"Ingenious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kind of heat in my room, and could not bear a charcoal brazier, so I incited an ingenious tin-smith to make me a stove with a pipe going out of the window. However, he was so proud of his success that he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Persian, Afghan and Turkish gold and silver inlaid shields, and the intensely picturesque and finely ornamented matchlocks and flintlocks. Here, too, as in China, we find an abnormally large rifle—something like the gingal of the Celestials. These long clumsy rifles possess an ingenious back sight, with tiny perforations at different heights of the sight for the various distances on exactly the principle ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Most ingenious! most felicitous! but let no man despise little words, despite of the little man of Twickenham. He himself knew better, but there was no resisting the temptation of such a line as that. Small words he says, in plain prosaic criticism, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... "With the ingenious financial details of the concern, which were conducted in the style of the 'Jose Santos Company,' I need not trouble you now. We come to the second period, when the flat in Albemarle Street and the two offices in old Bond Street became vacant and were promptly leased by Mareno, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... part of the Exposition is good, but nothing to what is should and might have been, but we bring home nearly as many medals as we took things. We lead the world in machinery and in ingenious inventions, and some of our ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the "Note" with which this work concludes, and which treats of the distinctions between type and allegory, the reader will find, from the pen of one of our most eminent living writers, an ingenious attempt to explain the interior or typical meanings of the work now ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... well-chosen continuity of a novel plan of illustrating the Animal economy, is devoted to "an examination of Birds in the exercise of their mechanical arts of constructing Nests." "This work," observes the ingenious Editor, "is the business of their lives—the duty which calls forth that wonderful ingenuity, which no experience can teach, and which no human skill can rival." The few introductory pages include a rapid sketch of the methods ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... service between the Shack and the wireless station about the middle of April, the parts all being made by himself; and it was certainly an ingenious and valuable contrivance. I, in particular, learned to appreciate the convenience of it as time went on. The buzzer was fixed on the wall close to the head of my bunk and I could be called any time during ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... supposed that because we deny thought and speech to animals, we wish to degrade them. Everything that has been told us of the ingenious tricks of animals, even the most incredible, we shall gladly believe, only not that bos locutus est, or that an actual utterance lies hidden in the bark of a dog. A man who sees no difference between language and communication will of course continue to say ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... voyage to add local colour and verisimilitude, when his heart missed a beat, as he perceived that he had made a blunder. Like many other amateur plotters, Ann and he had made the mistake of being too elaborate. It had struck them as an ingenious idea for Jimmy to pretend that he had arrived that morning, and superficially it was a good idea: but he now remembered for the first time that, if he had seen Mr. Pett on the Atlantic, the probability was that Mr. Pett had seen him. The next moment the other ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Certain ingenious methods were therefore devised to insure the taking of game in large numbers at one time. This was especially the case with the buffalo, which were the food and raiment of the people. One of these contrivances was called pis'kun, deep-kettle; ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... his face, that strove to end him, was the embodied and evil spirit of the place, a place that even Halvard had seen was damnably wrong. He questioned if such a force could be killed, if a being materialized from the outer dark could be stopped by a pistol of even the latest, most ingenious mechanism. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade of tyranny. They know all the devices, all the little frauds, all the artifices and contrivances, the whole panoply of the defensive armor by which ingenious slavery secures itself against the violence of power. They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last retreats. They have suffered themselves; but, far from being taught by those sufferings to abstain from rigor, ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The ingenious author of the article GODWIN, in the Biographia Britannica, has endeavoured to clear the memory of that nobleman, upon the supposition, that all the English annals had been falsified by the Norman historians after ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... know who were the Saints, Popes, and Bishops thus addicted to tippling! Truly a chronique scandaleuse, and one which would surely have appealed to Louis Maimbourg, that ingenious Jesuit historian, had it but appeared in his day. We are told that he never took up his pen till he had heated his imagination by wine, nor ever attempted to describe a battle till he had drunk two bottles—lest, as he said ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... "That is a very ingenious chain of circumstantial evidence. Of course, you do not think it strong enough to convict a man of such ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... peer to the draper's assistant; all were admirers, or rather worshippers, of Byron, and all doated on his verses; and then I thought of those who, with genius as high as his, or higher, had lived and died neglected. I thought of Milton abandoned to poverty and blindness; of witty and ingenious Butler consigned to the tender mercies of bailiffs; and starving Otway: they had lived neglected and despised, and, when they died, a few poor mourners only had followed them to the grave; but this Byron had been made a half god of when living, and now that he ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... not at first accredited in Boston, but that her father, and Mr. Atkinson, and the chief people there now, did hold him to be not only what he professeth, as respecteth his gentlemanly lineage, but also learned and ingenious, and well-versed in the Scriptures, and the works of godly writers, both of ancient and modern time. I noted that Robert was very silent during the rest of our journey, and seemed abashed and troubled in the presence of the gay gentleman; for, although a fair and comely youth, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... this long series of more than thirty novels, and like the Littlepage MSS. it was devoted to the illustration of social and political evils, having for its main subject the constitution and office of juries. In other works Mr. Cooper appears as a conservative; in this as a destructive. The book is ingenious and able, but has ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... in the mysteries of building up heads, and pulling down characters; ingenious in the construction of caps, capes, and scandal, and judicious in the application of paint and flattery; also, a footman, who knows, at a single glance, what visiters to admit to the presence of his mistress, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... the message was regarded as an ingenious censure of Congress by the President, and was loudly applauded on the Democratic side of the House. He concluded by declaring that notwithstanding the anomalous character of the resolution, he had affixed ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... erection of a monument to the memory of Watt. Of his medical information, slight as it undoubtedly was, he is said to have been particularly proud. Carpue had demonstrated to him the general anatomy of the human body, in his younger days; and for a number of years, the ingenious Weiss submitted to his inspection all the new surgical instruments, in one of which the king ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... port, and of the nation; the effect being the exact equivalent of the local gains of a railroad centre of the present day. It was a dominant object with statesmen of the earlier period to draw such accumulations of traffic to their own ports, or nations; to force trade, by ingenious legislation, or even by direct coercion, to bring its materials to their own shores, and there to yield to them the advantages of the entrepot. Thus the preamble to one of the series of Navigation Acts states, as a direct object, the "making this Kingdom a staple[12] ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... has invented a method of posing cats that is ingenious and of great advantage. To the uninitiated it would seem that one could only take the portrait of a sleeping cat, so untiring are the little beasts in their gymnastic performances. But Mme. Ronner, having studied them with infinite patience, proceeded ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... This is an ingenious little misprint; for what Miss Bennet, who was one of the hostesses, was doing was not taking tea, of course, but making tea. The early editions and ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... Faith,' says one of our old divines, with the quaintness characteristic of his day, 'resemble the two sons of the patriarch; Reason is the firstborn, but Faith inherits the blessing. The image is ingenious, and the antithesis striking; but nevertheless the sentiment is far from just. It is hardly right to represent Faith as younger than reason: the fact undoubtedly being, that human creatures trust and believe, long before they reason or know. But the truth ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... remark here is ingenious; "The Romans," says he, "were so convinced of the power of beauty, that they used a word implying strength in the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of the malady, relief is given by the skillful use of instruments for dilating the canal, or, where this fails by the operation of urethrotomy, for which we employ an improved and ingenious instrument, by which the stricture is readily and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... by any other agency than that of fire. As late as 1860 Mr. Henry Rosales convinced himself, and apparently the Victorian Government also, that quartz veins with their enclosed metal had been ejected from the interior of the earth in a molten state. His essay, which is very ingenious and cleverly written, obtained a prize which the Government had offered, but probably Mr. Rosales himself would not adduce the same arguments in support of the volcanic or igneous theory to-day. His phraseology is very technical; so much so that the ordinary inquirer will find it somewhat ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... plan, for she was ingenious in contrivances to do good, she greatly assisted those in slender circumstances, especially such as were of the household of faith. Believing that the use of sums of ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds in hand would be serviceable ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... tendencies. It covers the whole field, moral, intellectual, and physical, from the smile or the frown on a man's face, up to the most complex of the ideas in his mind; from the expression of his emotions, to their root and relations with one another in his inmost organisation. As an ingenious writer, too soon lost to our political literature, has put it:—'If we wanted to describe one of the most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made an antiquity. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... on a coal shovel in the furnace of the apartment house whose basement back room she occupied. Although her inventions were not practicable, various experts to whom they were submitted always pronounced them suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this complimentary verdict—"this ribbon to stick in her coat"—with such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her financial disappointment, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... The eye, the outer instrument of vision, is a most beautiful and ingenious machine. All its parts are arranged with such a delicate adjustment to one another, and such an exquisite adaptation of every part to the great object of the whole, that the eye is properly regarded as one of ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... irregular genius, bursting from the limits of imperfect science, bore him to conclusions far beyond the intellectual vision of his contemporaries. If some of his conclusions were erroneous, they were at least ingenious and splendid; and their error resulted from the clouds which still hung over his peculiar path of enterprise. His own discoveries enlightened the ignorance of the age; guided conjecture to certainty, and dispelled that very ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... this ingenious naturalist who has already given us more useful works and has still others in preparation, uses for this odious task, a pen dipped in gall and wormwood. It is true that many of his remarks have some foundation, and that to each error that he points out he at the same time adds its correction. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the foxes may ruin the new proprietor. The difficulty of obtaining a purchaser is most great in the case of land terraced for rice-fields, in the mountain districts. The prime necessity of such agriculture is irrigation— irrigation by a hundred ingenious devices, always in the face of difficulties. There are seasons when water becomes terribly scarce, and when the peasants will even fight for water. It is feared that on lands haunted by foxes, the foxes may turn the water away from one field into another, or, for spite, make holes ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring at each landing transversal corbels which are decorated with arabesque carvings without and within. This bewildering creation of ingenious and delicate details, of marvels which give speech to stones, can be compared only to the deeply worked and crowded carving of the Chinese ivories. Stone is made to look like lace-work. The flowers, the figures ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... merchantmen which has been sunk by a waiting submarine sailed, it now appears, under a German guarantee of "relative security": and the incident has been received in Holland with a widespread outburst of relative acquiescence. Germany, in the little ingenious arrangements that she is so fond of making for the safety and comfort of her neighbours, is so often misunderstood. It should be obvious by this time that her attitude to International Law has always been one of approximate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... with the army, was left alone with six small children in a hamlet among the hills of Berkshire, Massachusetts. Finding it difficult to eke out a subsistence from the sterile soil of their farm, and being quick and ingenious with her needle, she turned tailoress and made garments for her little ones, and for all the families in that region. She wrote her husband, telling him to be of good cheer, and not to give himself anxiety on his wife's or his children's account, adding that as long as her fingers could ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical character in The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan's wife and Freia's sister: nay, she contradicts her allegorical ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... languages, and will gif you lessons in Danish, Swedish, English, Bortuguese, Spanish and Bersian." Thus occupied in meditations, the rapid hours and the rapid steamer pass quickly on. The sun is sinking, and, as he drops, the ingenious luminary sets the Thames on fire: several worthy gentlemen, watch in hand, are eagerly examining the phenomena attending his disappearance,—rich clouds of purple and gold, that form the curtains of his bed,—little barks that pass black across his disc, his disc every instant dropping nearer ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shot through the head by the husband he has wronged! Patience, patience, good Simpson; thou shalt yet riot in the very satiety of thy vengeance. But now to put in operation my first method—an ingenious one it is, too—of ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... has saved it. History will draw together and unite those two names. A single word explains Mr. Lincoln's whole life: it was Duty. Never did he put himself forward; never did he think of himself; never did he seek one of those ingenious combinations which puts the head of a state in bold relief, and enhances his importance at the expense of the country; his only ambition, his only thought was faithfully to fulfil the mission which his fellow-citizens had entrusted to ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... friendship and experimented fidelity. At that time it was not imagined, that patriotism was a bloody idol, which required the sacrifice of children and parents, or dearest connections in private life, and of all the virtues that rise from those relations. They were not of that ingenious paradoxical morality, to imagine that a spirit of moderation was properly shown in patiently bearing the sufferings of your friends; or that disinterestedness was clearly manifested at the expense of other people's fortune. They believed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... minutes. His speech was excessively ingenious, as well as eloquent, and directed to move the sympathy of his hearers as much as possible, without any deviation from literal truth. He said that it was true that he had tried to escape to France, but that his motive was not treasonable; he knew the King to be justly incensed, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... It is not two years since I acquired, in a foreign land, some domestic intelligence of my own family; and this intelligence was conveyed to Switzerland from the heart of Germany. I had formed an acquaintance with Mr. Langer, a lively and ingenious scholar, while he resided at Lausanne as preceptor to the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. On his return to his proper station of Librarian to the Ducal Library of Wolfenbuttel, he accidentally found among some literary ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... in earthenware, horsehair, bridle reins, ropes, and domestic utensils, is remarkably ingenious. They formerly cultivated cotton and manufactured cotton cloth of a very strong quality. The men understood spinning and weaving, and passed the ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... ingenious and subtle. It comes by the window, it goes through walls. It does not always show itself, but it is always there. The poor doors are innocent of the coming of that ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... of the Museum building is the Meteorological Observatory of the Central Park, under charge of Professor Daniel Draper. Here are ingenious and interesting instruments for measuring the velocity and direction of the wind, the fall of rain and snow, and for ascertaining the variation of the temperature, etc. The establishment is very complete, and a portion of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of the second week, when they were alone in her dressing-room, he—with the ingenious lack of abruptness of the experienced man at the game—took her hand, and before she was ready, kissed her. He did not accompany these advances with an outburst of passionate words or with any fiery lighting up of the eyes, but calmly, smilingly, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... indulged in as sanguine prepossessions as before; but in a week's time our eagerness was greatly abated, and a general dejection and despondency took place. It is true, there were some few amongst us who still kept up their spirits, and were very ingenious in finding out reasons to satisfy themselves, that the disappointment had been occasioned by a casual delay of the galleon, which a few days would remove, and not by a total suspension of her departure for the whole season: But these speculations were not relished by the generality of our people; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... took place on Christmas Eve and St Stephen's Day, and is accounted for by a legend concerning an evil fairy who lured many men to destruction, but had to assume the form of a wren to escape punishment at the hands of an ingenious knight-errant. ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... wily brain upon the spot A private plot we'll plan, The most ingenious private plot Since private plots began. That's understood. So far we've got And, striking while the iron's hot, We'll now determine like a shot The details ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... half-hour they were all at the disposal of the Man from Outside, who worked as though it was a real stage, and they were real players, and there were great audiences to see them. It was all quite wonderful, and it involved certain posings, attitudes, mimicry and pantomime, for they were really ingenious charades. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her hands tied behind her, and her ankles also secured; so that she could by no means attain to a sitting position, although she made violent and extraordinary efforts to do so. We say extraordinary, because Poopy, being ingenious, hit upon many devices of an unheard of nature to accomplish her object. Among others, she attempted to turn heels over head, hoping thus to get upon her knees; and there is no doubt whatever that she would have succeeded in this, had not the formation of the ground been exceedingly ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... must beware of the pitfall of antiquarianism, and must remember that for our purposes our only interest in the past is for the light it throws upon the present. I look forward to a time when the part played by history in the explanation of dogma shall be very small, and instead of ingenious research we shall spend our energy on a study of the ends sought to be attained and the reasons for desiring them. As a step toward that ideal it seems to me that every lawyer ought to seek an understanding of economics. The present divorce between the schools of political ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... pummel of his saddle, his looking-glass, Or th' handle of his racket,—O, that, that! That while he had been bandying at tennis, He might have sworn himself to hell, and strook His soul into the hazard! Oh, my lord, I would have our plot be ingenious, And have it hereafter recorded for example, ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... applied himself to the construction of a pair of compasses capable of dividing an inch into a thousand parts, and to the sinking of a well in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill, and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs, a person of eleven or twelve ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for the especial purpose of producing ultra-violet rays in large quantity. There are also in your machine induction coils for the purpose of making an impressive noise, and a small electric furnace to heat the salted gold. I don't know what other ingenious fakes you have added. The visible bluish light from the tube is designed, I suppose, to hoodwink the credulous, but the dangerous thing about it is the invisible ray that accompanies that light. Mr. Haswell sat under those invisible rays, Prescott, never knowing how deadly they might ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... astronomical world has ever known; and although it is now over thirty years since it commenced, astronomers are still divided into two parties—one accepting the lines as demonstrated facts, the other either denying their existence, or endeavouring to explain them away by various more or less ingenious or ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... their disguises, ingenious contrivances, deceptions, and boldness in carrying out their object, would make an attractive chapter in itself. Often compelled to mingle with the mob, always obliged to conceal what they were about, not daring to raise a pole or handle a wire unless cautiously ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... instance of the way in which words may be made, not only to cover, but to transform, ideas. A reverent form of language conceals an irreverent conception. The thought is too shocking for plain utterance; but, dressed in the garb of ingenious phraseology, it assumes an aspect that enables it to pass as a devout acknowledgment of a divine mystery. The real meaning, absurd as it is dreadful, to state or think, is that the Heavenly Father sometimes ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... call him, does not suffer by losing these trumperies, which, I believe, old Zist-et-Zest, a veteran of ours and a wonderful carver, had really far more to do with producing than he. You must not let your gracious pity be moved by such fellows as these troopers of mine; they are the most ingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to produce a dramatic effect in your presence as they do how to drink and to swear when ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... he could not do too much to convince him that his confidence was not misplaced; and thus, to protect Mrs. Wharton from suspicion, he yielded to all her husband's wishes. Vivian now felt frequently ashamed of his conduct, but always proud of his motives; and, with ingenious sophistry, he justified to himself the worst actions, by pleading that he did them ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... all the agonies of a merchant who sees the dawn of the day when a note falls due and knows that his cash drawer is empty. We can picture him, anxiously studying his account books, with his elbows on his desk, and imagining a thousand ingenious means of meeting his financial troubles. But the hard reality shattered them, one by one, like thin glass. He was a prey to the money-lenders and the lawyers, who had no mercy upon a poor wretch who had failed to "make good," and accomplish his ruin with mathematical indifference. ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... that instinct is in great measure independent of bodily organisation. Granted, indeed, that a certain amount of bodily apparatus is a sine qua non for any power of execution at all- -as, for example, that there would be no ingenious nest without organs more or less adapted for its construction, no spinning of a web without spinning glands—nevertheless, it is impossible to maintain that instinct is a consequence of organisation. The mere existence of the organ does not constitute even the smallest ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... "By this ingenious logic the Kansas and Nebraska Bill is made to contradict itself. It first declares that the Constitution extends to the Territories; in other words, slavery exists there by force of the Constitution, without reference ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... that though they thought as we do and felt as we do (only, as I have said, with greater vehemence), they didn't LOOK like us at all; and Mr. Edgeworth, the father of Maria Edgeworth, the 'gay gallant,' the impetuous, ingenious, energetic gentleman, sat writing with powdered hair and a queue, with tights and buckles, bolt upright in a stiff chair, while his family, also bequeued and becurled and bekerchiefed, were gathered round him in a group, composedly attentive to his ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... difficulties of democracy increase enormously with the increase of area and population, but a vast centralized democracy was liable to be itself an oppressive despotism, as France has learned at bitter cost. The Federal plan, like most other great advances, came not as the conception of an ingenious brain, but from the growth of social facts. The thirteen colonies started and grew as individual offshoots from Great Britain. Under a common impulse they broke loose from the mother-country; then, by a common necessity, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... think insects smell the approaching observer as the deer wind the stalker. The Gatekeeper butterfly is common; its marking is very ingenious, may I say? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is complete, and yet it is incomplete; it is finished, and yet it suggests to the mind that the lines ought to go on farther. They go out into space beyond the wing. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... seldom to be found in the savage. His conduct towards the Landers was distinguished by the greatest rapacity and duplicity, whilst in his intercourse with his own immediate connexions, his actions cannot be surpassed by any of the great heroes of antiquity. He evinced in early youth an active and ingenious disposition, and an extraordinary fondness for mechanical employments and pursuits. This bias of Adooley soon attracted the attention and notice of his father, and this revered parent did all that his slender means afforded of cherishing it, and of encouraging him to persevere in ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... alliance. As for Mr. Gouv. Morris he is entirely devoted to his correspondent, with whom he has been constantly connected in business and opinion. His great talents are recognized, and his extreme quickness in conceiving new schemes and gaining others to them. He is perhaps the most eloquent and ingenious man of his country, but his countrymen themselves distrust his talents. They admire ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to mention these ingenious arguments. They are, however, purely hypothetical, obviously invented to support a theory. It can scarcely be said that they carry conviction. We may rather agree with Guinard that so great is the importance of reproduction that nature has multiplied the means by which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... some of the tents were blown down, and the men, wakened out of their sound slumber, were drenched and had to scamper in the pitchy darkness, while theirs stood firm and they were warm and dry, thanks to the ingenious device ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... deity, making wampum for the inland tribes and waxing rich with gains from it. They made the canal from bay to sea at Canoe Place, that they might reach open water without dragging their boats across the sand-bars, and in other ways they proved themselves ingenious and strong. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... those creatures procures for him a wishing-stone, by means of which he has a grand palace built and obtains much treasure. He foolishly exchanges his talisman with the chief of a caravan for all their gold and merchandise, and it is afterwards restored to him by the grateful and ingenious animals.—In a Tamil version—referred to by Sir Richard, p. 30, note 2—which occurs in the "Madanakamarajankadai," a poor wandering young prince buys a cat and a serpent; at his mother's suggestion, he sets the serpent at liberty and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... men left their faces exposed, went to sleep in desperate exhaustion, after hours of fruitless warfare, and awoke with eyes all but shut up, and cheeks like dumplings. Others lay down to leeward of the fire and spent the night in a compound experience of blood-sucking and choking. One ingenious man—I think it was Salamander—wrapped his visage in a kerchief, leaving nothing exposed save the point of his nose for breathing purposes. In the morning he arose with something like a huge strawberry on the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... 25, 26 [Stz. 237]. "Vpon the King Alanzon prest so sore, That with a stroke," etc. —There seems no contemporary authority for the single combat between Henry and Alencon of which Shakespeare has made such ingenious use in his management of the incident of Henry's glove. According to one account, Alencon struck at the King somewhat unfairly as he was stooping to aid his brother, and smote off a piece of his crown. According to another authority, the ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... a smith under his father; but, being ingenious, and encouraged in learning (as all my brothers were) by an Esquire Palmer, then the principal gentleman in that parish, he qualified himself for the business of scrivener; became a considerable man in the county; was a chief mover of all public-spirited undertakings ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... to Milton, who prefaced these lines with, "Ingenii, hoc distochon" [Some ingenious person wrote this distich]. Milton wrongly believed More to be the author of a libel ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... prisoners are arranged in the different wings, according to their ages, and the degree of morality; there are about 500, and the different regulations are so meritorious, and the plan of the building so curious and ingenious, that the stranger will derive much pleasure from visiting this singular establishment. Just by, is the Abattoir de Popincourt, or de Menilmontant, which is considered to be the largest and finest of all the five immense ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... of gifts and retired; the mummy being completely rifled, and the construction of the body, a frame of light, open wicker-work, revealed. Aunt Jane had had it made at the basketmaker's, while as to the head and covering, her own ingenious fingers had painted and fashioned them. Everybody had to look at everybody's presents, a lengthened operation, and then there was a splendid game at blindman's-buff in the hall, in which all the elders joined, except mamma, who had to go and sit in the nursery with the restless and excited Primrose ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of one or two very ingenious (hem!) little contrivances for adapting the difficulties of "Used Up" to the small stage. They will require to be so exactly explained to your carpenter (though very easy little things in themselves), that I think I ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... those who turn to science not in order to play a part in it, nor to write, nor to dispute, nor to teach, but simply for an answer to an every-day question of life. Science answered thousands of different very subtle and ingenious questions touching criminal law, but not the one he was trying to solve. He asked a very simple question: "Why, and with what right, do some people lock up, torment, exile, flog, and kill others, while they are themselves just like those whom they torment, flog, and kill?" And in answer ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... ingenious and fluently expressed. The author has an easy way of surmounting his difficulties by the use of such little auxiliary phrases, as "of course," "it may be surmised," "it is reasonable to suppose," and so on; which, though trifling in themselves, help him in ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... may cite the "Art Journal" of 1865, which provides a most extraordinary criticism of David, of that year. "We would venture to ask," says this ingenious critic, "why the divine psalmist has so small a brain? Within this skull there is not compass for the poet's thoughts to range. We state as a physiological fact, that a head so small, with a brow so receding, could not have ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... almost as remote as Tegnr himself from the true heroic tradition; and, like Tegnr's poem, makes up for this want of a pedigree by a study and imitation of the great manner, and by a selection and combination of heroic traits from the older authentic literature. Hence Tegnr's work, an ingenious rhetorical adaptation of all the old heroic motives, is already half done for him by the earlier romanticist; the original prose Frithiof is the same romantic hero as in the Swedish poem, and no more like the men of the Icelandic histories than Raoul de Bragelonne is like D'Artagnan. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to investigate the different kinds of traps used by the Mangeromas for catching Peruvian caboclos or half-breeds. First of all in importance is the pit-trap, into which the aforesaid men had fallen. It is simple but ingenious in its arrangement. A hole about nine feet deep and eight feet wide is dug in the ground at a place where the caboclos are liable to come. A cover is laid across this and cleverly disguised with dead leaves and branches so as to exactly resemble ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... was now half-past five. In three hours they would be here. What would Wyndham have done? Caned them, no doubt. Riddell had no cane. Ruler? He might break one of their ringers, or they might resist; or worse still baffle him with some ingenious excuse which he would not know how to ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... to break a promise to children. Daddy rose somewhat wearily from his comfortable chair and put his pipe on the mantelpiece. First he held a conference in secret with Uncle Pat, the most ingenious of playmates. Then he returned to the children. "Collect the tribe," said he. "There is a Council in a quarter of an hour in the big room. Put on your Indian dresses and arm yourselves. The great Chief ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as well. He feared that at any moment Charley, alarmed by his long absence, might call or fire off one of the guns and bring the outlaws to his hiding-place. How could he warn him of the danger he was in? Suddenly the bound lad was seized by an ingenious idea. Assuring himself by their deep breathing, that his captors were fast asleep, he began to whistle, softly at first, then gradually louder and louder till the weird, mournful strains of the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in life seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the merry lists ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... head of the establishment who was so soon, for the first time in history, to grant me an audience—which had provided a parallelogram of some fibrous material for the purpose of removing the mud from one's boots. A minute later I was again delighted by the discovery of an ingenious contrivance in the shape of a kind of peg or hook on which a hat and coat could be placed. It is by just such minutiae as these that one place is distinguished from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... absorbed in the realities of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the picture was surrounded. They consisted of whip handles, canes, piano keys, mouth-pieces for wind instruments, all sorts of umbrellas, and many more things, of every sort, made of cane and whalebone. The arrangement was so ingenious, the designs so fanciful, and the execution so good, that nothing could be prettier. But what of course was of the most importance, was the face and head that they were meant to ornament. "What a benevolent, what a beautiful face!" I said. ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... polite, float off and leave no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite—they are not unappreciated—they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it—no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... inventor was abundantly filmed while the earnest country boy dreamed hopefully above his drawings or tinkered at metal devices on the work-bench. The kitchen in which his mother toiled was repeatedly shot, including close-ups of the old mother's ingenious contrivances—especially of the closed boiler with its coil of copper tubing—by which she was helping to ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Nightingale—the immeasurable difference between the artificial bird and the real songster, whose melodious raptures somehow touched a chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of the elaborate character of the German entrenchments, and of the British genius for comfort developed in our own lines, but it is doubtful whether anything done by either side in that direction has surpassed the chef-d'oeuvre of an ingenious French engineer shown in our illustration. At one point in the French trenches not seven hundred yards from those of the enemy, and within two miles of the German artillery, he constructed an up-to-date bathing establishment, with a heating ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 15, Nov. 18, 1914 • Various
... this ingenious dilemma is to be applied to her material condition also. As with order, so with finance. In the old days Ireland was refused Home Rule because she was too poor. How could she get on without England? She would be bankrupt. But now that she is better ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... he feels inclined. It is his affair. Strictly speaking, he should appreciate the delicacy of feeling which has gracefully left the performance of this simple act to his own discretion. Yes, it is in this fine instance of steady principle that we see a discrimination of politeness exquisitely ingenious and beautiful. The English have the reputation of being a blunt, downright people; and their practice of shutting the door after them makes it certain they are so. When they draw to the door, turn the handle, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... two pamphlets in answer, both announced in the Medley of May 19-23 as soon to be printed. Apparently neither of these appeared, at least not under the announced titles; but by May 26 Oldmixon's Reflections had been published anonymously and was referred to in the Medley as "a very ingenious Pamphlet." As any reader of the Reflections will observe for himself, the pamphlet opens on a violent political note and sustains it throughout. Although Oldmixon is more concerned to level charges against Swift—a lewd, ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... Somehow or other, we were unlucky in our first attempts. Speculators are like wasps; for when they have once got hold of a ripening and peach-like project, they keep it rigidly for their own swarm, and repel the approach of interlopers. Notwithstanding all our efforts, and very ingenious ones they were, we never, in a single instance, succeeded in procuring an allocation of original shares; and though we did now and then make a hit by purchase, we more frequently bought at a premium, and parted with our scrip ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... heart was weak and that a shock would kill him. So much he had learned from Dr. Mortimer. He had heard also that Sir Charles was superstitious and had taken this grim legend very seriously. His ingenious mind instantly suggested a way by which the baronet could be done to death, and yet it would be hardly possible to bring home the ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... Pagan emperors of the first three centuries sink into comparative insignificance. For not a tithe of the blood of martyrs was shed by Paganism, that has been poured forth by Popery; and the persecutors of Pagan Rome never dreamed of the thousand ingenious contrivances of torture which the malignity of Popish inquisitors ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith |
