"Gentility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... supper, when, through the crack of the door of the little room where she was supposed to be clearing away the relics of the feast, she looked and listened at her ease; laughed at the wits, stared at the lions, heard the music, was impressed by the wisdom, and much edified by the gentility of the whole affair. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... little meek, white, vacant face, and left it hardly more expressive than the unfeatured block upon which these articles are displayed in the barber's window. He was an exquisite image of shabby gentility. His scant ill-made coat, desperately brushed, his darned gloves, his highly polished boots, his rusty, shapely hat, told the story of a person who had "had losses" and who clung to the spirit of nice habits even though the letter had been hopelessly effaced. Among other things ...
— The American • Henry James
... nurse, a simpering piece of faded gentility, who did not presume to state her name as a fact, but merely offered it as a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the scarlet cloak and little round cap of Lincoln green, the puffed and ruffled sleeves, the petticoat of green-drugget cloth, the high heeled leather shoes, with their green ribbon bows, and the riding mask of black velvet which Debby remembered to have heard, only ladies of the highest gentility wore."[129] ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... replenishing before luncheon. She was putting on her bonnet to go to order them, when a doubt seized her whether she was transgressing the dignities of the Honourable Mrs. Martindale. Matilda had lectured against vulgarity when Arthur had warned her against ultra-gentility, and she wavered, till finding there was no one to send, her good sense settled the question. She walked along, feeling the cares and troubles of life arising on her, and thinking she should never again ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have a wholesome disregard of what Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so thinks or says. We pride ourselves on conforming to circumstances; and as a British officer must needs be a gentleman and his wife a lady, perhaps we repose quietly on that incontestable proof of our gentility, and can afford to be useful ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the patient into a fresh bed, and that was done very often. She would run to the cook or the butler for anything that was wanted in a hurry. She flung gentility and humbug to the winds. Then she dressed in ten minutes, and went and dined with Vizard, and made excuses for Zoe's absence, to keep everything smooth; and finally she insisted on sitting up with Ina Klosking till three in the morning, and made Miss Gale go to bed in the room. "Paid nurses!" said ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... of bankclerks who attach overmuch importance to the gentility of their Boy's avocation; to fathers who think that because the bank is rich its employes must necessarily become so in time; to friends who criticize the bankclerks of their acquaintance for not settling down—this ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... thought I knew all about it. Yes! in others, but now began to understand it for myself. Gradually my personal appearance faded. My once faultless linen became unkempt and unclean. Down further and further went the heels of my shoes, and I drifted into that distressing condition "shabby gentility." If the odds were against me before, how much more so now, seeing that I was too shabby even to command attention, much less a reply to my ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... his own table if 'twere illy set. He so loved things artistic in design - Order and beauty, all about him. Yet So kind he was, if it befell his lot To dine within the humble peasant's cot, He made it seem his native soil to be, And thus displayed the true gentility. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... relating to his mother how he has been at the head of his class, and showing his school tickets, which his mother, with untiring admiration, deposits in the little real china tea pot—which, as being their most reliable article of gentility, is made the deposit of all the money and most especial ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tiredly, "that the obligations of Darthian gentility apply to the grandson of a pirate ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... still owned by two antediluvian spinsters of the name of La Sarthe—exquisite specimens of Early Victorian gentility. They are very poor and proud and narrow-minded, and they have a great-niece living with them, the most remarkable little female intelligence I have ever come across. My old habit of instruction is not to be allowed to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... founded by men of high social rank. It is true that in numerous instances Virginians had the right to coats-of-arms, but this does not prove that their blood was noble, for in most cases these emblems of gentility came to them through ancestors that were mercantile in occupation and in instinct. During the 17th century the trades were in high repute in England, and to them resorted many younger sons of the gentry. These youths, excluded from a share in the ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... to be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity—a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility—contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Felicia Verity was known to treat her with affection. Mrs. Augustus Cowden, that true blue of county dames and local aristocrats, openly approved her. She sat daily at Sir Charles Verity's table and helped to order his household. What more genuine patents of gentility could be asked? So they listened with a pleasure, deep almost to agitation, to her performances upon the piano, her reminiscences of Bonn and the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, to her anecdotes of life ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... various species and varieties of other chestnuts, but none of these as yet has produced nuts of marked value. There seems to be a tendency for the coarseness of the larger nuts to prevail in the hybrids, a certain loss of gentility beneath a showy exterior. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... again to his visitors. But the visitors were rapidly retreating along the path, the lines of Miss Elvira's back indicating disgust and outraged gentility. Mrs. Chase, however, looked back. Obviously she still did not know what it was ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... a cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility, And he own'd with a grin That his favorite sin, Is pride ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Lavinia was not the same girl who at Bedfordbury used to run wild, half clad and half starved, and yet never looked like a beggar, so pretty and so attractive was she. Six months had developed her into a woman and the training of Miss Pinwell, the pink of gentility, had given her the modish airs of a lady of quality. True, her appearance just now had little of this "quality," her walk being in fact somewhat limping and one-sided. But there was good reason for this defect. She had lost one of her high-heeled ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... family, the thought struck him that his coming hither had dug up, as it were, a buried secret that immediately assumed life and activity the moment that it was above ground again. For seven generations the family had vegetated in the quietude of English country gentility, doing nothing to make itself known, passing from the cradle to the tomb amid the same old woods that had waved over it before his ancestor had impressed the bloody footstep; and yet the instant that he came back, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... settled their position, since it was the opinion of most of its members that it was organized especially that the "first families" might have a church-home. But they occupied a very front seat, by reason of their inability to pay for a middle one, which was bad for "position," as First Church gentility went. What was surprising to them was how they ever happened to have the money to pay for that seat; but, let me record it to their honor, they always happened to have it. They were honest. They ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... are talking!" cried the accused, who was dressed with his habitual shabby gentility. "The girl yonder, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... a lesson in gentility," she said. "Understand, Miss Beauty, that English Cats veil natural acts, which are opposed to the laws of English respectability, in the most profound mystery, and banish all that is improper, applying to the creature, as you have heard the Reverend Doctor Simpson say, the laws ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... obsequious, and rapacious; her eyebrows are closely shaven, her teeth carefully lacquered with black, as befits a lady of gentility, and at all and no matter what hours, she appears on all fours at the entrance of our apartment, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... man, with good, somewhat gipsy-like features, much tanned by the weather, as if he were perpetually exposed to sun and wind, rain and hail; sharp of movement, evidently of more than ordinary intelligence, and, in spite of his rough garments and fur cap, having an indefinable air of gentility and breeding about him. Brereton had already noticed the pitch and inflection of his voice; now, as Harborough touched his cap to the Mayor, he noticed that his hands, though coarsened and weather-browned, were well-shaped and delicate. Something about him, something in his attitude, the ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... rock. What a solemn contrast to the streams of fire-water soon about to flow! John Gubbins sat at the top of the table, looking fat and anxious, half shy and half foolish; the man with the false hair and ornaments placed himself next to him. Three other strangers were present, a mixture of sham gentility and swagger, of whom it would be difficult to say which had descended into the lowest depths of blackguardism. And now business was begun; the glasses were transferred to the larger table, the bottle uncorked, ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... of ironing. She thought it peculiar but genteel, and gentility is always desirable. There must be something about the climate of California that is especially inspiring to authors—a kind of magnetism in the atmosphere that draws out all the literary talent which may be lying dormant in their souls—so that any one desirous ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... visage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson's harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty. There was to Rowland's sympathetic sense a slightly pitiful disparity between the young sculptor's delicate countenance and the shabby gentility of his costume. He was dressed for a visit—a visit to a pretty woman. He was clad from head to foot in a white linen suit, which had never been remarkable for the felicity of its cut, and had now quite ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... strong blows to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features,—these temporary deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,—contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... upon the town in sudden glory, threw all her companions into the shade. Never had such a fine lady of comedy been seen, said the critics; never had an actress (who was not expected to be over-versed in the affairs of the "quality") displayed such gentility, high-breeding and evidence of being—Heaven knew how—quite "to the manner born." Never was woman so bubbling over with humour, said the people. As for Colley, he was delighted, of course, but believing that an honest confession ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... screamed out Mrs. Church. "This is a nice state of things, I must say. Who minds what a slip of a young lady says?—meaning no offence to you, miss; but I have been spending my money right and left, getting tea that beats all for gentility, and now one of the ladies is off as it were in a flash of an eye. ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... from the gay stuff of which it was composed, to appear in a public place, than to encounter a storm of rain. It was party-coloured, being made of different stripes of blue and violet; and the wearer arrogated a certain degree of gentility to himself, by wearing a plume of considerable dimensions of the same favourite colours. The features over which this feather drooped were in no degree remarkable for peculiarity of expression. Yet in so desolate a country as the west of Scotland, it would, not have ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... able to do with one servant instead of two, they would save probably more than they could earn in other ways, besides being much stronger from the exercise thus taken. But too many girls are, unfortunately, imbued with the vulgar notion that work is not genteel. What a Moloch this gentility has been and still is! What a number of human sacrifices are continually placed at its shrine, and what puppets its votaries become! Mr. Smiles says: 'There is a dreadful ambition abroad for being "genteel." We ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... me that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... and fashionable, perfect in etiquette, costume, and most particular in their society; but the rank and position of the noble Lady de Tilly made her friendship most desirable, as it conferred in the eyes of the world a patent of gentility which held good against ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it in the language of sentimental science she felt he ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Gentleman, a circumstance of which an ignorant panegyrist has praised him for not being proud; when the truth is, that the appellation of Gentleman, though now lost in the indiscriminate assumption of Esquire[111], was commonly taken by those who could not boast of gentility. His father was Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction[112], who settled in Lichfield as a bookseller ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... stranger—for such were never permitted to pass through the town without a tender of the hospitality of that venerable and elegant gentleman—whose prolonged life exhibited to another generation a pattern of old gentility, combined with a conscientious and effective performance of not only the smaller and more graceful duties of life, which he sweetened and adorned, but also of those graver and higher tasks which the confidence of his state imposed upon ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... garden they then remained—they were soon afterwards cut down—rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar pleasure. It is a satisfaction apart, for instance, to reflect that he has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. Like the M.P. in Martin Chuzzlewit, he represents the Gentlemanly Interest. That is his mission in literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly. He appears sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... yes, she did; for a woman will go anywhere, at any time, with anybody, to see any thing—especially in a gig." Those were days in which a gig was a vehicle the existence of which was not only recognized in civilized society, but supposed to confer a diploma of "gentility" upon its possessor. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... you mean by this outrage?" she stormed. Her voice was low and rich, with a charming roundness that seemed the very hallmark of gentility. But, now, it was surcharged with an indignant amazement over the indignity put upon her by the representatives of the law. Then, abruptly, the blue eyes were softened in their fires, as by the sudden nearness ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... the drift of this remark in considering the expression "play the agreeable," which was unpleasantly suggestive to her of under-bred gentility. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... beautiful dingle where we last planted the —— fern. His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility. He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed to him so happy and so beautiful an abode, that his heart felt ready to burst with joy. The ecstasy ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with a silly speech, Hetty, I will pitch you into the canal, and die of sorrow for my lost love afterwards. You know what I am, according to the conventional description: a gentleman with lots of money. Do you know the wicked origin of that money and gentility?" ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Marks, with a hoarse laugh; "who wants you to be genteel, I wonder? Not me, for one; when you're my wife you won't have overmuch time for gentility, my girl. French, too! Dang me, Phoebe, I suppose when we've saved money enough between us to buy a bit of a farm, you'll be parleyvooing to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... The GENTILITY-MONGERS, on the contrary, are positively noxious to society, as well particular as general. There is a twofold or threefold iniquity in their goings-on; they sin against society, their families, and themselves; the whole business of their lives is a perversion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... profit. Consequently, when its owner had tired of Colonial life, he had at first rented the farm, but, finding this unsatisfactory, he, in a moment of disgust, advertised it for sale. Pretentious in its plan and in its appointments, its neglected and run down condition gave it an air of decayed gentility, depressing alike to the eye of the beholder and to the selling price of the owner. Haley bought it and bought it cheap. From the high road a magnificent avenue of maples led to a house of fine proportions, though sadly needing repair. The wide verandahs, the ample ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... features.—C.D.W.]—stimulated industry, thrift, the inclination to settle down to the necessary hard work of the world, or have they bred idleness, indisposition to work, a vaporous ambition in politics, and that sort of conceit of gentility of which the world has already enough? If any one is in doubt about this he can satisfy himself by a sojourn in different localities in the South. The condition of New Orleans and its negro universities is often ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... you to know everything, dear benefactress. And it's not worth while for you, in your gentility, to trouble yourself about every low-lived person. And though they do complain, what's the use of paying attention; are they worth your notice? Since you do so many good deeds for others, God will forgive ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... family still remained, a party reined up and made some inquiries of the pater familias, a hangdog looking specimen, with an old slouched hat covered to the crown with rusty crape, a mark of second-hand gentility in these parts. He said that "this yer war" had caused such a famine among the people, that nearly all of them had been obliged to leave; some had gone to Washington and some to Richmond, "a right smart lot of them had gone to Richmond." He had "reckoned onct or twict" ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that rentier class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.—a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth Madame had kept a pension and had had English demoiselles among her charges. She had never been to England but she had heard ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in China—the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized social system the old order ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... in your letter, the simple, flowing style of gentility, the one which alone a woman of condition who writes to her friend may use with dignity. Your digressions and your thoughts are flowers which . . . (forgive an author who pilfers from you the delicious ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... she does it!" said Harry Dart, coming up to me. "Quite the brilliant belle! By Jove! how she dances! I despise the girl with her greedy maw, and deuced airs of high gentility when she is a perfect beggar, but it is a second heaven to dance with her. She has the go of a wild animal in her. She is a little like a panther—so round, so sleek, so agile in her spring. I told her just now I should like to paint her—yellow eyes, hair like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... to take leave of them, I could perceive, not only that they were both very much affected, but that Clarke had something more on his imagination. He had a great respect for my gentility, and learning; and was always afraid of being too familiar. At some moments, he felt as it were the insolence of having fought with me: at others a gleam of exultation broke forth, at his having had that honour. He had several times expressed ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... at right angles to the shore, running up the valley of the Avon; but it soon ceased to be fishy, and became agricultural, owning a few cottages of very humble gentility, which were wont to hang out boards to attract lodgers of small means. At one of these Grace rang, and obtained admittance to a parlour with crazy French windows opening on a little strip of garden. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of gentility of appearance, a suit of black had been his working day costume, nothing therefore could be more easy than for Dumps to turn gentleman. He did so; took a villa at Gravesend, chose for his own sitting room a chamber that looked against a dead wall, and whilst ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... "but really the service makes brutes of us all. It is hard to sacrifice our health, our night's rest, and our comforts; but still more so, that in my responsible situation, I am obliged too often to sacrifice my gentility." ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... footboy; for tea and card parties,—it would just hold one table; for the rustle of faded silks, and the splendour of old china; for the delight of four by honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal between the deals; for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny; but fate has been unpropitious: it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... our village dressmaker. A very bad one certainly, but still she could gore a skirt. She was not a native of the village, and signified her superior gentility by a mincing pronunciation. She had also a hiss with the sibilants peculiar to herself. Before I could remonstrate, Jack was knocking ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... faith and dark villany on both sides ere the war was over. Be it remembered that these same nobles had kept the honor too closely to themselves, and ridiculed it out of life quite too sharply in the 'base mechanicals' to fairly expect mastery in gentility from them. And in these same Partingtonian Biographies, I am often inclined to suspect that the lions do some ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... time now to leave the scene, so Charley and I went to look for our gig (evidence of gentility from the time of Thurtell and Hunt's trial for ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... you were always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me—how long ago it was!—to see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their money, and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... one of the bugbears of the Blake family, her gentility and general fineness being altogether ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found—or thought—it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; they sweetened their narratives ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... education; he dealt first with the upholders of a kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new phrase his warning] "that every man of high ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place, and—especially during the lifetime of the elder partners—left him leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... crime as fell into his clutches. They had already vowed vengeance upon him, these sometime brethren of the coast, for his betrayal of their confidence at Panama; they had further resented his honor of knighthood, his cloak of respectability, his assumption of gentility, and now that he hanged and punished right and left without mercy, their anger and animosity were raised to the point of fury, and many of them swore deeply with bitter oaths that if they ever caught him defenceless they would make him pay dearly in torture and torment ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... its range was infinite. Wits, felons, clergymen, adventurers, millionaires and spendthrifts, all had answered to the unobtrusive cognomen. It was plain and commonplace, but as baffling as a disguise. With Talbot, Meredith, or Percival, the case is different, such nomenclature presupposes gentility. As the name "Percival" crossed the girl's mind in her whimsical musings, her thoughts seized upon it and fitted it instantly to the name which had preceded it, Percival—and Smith! Percival Smith! That was the name signed to the letter they had re-discovered after its sleep of years—the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... are a young gentleman, are you?" he continued, without attending to my observations. "Sent to sea to learn manners! Well, we'll soon knock your gentility out of you, let me tell you. Howsomdever, we don't want no help here, so be off on shore again; and when you meet John Smith, just ask him to take you a walk through the town, and not to bring you back to make yourself useful till the ship's ready for ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... affluent, then matters are ten times worse. Then there is all the pride and vanity that ignorance, and a desire to hide that mean extraction create. Incapable of shewing delicacy and fine breeding in herself, she spoils her harmless children by converting them into specimens of the gentility of the family. For more of this, see the chapter ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Nicholls, who has left his overcoat and hat in the hallway. Nicholls is a young fellow of twenty-three, stockily built, fair-haired, handsome in a commonplace, conventional mould. His manner is obviously an attempt at suave gentility; he has an easy, taking smile and a ready laugh, but there is a petty, calculating expression in his small, observing, blue eyes. His well-fitting, ready-made clothes are carefully pressed. His whole get-up suggests an attitude ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... thought of my distress, and the means of extricating myself, without appearing in want to my step-mother. I compared myself, in this walking pilgrimage, to my friend Venture, on his arrival at Annecy, and was so warmed with the idea, that without recollecting that I had neither his gentility nor his talents, I determined to act the part of little Venture at Lausanne, to teach music, which I did not understand, and say I came from Paris, where I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... in the air." Iiani was very polite to ladies, and he knew their ways. He seldom advanced without an offering of some lovely flower or a small sprig of sweetly-scented herb, which he invariably presented with a graceful bow and a smile intended to represent a combination of humility, amiability, gentility, and as many other "ilitys" as could be squeezed into his expressive features. It is hardly necessary after this description to say that Iiani was a very tall humbug, pleasant in manner when he had his own way. He was lazy to such a degree that ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... gloomy silence, seemed intolerable, to be shunned, from the mere instinct of self-preservation. He thought of the evening he had spent in the bosom of "Down-by-the-starn" Hemmings' family, receiving his last instructions—the security of that suburban villa, its discouraging gentility; the superior acidity of the Miss Hemmings; the noble names of large contractors, of company promoters, of a peer, dragged with the lightness of gun-carriages across the conversation; the autocracy of Hemmings, rasped up here and there, by some ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to the Prince of Wales, travelling as Baron Renfrew, on the evening of October 12, 1860, in which his father had figured briefly before the royal guest to the abiding credit of American tact and gentility. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... finest ladies would have exchanged all their white for it: add to these a countenance in which, though she was extremely bashful, a sensibility appeared almost incredible; and a sweetness, whenever she smiled, beyond either imitation or description. To conclude all, she had a natural gentility, superior to the acquisition of art, and which ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... used to a situation that, at first she had found not only novel, but a little irksome; and the officers and men in their turn, gradually familiarized to the presence of a young and blooming girl, whose attire and carriage had that air of modest gentility about them which she had obtained in the family of her patroness, annoyed her less by their ill-concealed admiration, while they gratified her by the respect which, she was fain to think, they paid her on account of her father; but which, ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... ancient mantelpiece were forced to keep company with meat blocks and butchers' cleavers. Above this were Henry Vail's rooms, where the old chambers had been carefully restored; and above these the third story and attic were crowded with tenants. But everywhere the house had traces of its former gentility. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... but influential class of Americans who copied foreign manners, the United States of America had gained something of a national character in European estimation. In the New World alone, labor was deemed compatible with gentility. The increasing facilities of traffic and manufacture gave a tremendous impulse to the development of the country. Thus a surprising number of railroads were opened in the States of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Improvements connecting Philadelphia ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... a basket containing a couple of mutton cutlets, a ball of wool and some tooth-powder. So she put on her Prince of Wales's cloak, and, postponing further reflection over the bridge-party till a less busy occasion, set forth in unencumbered gentility for the morning gossip. At the corner of the High Street, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... keep her waiting long. He came back in a black coat that was quite as grand as Judge Little's, and almost as long. That garment was the mark of fashion and gentility in that part of the country in those days, a style that has outlived many of the hearty old gentlemen who did it honor, and has descended even to this ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... you are to add the perfect good Breeding and Civility of the Knight upon every Occasion; which are some Kind of Merit in his Favour, and entitle him to Respect, by the Rules of common Gentility and Decency; At the same time his Courage, his Honour, Generosity, and Humanity, are conspicuous in every Act and Attempt; The Foibles which he possesses, besides giving you exquisite Pleasure, are wholly inspir'd by these worthy Principles; Nor is there ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... being completed in the Forties with Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans, this last portion having also more than one section. The first two volumes of the Lost Illusions narrate the early experiences of Lucien de Rubempre, a young poet of Angouleme, whose family, with some claims to gentility, has fallen into narrow circumstances, the widowed mother being obliged to earn money as a midwife, and the daughter as a laundry-woman. The latter's marriage with David Sechard, a printer, alters the situation of the family for the better; and Lucien is enabled to occupy himself in the printing-house, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... good, too, and Mrs. Salter was liberal. He rose greatly in her esteem by saying grace before meat. He cooled his tea in his saucer too, and raised it to his lips with his little finger stuck stiffly out (a mark of gentility imparted by Mrs. Lake), and in all points conducted himself with the utmost propriety. "For what we have received the Lord be praised," was his form of giving thanks; to which Mrs. Salter added, "Amen," and "Bless ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... order to save every possible cent, we should become slipshod and shabby. Carelessness in dress takes away from our rating as nothing else will for it has to do with first impressions of those with whom we come in contact. Gentility pays dividends of the highest order, being, as it is, a badge of character. Neatness bespeaks character, and it is just as cheap in dollars and cents to keep ourselves respectably clothed as to indulge in ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... my joy I was able to relinquish Mr. Lambie. That timid soul had been on thorns ever since I mooted my new projects. He implored me to put them from me; he drew such pictures of the power of the English traders, you would have thought them the prince merchants of Venice; he saw all his hard-won gentility gone at a blow, and himself an outcast precluded for ever from great men's recognition. He could not bear it, and though he was loyal to my uncle's firm in his own way, he sought a change. One day he announced that he had been offered a post as ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... said. "We may put on airs of gentility, boast of independence and spirit, and all that; but it's a mean kind of gentility that will let a man flourish about in a fine coat for which he owes his tailor. Wyville has a large bill against me for clothes, Grafton another for boots, and Cox another for hats. I am trying ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... to find some touch of the Boweryite about him, some outcropping of the half-submerged bunco-steerer. Instead of that, both his look and his tone carried some tinge of quiet yet dominant gentility, reminding her, as she had so often been taught before, that the criminal is not a type in himself, that only fanciful and far-stretched generalizations could detach him as a species, or immure and mark him off from ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... is generally a cast-off mansion of gentility. There are a score of things about it to remind you that it was once a home, and to set you to speculating on the ways of the grim fate that has changed it into a place of torment. Whole volumes have been written ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming: it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... for he was very ambitious. His natural discernment set all his own failings before him in the clearest light; also their consequences. He knew that he was vulgar and brutal, and that as a result all persons of real gentility looked down upon him, however much they might seem to cringe before his money and power, yes, though they chanced to be but ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... pieces at the mark, and had their good or bad address rewarded by the laughter or applause of the spectators. But when a slender young man, dressed with great simplicity, yet not without a certain air of pretension to elegance and gentility, approached the station with his fusee in his hand, his dark-green cloak thrown back over his shoulder, his laced ruff and feathered cap indicating a superior rank to the vulgar, there was a murmur of interest among the spectators, whether ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seem delighted in the sport, and have his fist gloved with his jesses.[38] A justice of peace he is to domineer in his parish, and do his neighbour wrong with more right.[39] He will be drunk with his hunters for company, and stain his gentility with droppings of ale. He is fearful of being sheriff of the shire by instinct, and dreads the assize-week as much as the prisoner. In sum, he's but a clod of his own earth, or his land is the dunghill and he the cock that crows over it: and commonly his race is quickly run, and his ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Philadelphia. These structures, which then wore an air of respectable old age, have been in recent years either totally destroyed or so extensively altered that the serene atmosphere of antiquated gentility no longer lingers about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... unceremonious demand the knight flushed angrily, frowned, made an expressive gesture with his lips and his nose which suggestively indicated that there was something offensive in the air between the wind and his gentility, ending the pantomime by finding a pass and handing it over to his "nigger," then—not deigning to speak—motioned him and it to the threatening figure. As this black man came forward, Brooks, looking at him a moment, cried excitedly, "By Jove! ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... be serious with a man like that! Do you not see that he is infatuated with one idea, and would it have cost you much to fall in with his gentility? ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... a helpless potterer; he may be a man of spotless life, able and honest; but he must on no account be a man with broad palms, a workman amongst workmen. The 'gentleman' is not necessarily gentle; but he is necessarily genteel. Etymology is not at fault here; gentility, and gentility alone, is ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... forefathers had any superiority to those who shared in the general indifference as to who their forefathers were. He went farther than this in some instances, and expressly implied that blood and birth were necessary to gentility. This was provincialism pushed to an extreme. Whatever we may think of its actual value, English aristocracy resembles in this gold and silver, that it has an accepted value independent of the character of its representatives. It is, therefore, current throughout the civilized ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... self-love to each country and nation. Upon this account it is that the English challenge the prerogative of having the most handsome women, of the being most accomplished in the skill of music, and of keeping the best tables: the Scotch brag of their gentility, and pretend the genius of their native soil inclines them to be good disputants: the French think themselves remarkable for complaisance and good breeding: the Sorbonists of Paris pretend before any ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur of that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hotel de Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed gentility ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... no body should point at it. Others buy titles, coats of arms, and by all means screw themselves into ancient families, falsifying pedigrees, usurping scutcheons, and all because they would not seem to be base. The reason is, for that this gentility is so much admired by a company of outsides, and such honour attributed unto it, as amongst [3629]Germans, Frenchmen, and Venetians, the gentry scorn the commonalty, and will not suffer them to match with them; they depress, and make them as so many asses, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... conspicuous part of the looking-glass frame over the chimney-piece of the best drawing-room. Thus you perceive that our natural position was one highly creditable to us, proving the soundness of our finances and the gentility of our pedigree,—of which last more hereafter. At present I content myself with saying on that head that even the proudest of the neighboring squirearchs always spoke of us as a very ancient family. But all ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a long line of patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair; but the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... pantaloons of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,—in short, we were a living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of men who had seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ben, "I don't understand much about titles and nobility, and those sort of things; but I'm sorry she's gone down in the world, for though a little particular about gentility, she's a good sort of woman in her way, and keeps up her character, and earns ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... and changed all in an instant. You have been thrown against the real world. You find it not to be what you supposed. It is no cause for shame or regret; womanhood lies deeper than any pretense at gentility. Men seldom fail to recognize this fact—their lives of struggle compel them to, but a woman finds it hard ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... woods under the shelter of mighty rocks, passed more ruins. We stopped to examine these older ruins of the ancient O'Ruarkes. A Milesian gentleman showed us through them. It is the correct thing to have a ruin on your place; it is a kind of patent of gentility. If a banshee could be thrown in along with a ruin, a new man would give a great price for an old place. But banshees are getting scarce and decline to be caught. This ruin has been patched over, clumsily but earnestly, so that hardly a speck of the original ruin ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... with the Parcel (to her friend—for the sake of vindicating her gentility). Oh, my dear, I do feel so funny, carrying a great brown-paper parcel, in a bus, too! Anyone would take me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... was of doubtful gentility. She had, in her first marriage—I don't think, D'Artagnan, I am telling you anything new—married a lawyer; they thought that 'nauseous;' you can understand that's a word bad enough to make one ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... know what, that was purely English. In fact, men and women here do things that would at least make them ridiculous in America. They are not afraid to enjoy themselves in their own way, and have no pseudo-gentility to support. Some girls danced upon the crowded deck, to the miserable music of a little fragment of a band which goes up and down the river on each trip of the boat. Just before the termination of the voyage a man goes round with a bugle ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that come and them that go From either gathering host, And, after feeble, false allegiance, now first know Their post. Ho, ye Who loved our Flag Only because there flapp'd none other rag Which gentlemen might doff to, and such be, 'Save your gentility! For leagued, alas, are we With many a faithful rogue Discrediting bright Truth with dirt and brogue; And flatterers, too, That still would sniff the grass After the 'broider'd shoe, And swear it smelt like musk where He did pass, Though he were Borgia or Caiaphas. Ho, ye Who dread ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack—who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of a true and touching ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... unhappy. She had a fixed notion of what life should be for people who were "nice" and "refined," and her days were a succession of regrets at the shortcomings of her neighbors. She was in many ways an admirable woman, but she seemed incapable of extending the conception of gentility which a little Pennsylvania town had given her, and she never caught a gleam of the real meaning of the life of which she was a part. She wanted everything in the Bad Lands exactly as she had had it at home. "Well," as Mrs. Roberts subsequently remarked, "she had one time of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Grimes? what is the fellow about? send him here, some one. And you, sir—you think yourself a navigator— go and get your sextant and prove yourself one," he added, turning fiercely to me. "You young slips of gentility must be kept ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... sought to keep him neatly mended up, for her woman's eye had caught that detail in a glance. Through his inebriety lurked a ghost-like suggestion of past gentility. She turned impulsively back, beckoning to him as she searched her purse. In it were two quarters and one of them she ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of the pock by my declaring, that Nanse, the goodwife, had also a finger in the pie—as, do what ye like, women will make their points good—she having overcome me in her wheedling way, by telling me, that it was curious I had no ambition to speel the ladder of gentility, and hold up my chin in imitation ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... came and went at much the same hour; and for a long while our intercourse was restricted to formal courtesies; mutual inquiries after each other's health, a few urbane strictures on the climate. The little old gentleman in spite of his aspect of shabby gentility,—for his coat was sadly inefficient, and the nap of his carefully brushed hat did not indicate prosperity—perhaps even because of this suggestion of fallen fortunes, bore himself with pathetic erectness, almost haughtily. He did not seem amenable to advances. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... then for Rebecca to do," thought Ruth, "that will not so greatly shock her notions of gentility. Dear me! she's as nice a girl as ever lived; but she ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson |
