him to be instructed in everything befitting a cavalier of gentle birth. While the sons of the nobility were revelling amid the pleasures of a licentious court, and sunk in that vicious and effeminate indulgence which led to the perdition of unhappy Spain, the youthful Pelayo, in his rugged mountain school, was steeled to all kinds of hardy exercise. A great part of his time was spent in hunting the bears, the wild boars, and the wolves, with which the Pyrenees ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... presents could induce a near approach. One lucky day, however, Captain Lewis surprised a chattering bevy of their squaws and made prisoner a belle of the tribe. Finding all effort to escape hopeless, the woman held down her head as if ready for death. There was among them the same effeminate fear of capture and the same heroic fortitude when death seemed inevitable, that Clive and Hastings found in the Bengalee. But the Captain gallantly painted her tawny cheeks with vermilion, and dismissed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... enveloping intuition, so to say, of the spiritual value in a material fact. During that unhappy agitation for the revision of our creed, I have heard him, touching the future state of unbaptised infants, utter sentiments of a heterodoxy that was positively effeminate in its sentimentality—sentiments which I shall not pain you by repeating. He has often referred, moreover, with the same disordered sentimentality, to the sad fate of our father—about whose present estate no churchman can have any doubt. And then about our belief that even good works are ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Thus we find a distinguished American zoologist, Chancellor Starr Jordan, constantly proclaiming that the effect of war in reversing selection is a great overshadowing truth of history; warlike nations, he declares, become effeminate, while peaceful nations generate a fiercely militant spirit.[1] Another distinguished American scientist, Professor Ripley, in his great work, The Races of Europe, likewise concludes that "standing armies tend to overload ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... gig. Guided by a hut upon the beach fronting French Factory and under lee of the breakers off Indian Bar, I landed near a tree-motte, in a covelet smoothed by a succession of sandpits. The land sharks flocked down to drag the boat over the breakwater of shingle. They appeared small and effeminate after the burly negroes of the Bights, and their black but not comely persons were clad in red and white raiment. It is a tribe of bumboat men, speaking a few words of English, French, and Portuguese, and dealing ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... This somewhat effeminate but decidedly comfortable attitude in which to keep one's watch on deck, was not invented until farther on in the cruise; and it seems odd that I should so long have continued to sit upright for hours together (wriggling ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... looking upon one of the most dangerous men in all the West. Quade was a villain. Culver Rann, quiet and cool and suave, was a devil. Behind his depravity worked the brain which Quade lacked, and a nerve which, in spite of that almost effeminate immaculateness, had been described to Aldous ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... you a handsome suit of clothes: A woman's, true; but then there is a cause Why you should wear them."—"What, though my soul loathes The effeminate garb?"—thus, after a short pause, Sighed Juan, muttering also some slight oaths, "What the devil shall I do with all this gauze?" Thus he profanely termed the finest lace Which e'er set off a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... "We effeminate women of the nineteenth century are afraid of broken heads," said Fanny. "But Mary Damer seems quite to enjoy your accident, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... the Count, and noted with sarcastic amusement the other's appearance—so foppish, so effeminate to English eyes; particularly did he gaze with scorn at the Count's yellow silk socks, which matched his lemon-coloured tie and silk pocket handkerchief. Fancy starting for a long night journey in such a "get-up." Well! Perhaps women liked that ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... had ever seen, wearing only a girdle of leaves around their waists, and all armed with Snider carbines and short stabbing knives made from cutlasses broken in halves. But, although they bullied the weak and effeminate Strong's Islanders, they were yet very obedient to their white masters, to whom they were all more or less related through the native wives whom the traders had married. The women were very tall and handsome, and every bit as handy with ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... he is a specimen of the best class of men to be met with in our day. He is a country gentleman, educated in the traditions of Rugby and Oxford at a time when those institutions had not succumbed to the subtle evils of our times, whereby the weak are corrupted into effeminate fools and the strong into abominable bullies. John Carvel's Latin has survived his school-days, and his manliness has outlived the university. He belongs to that class of Englishmen who proverbially ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... chosen successors. The young heirs were very coldly received on this occasion, for Helge was of a somber and taciturn disposition, and inclined to the life of a priest, and Halfdan was of a weak, effeminate nature, and noted for his cowardice. Frithiof, who was present, and stood beside them, cast them both in the shade, and won many admiring ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... weapon, was a recognizable subspecies in England at least to 1700. The anonymous author, for instance, of A Satyr Against Common-Wealths (1684) contended in his preface that it is "as disagreeable to see a Satyr Cloath'd in soft and effeminate Language, as to see a Woman scold and vent her self in Billingsgate Rhetorick in a gentile and advantageous Garb." But as Harte certainly realized, The Dunciad differed greatly from unvarnished abuse, and thus required ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Missouri Synod Dr. Mann wrote in 1866: "These theological scratchbrushes (Kratzbuersten) of the West do an important work. They discipline thousands of Germans ecclesiastically, as otherwise only Catholic priests are able to do. Most of them lead a rough, self-denying life. They defy effeminate, sentimental, hazy ecclesiastical Americanism. There is a firm character here. They will not always remain as rugged as they are now. The coming generation will be English and milder in many respects. The Missourians are a power in the West, where ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... means so diversified as those of boys. It would be considered a trifle too effeminate were the little men to amuse themselves with their sisters' game of Chucks—an enchanting amusement, played with a large-sized marble and four octagonal pieces of chalk. Beds, another girlish game, ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... notions and possessions. The Dame was a very homely, hard-featured lady, deaf, and extremely fat and heavy, one of the old uncultivated rustic gentry who had lagged far behind the general civilisation of the country, and regarded all refinements as effeminate French vanities. She believed, likewise, all that was said against Queen Mary, whom she looked on as barely restrained from plunging a dagger into Elizabeth's heart, and letting Parma's hell-hounds loose upon Tixall. To have such a guest imposed on her was ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... because England is a money-making country, and money-making is an effeminate pursuit, therefore all sedentary and spoony sins, like covetousness, slander, bigotry, and self-conceit, are to be cockered and plastered over, while the more masculine vices, and no- vices ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... familiar, intimate fancy, imagination farther, further feeling, sentiment feminine, effeminate fervent, fervid fewer, less fluid, liquid first (or last) two, two first (or last) food, feed foreign, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... frank and manly. There was an ease and freedom about him that contrasted favorably with the effeminate appearance and affected manners of the jeunesse doree. His voice, too, was a pleasant voice, and gave a value to all he said. A sunny smile lighted up his fair-complexioned face, the face old Carlotta had ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... doeth alter: For that he thinketh not meete to clothe with civell apparell him, who wil be redie, and promt to all kinde of violence, nor the civell customes, and usages maie that man have, the whiche judgeth bothe those customes to be effeminate, and those usages not to be agreable to his profession: Nor it semes not convenient for him to use the civill gesture and ordinarie wordes, who with fasing and blasphemies, will make afraied other menne: the whiche causeth ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin[Fr]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile|; impotent &c. 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c. v.; sapless, strengthless[obs3], powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic[obs3], asthenic[obs3]; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate[obs3], womanly. frail, fragile, shattery[obs3]; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy[obs3]; drooping, tottering &c. v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... end the war; (2) The 'Thesmophoriazusae' or Women's Festival of Demeter, a licentious but irresistibly funny assault upon Euripides. The tragedian, learning that the women in council assembled are debating on the punishment due to his misogyny, implores the effeminate poet Agathon to intercede for him. That failing, he dispatches his kinsman Mnesilochus, disguised with singed beard and woman's robes, a sight to shake the midriff of despair with laughter, to plead his cause. The advocate's excess of zeal betrays him; he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the effeminate imitations of the hummum to be found in New York or London, expect similar considerate treatment in Algeria. He will be more likely to receive the attention of the M'zabite bather after the fashion narrated in the following paragraph, which is a quotation from an English journalist in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... became more restricted, and men's minds were gradually diverted by business and foreign trade from that philosophical and artistic industry, which had made Athens the centre of the world. The brighter part of the country's genius descended to effeminate pursuits, and employed itself in the development of amorous fancies. In the comedies which came into favour, the dramatis personae represented a strange society of opulent old men, spendthrift sons, intriguing slaves, and courtezans. If we did not know what temptation there is to make ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... superior virility, stamina and sturdy qualities entirely disappear in two or three generations of city life. Our city civilization is always in a process of decay, and would, in a few generations, become emasculated and effeminate were it not for the pure, crystal stream of country youth flowing steadily into and purifying the muddy, devitalized stream of city life. It would soon become so foul and degenerate as to threaten the physical and moral ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden |
