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Legible   Listen
adjective
Legible  adj.  
1.
Capable of being read or deciphered; distinct to the eye; plain; used of writing or printing; as, a fair, legible manuscript. "The stone with moss and lichens so overspread, Nothing is legible but the name alone."
2.
Capable of being discovered or understood by apparent marks or indications; as, the thoughts of men are often legible in their countenances.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Legible" Quotes from Famous Books



... stood open. The initials of my name, still legible, appeared rudely carved on the posts—a boyish propensity which most of us have indulged; and I well remember ministering to its gratification wherever I durst hazard the experiment, when first initiated into the mystery of hewing ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... English. This curious correspondence—which, after all that subsequently happened between the English monarch and the Papal Court, we are very much surprised to see in such a place—is in wonderful preservation. But though perfectly legible, the archaic form of the characters and the numerous abbreviations make it extremely difficult to decipher them. The tragic ending of this most inauspicious love-making invests with a deep pathos these faded yellow records of it that seem like the cold, gray ashes of a once glowing fire. In ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... into an ocean of infirmities, yet the mercy of God, which is over all His workes, maketh grasse to growe upon the mountains and herbes for the use of men, and hath not only stamped upon them a distinct forme, but also given them particular signatures, whereby a man may read even in legible characters the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... pleasure, I implore you. I can't blame you for being gruff and unsociable; were you otherwise you wouldn't reside at—at—" he turned his head to read the half legible sign on the station house, "at Chazy Junction. I'm familiar with most parts of the United States, but Chazy Junction gets my flutters. Why, oh, why in the world did ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... 14.)—The weapon with which he "smites the nations" that oppose him, is the "sharp sword," an emblem of his ruinous and avenging justice; for he "tradeth the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God."—"On his thigh," where he wears his sword, there is a legible inscription, indicating his universal and ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... circumstances, that I should have disputed the will had I not been afraid of exposing a relation of my own, who was privy and instrumental to this mysterious transaction. It is sufficient to say, that the old lady never signed her name, although she wrote a most excellent and legible hand, this precious instrument bearing only her mark; and the maid servant, who attended her, would have proved quite sufficient to have set aside the will, and exposed the parties concerned; but, as one of them was a very near relation ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... English have not grown in a day, and were not originally made free and equal by decree; that we have grown, and must continue to grow, by the aid and the development of our strength; that ours is a fairly legible history, and a fair example of the good and the bad in human growth; that his landowner and his peasant have no clear case of right and wrong to divide them, one being the descendant of strong men, the other of weak ones; and that the former may sink, the latter may rise—there ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... peace of their hearts in the midst of many dangers, did bear them out against the malicious accusations and aspersions put upon their actions: all which were sensible impressions of the good providence of God, and legible characters of His work; which the church and kingdom of England, exercised at this time with greater difficulty than theirs, have in part already found; so shall the parallel be perfected to their greater comfort in the faithful pursuing of the work ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... India, bore a Colombo postmark, and was in Vincent Holroyd's hand, which Caffyn happened to know; if further proof were required he had it by pressing the thin paper of the envelope against the inclosure beneath, when several words became distinctly legible, besides those visible already through the gap left by the stamp. Thus he read, 'Shall not write again till you——' and lower down Holroyd's ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... Dublin palimpsest manuscript, in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, designated by the letter Z. It contains with other writings thirty-two leaves of the gospel by Matthew. They were edited, as far as legible, in 1801, by Dr. John Barrett, Fellow of Trinity College. In 1853 Dr. Tregelles made a new and thorough examination of the manuscript, and, by the aid of a chemical process, brought all that exists of the gospel text to a legible condition. This manuscript is assigned to the sixth century. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... near them are buried the dead of the One Hundred and Thirty-seventh New York, and close at hand an equal number from the Twelfth New Jersey. Care has been taken to place a head-board at each grave, with a legible inscription thereon, showing whose remains are resting beneath. On one board the comrades of the dead soldier had nailed the back of his knapsack, which bore his name. On another was a brass plate, bearing the soldier's name in ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox

... the letter from his pocket as he spoke, and Trenholme perceived that it was addressed in a legible hand ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... barbarisms. She has learned that haeow means what; that thinkin' is the same thing as thinking; or she has found out the meaning of that extraordinary monosyllable, which no single-tongued phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,—what they say when they think they say first, (fe-eest,—fe as in the French le),—or that cheer means chair,—or that urritation means irritation,—and so of other enormities. Nothing surprises ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... a plain leaden coffin, with no appearance of ever having been enclosed in wood, and bearing an inscription, 'King Charles, 1648,' in large, legible characters, on a scroll of lead encircling it, immediately presented itself to the view. A square opening was then made in the upper part of the lid, of such dimensions as to admit a clear insight into its contents. These were ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... you were distinctly legible. When I looked out of my window and saw you setting out the little tea-table on the lawn with Mollie, I said to myself, "That is a girl after my ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw

... the meanest capacity, popularized. plain, distinct, explicit; positive; definite &c (precise) 494. graphic; expressive &c (meaning) 516; illustrative &c (explanatory) 522. unambiguous, unequivocal, unmistakable &c (manifest) 525; unconfused; legible, recognizable; obvious &c 525. Adv. in plain terms, in plain words, in plain English. Phr. he that runs may read ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... I find in writing; my manuscripts, blotted, scratched, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me; nor is there one of them but I have been obliged to transcribe four or five times before it went to press. Never could I do anything when placed at a table, pen in hand; it must be walking ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... hatred and revenge and went on: "I know what I know—there are legible and infallible signs, and it is given to me to interpret them, and I tell you: It is true, unerringly true, as every Alexandrian child has learnt from its nurse: When Serapis falls the earth will collapse like a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the slightest show of nervousness, and opened the door. Lord Harry was right. There stood the woman who had been his first nurse—the woman who overheard and watched—the woman who suspected. The suspicion and the intention of watching were legible in her eyes still. She had come back ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... bold and active spirit the danger and the excitement, which were insupportable to the more delicately organized mind of Halifax, had a strong fascination. The different characters of the two statesmen were legible in their faces. The brow, the eye, and the mouth of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary, of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a martyr in any ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... bare and scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side—the women's gallery with its great heavy curtain—the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy front—the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp—so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and wood, of a modern church—are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... to dip his pen in the inkstand, Charles Miller covered sheet after sheet of thin paper with his fine legible writing. As he reached the final word he laid down his pen and stretched his cramped fingers and gently rubbed one hand over the other. For the first time conscious of the chill atmosphere, he rose and moved about the room. Stopping ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... reflection as I was in observing the expression of the faces of these people as they listened to their correspondents. Disappointment, pleased surprise, chagrin, disgust, indignation, and amusement were alternately so legible on their faces that it was perfectly easy for one to be sure in most cases what the tenor at least of the letter was. It occurred to me that while in the old time the pleasure of receiving letters had ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... the application form using black ink pen or type.* You may photocopy blank application forms. *However*, photocopied forms submitted to the Copyright Office must be clear, legible, on a good grade of 8-1/2 inch by 11-inch white paper suitable for automatic feeding through a photocopier. The forms should be printed, preferably in black ink, head-to-head so that when you turn the sheet over, the top of page ...
— Copyright Basics • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... some question touching her business on board the Saint Andrew: and in answer she drew a paper from the top of her packet. It was spotted with sea-water, but (as I could see) yet legible. The Commissioner studied it, showed it to Master Porson (who nodded), and handing it back politely, begged her for some particulars concerning ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... It would seem that the original runes, as graved by Gudrun, had not been so completely erased as to leave no traces of them; but that they were still sufficiently legible to enable Kostbera to ascertain the real purport ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... whole surface of the coin, the film of oxide changing its tint with the intensity or continuance of the heat. The parts, however, where the letters of the inscription had existed, oxidate at a different rate from the surrounding parts, so that these letters exhibit their shape, and become legible in consequence of the film of oxide which covers them having a different thickness, and therefore reflecting a different tint from that of the adjacent parts. The tints thus developed sometimes pass through many orders of brilliant colours, particularly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various

... writing is large and legible. I think I can read it. 'My dear mother, the place I told you of in my last letter was given away, so I must go on in the toy-shop till something better turns up. I only get six shillings a week and my tea, and can't quite manage ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... beginning is not an image that it is in the power of men to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of likeness 'to Him that created him.' The coin is rusty, battered, defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. 'Whose image and superscription hath it?' Render unto God the things that are declared to be God's, because they bear His likeness and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... of the reign of King James I. one —- a taylor in London, had several visions, which he did describe to a painter to paint, and he writ the description himself in an ill taylor-like hand, in false English, but legible: it was at least a quire of paper. I remember one vision is of St. James's park, where is the picture of an altar and crucifix. Mr. Butler'of the toy-shop by Ludgate, (one of the masters of Bridewell) had the book in anno 1659; the then Earl of Northampton gave ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... and in her confusion, being unable to find her proper habiliments, laid hold of one of these scrolls, and wrapping it around her, hastily rushed into the street, and presented to the astonished spectators an extensive back view, with the words, "BOMBARD THE CITADEL," inscribed in legible characters upon her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... of December, 1878, that a letter, written in a singularly legible and rather boyish-looking hand, came to me from Christ Church, Oxford, signed "C.L. Dodgson." The writer said that he had come across some fairy designs of mine, and he should like to see some more of my work. By ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... English poetry; and second, by his own writing, which earned for him the title of father of English prose. Finding that some fragments of poetry had escaped the fire of the Danes, he caused search to be made for old manuscripts, and had copies made of all that were legible. [Footnote: These copies were made in Alfred's dialect (West Saxon) not in the Northumbrian dialect in which they were first written.] But what gave Alfred deepest concern was that in all his kingdom there were few priests and no laymen who could read or write ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... connection with our present subject. Some of this pencil-writing is as clear as if it were freshly written; but the greater part is much rubbed, apparently by the mere service that the volume has seen; and some of it is so faint as to be legible only in a high, reflected light, in which, however, to sharp eyes it becomes distinctly visible.[dd] That ordinary black pencil-marks will endure on paper for two centuries may very likely be doubted by many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... judged by handwriting. Write a good, clear, legible hand, without any flourishes, and always use the best and the blackest of ink. The typewriter is employed ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain

... she went to her room, and there among them was a bulky envelope addressed in Mrs Quantock's great sprawling hand, which looked at first sight so large and legible, but on closer examination turned out to be so baffling. You had to hold it at some distance off to make anything out of it, and look at it in an abstracted general manner much as you would look at a view. Treated thus, scattered ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. In fact, having once established connected and legible characters, I scarcely gave a thought to the mere difficulty of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... anything that we as yet understand, but apparently the same sort of pre-arrangement that determined whether the stone from the cliff should fall on point A or point B—the same sort of process that guided the pen to make legible and effective writing instead of illegible and ineffective scrawls—the same kind of control that determines when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to secure the anticipated slaughter of a bird. So far as energy is concerned, the explosion and the trigger-pulling ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... obliged to pay twenty-five cents for every letter written for me. I now began to feel that as I was free I could learn to write, as well as others; consequently Mrs. Harris, the lady with whom I lived, volunteered to assist me. I was soon enabled to write quite a legible hand, which I find a great convenience. I would advise all, young, middle aged or old, in a free country to learn to read and write. If this little book should fall into the hands of one deficient of the important knowledge of writing, I hope ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson

... birthday till he had first lifted up his soul to God, and on such occasions there was not a trace on his countenance of any of the feelings that moved him so strongly on ordinary days. When he knelt down to pray, a deep, unaffected devotion was legible in every feature; and when he heard the recapitulation of his merits, he cast down his eyes as if he considered all that he had done in his life so far but a small matter compared with what he might and must do in the future. "God grant me but one more year over and above the many ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... able to make anything of the two following Characters. In a small place within also, may be seen a Writing carved in Stone between two old Pillars, but so impair'd and worn out by the weather that it is not legible.' At Groree, too, similar remains ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... his room, and glanced at the door. The half-painted sign on the frosted glass was legible, reversed, as the ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele

... thoughtfully. "Haredale?" and passed the paper to me whereon I read these words, blotched with water, yet still legible: ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... title (in English) on each ancient recipe, following the example of Schuch. This procedure may be counted against us as a liberty taken with the text. The text has remained inviolate. We have merely aimed at a rational and legible presentation—work within the province and the duty of an editor-translator and ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... the floating spar to one who is drowning and it steadied her into instant resistance. She had gone to her own room and read there the full legend—almost obliterated by wear—almost, but not quite. Some letters and numbers were gone, but enough were left legible. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... terror, was seized with a convulsion of fear when he thought of any active exertion to avoid it, and shivered in all his long, thin limbs. Then he pulled out his Baedeker and began to write his will upon the flyleaf, but his hand twitched so that he was hardly legible. By some strange gymnastic of the legal mind a death, even by violence, if accepted quietly, had a place in the order of things, while a death which overtook one galloping frantically over a desert was wholly irregular and discomposing. It was not dissolution which ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... message from M. de Saint-Pierre," concluded Washington, drawing a sealed packet from an inner pocket. "'T is somewhat stained by water, but I trust still legible." ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... obvious and well-marked external character, the disease for which it is a remedy or the object for which it should be employed." Southey says,[80] "The signatures [were] the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs—Nature having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses." Some opined that the external marks were impressed by planetary influences, hence their connection with talismans; others simply reasoned it out that the Almighty ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... company till two or three o'clock in the morning, if he neither ruins himself nor others. (11) He wrote his letters as rapidly as his disabled fingers would allow him to form the characters of a remarkably legible hand. No rough draughts or sketches of familiar letters were found amongst his papers at Strawberry Hill: but he was in the habit of putting down on the backs of letters or on slips of paper, a note of facts, of news, of witticisms, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for publication in the Gazette. Una, like most people of Panama, had believed that there was something artistic about the office of any publication. One would see editors—wonderful men like grand dukes, prone to lunch with ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... most remarkable testimonies to the eternal life, his resting place may be found. The sign of the fish is on his stone. Its time-eaten inscription is still legible, among the many which tell of the early Christian expectation and of all ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford

... broadcloth suit and a silk hat, and seated a short distance from the door. On the seat by his side stood a couple of valises. On one of them, the one nearest him, on which his arm rested, was written, in white letters, plainly legible,—— ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... boarded all over walls, ceiling, and floor. The rough-hewn boards bear many fragments of inscriptions which show that others besides Lollards were immured here. Some of them, especially his motto "Nosce te ipsum," are attributed to Cranmer. The most legible inscription is "IHS cyppe me out of all al compane. Amen." Other boards bear the notches cut by prisoners to mark the lapse of time. The eight rings remain to which the prisoners were secured: one feels ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... had been hard workers, but Steve had never seen anybody ply a chisel as Murray did. He was not trying to make pretty letters, but they were all deeply cut and clearly legible. ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard

... said he calmly, and there was nothing legible in his gaze. It was blank and insignificant, destitute even ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... was wonderfully marked by intelligence. When he grew to be a man, he wore no beard, not even the slightest apology for a whisker, and this perhaps added to the apparent heaviness of his face; but he probably best understood his own appearance, for in those days no face bore on it more legible marks ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... although it now scarcely retained a few tarnished vestiges of its former splendour. The subject was an old man, his face swarthy and bronzed, with furrowed brow and hollow temples, and sharp high cheekbones; a physiognomy on which the ravages of time, and climate, and suffering were plainly legible. The figure was draped in a flowing Asiatic costume. Defaced and injured and grimed with dirt though the portrait was, yet, when Tchartkoff had wiped the dust from the countenance, he perceived evident traces of the touch of a great artist. The picture seemed to have been scarcely finished, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... Prophet Voice had said, "As long as those words by man were read, "The ancient race of the Gulls should ne'er "One hour of peace or plenty share." But years on years successive flew, And the letters still more legible grew,— At top, a T, an H, an E, And underneath, D. E. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... another exile, studied some years before. Each got his doctor's degree—just how we do not know. No one ever saw Goldsmith's diploma—Doctor Johnson once hinted that it was an astral one—but Marat's is still with us, yellow with age, but plain and legible with all of its signatures and the big seal with a ribbon that surely might impress the chance sufferers waiting in an outer room to see the doctor, who is busy enjoying his siesta on the other side ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... partly legible, lead one to believe that we are dealing with an astronomical calculating mechanism of some sort. This is born out by the mechanical construction evident on the fragments. The largest one (fig. 6) contains a multiplicity of gearing involving an annular gear working ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... have certain title to them. Individual comments are made on all those that I know or knew of, and several large, heavy stones I could not lift to get inscriptions, as they lay on their face. In several cases wood headboards have outlived stone, the inscription on the former being more legible than the stone. The action of the elements in many cases has entirely erased some, especially from sandstone, although newer than the ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett

... angels round Him, and six saints seated, S. Benedict, S. Romualdo, S. Laurence, S. Jerome, S. Mauro, and S. Placido, three on either side; and on this picture, which was held at that time to be most beautiful for a work in fresco, he wrote his name in large and very legible letters. In the same city, also, he was commissioned by the Nuns of S. Anthony of Padua to paint a panel-picture of Our Lady, with Jesus Christ fully dressed, as it pleased those simple and venerable sisters, in her lap, and on either side of the Madonna S. Peter, S. Paul, S. Cecilia, and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... expression cleared to astonishment. Passing that emotion, it went to incredulity. It was a beautifully legible face, though everything but clean. He made up ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various

... late Mr. Riley misread "roleres" for "teleres" (the writing is not very legible), and therefore thought the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... raising his pen from the paper. Line after line of neat, small writing, quite different from what his friends knew in letters or on envelopes, flowed from his pen. It was his "press" handwriting, plain, rapid, and as legible as print. The punctuation was attended to with singular care: the commas broad and heavy, the colons like the kisses in a child's letter, round and black. Once or twice he smiled as he wrote, and occasionally ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... the flora or fauna of our present earth; but the human characters that were fixed and stamped as by photograph in the Scriptures are not so far removed from the men and women who now live on the earth. No species has become extinct; and even the minuter characteristics of distinct varieties remain legible still. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... Joyce. "By what warrant?" asked the king. Joyce pointed to the soldiers whom he brought along; tall, handsome, and well accoutred. "Your warrant," said Charles, smiling, "is writ in fair characters, legible without spelling."[*] The parliamentary commissioners came into the room: they asked Joyce whether he had any orders from the parliament? he said, "No;" from the general? "No;" by what authority he came? he made the same reply as to the king. "They would write," ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... Sanetomo appreciated the situation thus created there is much difficulty in determining. The sentiment of pity evoked by his tragic fate has been projected too strongly upon the pages of his annals to leave them quite legible. He had seen his elder brother and two of the latter's three sons done to death. He had seen the "removal" of several of his father's most trusted lieutenants. He had seen the gradual upbuilding of the Hojo power on this hecatomb of victims. That he perceived something of his own danger would ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... from Selenin with some official document, he felt the blood mounting to his cheeks, and his heart grow weak. This document was the decision concerning Katiousha's trial. What was it? Was it possible that it contained a refusal? Nekhludoff hastily ran over the letter, written in small, hardly legible, broken handwriting, and breathed freely. The decision ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy

... several new devices, including the common gyroscopic attachment which is known by his name. The main body of the manuscript is written neatly in ink, but the last few lines are in pencil and are so ragged as to be hardly legible—exactly, in fact, as they might be expected to appear if they were scribbled off hurriedly from the seat of a moving aeroplane. There are, it may be added, several stains, both on the last page ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... is curious: concise, square, not flowing,—very legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who profess to read character in chirography would decipher but little from these cramped, quiet lines. Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... was written on tea paper in large legible style, and evidently by an intelligent person. Groups were perusing it during the day. A force of police marched through the village and back, but did not observe this document, as it is still posted on ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... completed. First and foremost it was now to be copied in order to be submitted under an assumed name to the theater in Christiania, and furthermore it was of course to be published. One of my faithful and trusting friends undertook to prepare a handsome and legible copy of my uncorrected draft, a task which he performed with such a degree of conscientiousness that he did not omit even a single one of the innumerable dashes which I in the heat of composition had liberally interspersed throughout wherever the exact phrase did not for the moment occur ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen

... of nature are legible, it is true; but they are not plain enough to enable those who run, to read them. We must make use of a cautious, I had almost said, a timorous method of proceeding. We must not attempt to fly, when we can scarcely ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... cape of Florida across twenty-five parallels of latitude and forty-five meridians of longitude to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The lessons taught by this amazingly swift extension of the empire and the church, and its arrest and almost extinction, are legible on the surface of the history. It is a strange, but not unparalleled, story of attempted cooeperation in the common service of God and Mammon and Moloch—of endeavors after concord ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... to be seen, although that revealing moonlight made even Alfy's written words quite legible. What could have become of them? Who had taken them? And why? Supposing somebody had stolen in and stolen them? Supposing that was why he was sleeping in the library? Yet, if there had been thievery ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond

... in different years, a framed concert programme, yellow with age, and a silhouette of Schumann. Over one of the doors hung a withered laurelwreath of imposing dimensions, and with faded silken ends, on which the inscription was still legible: DEM GROSSEN KUNSTLER, JOHANNES SCHWARZ!—Open on a chair, with an embroidered book-marker between its pages, lay ATTA TROLL; and by the stove, a battered wooden doll sat against the wall, in a relaxed attitude, with a set leer on ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... and emphatic. His papers were all in order, he vowed. He had them on him: his own identity papers, clear for anyone to see. Someone had dragged them out of his pocket; they were dank and covered with splashes of mud—hardly legible. They were handed over to a man who stood in the immediate circle of light projected by the lamp. He seized them and examined them carefully. This man was short and slight, was dressed in well-made cloth clothes; his hair was held in ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... Family, Nobility, Clergy, &c., &c., the Blessing, and Junior, 1702, the name of the writer. This curiosity is in the possession of Mr. John Reeder, of Brighton, who being an auctioneer at a sale where it was lately sold, purchased it on very easy terms. It is not legible without ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... the papers must be written in a fair, legible hand, on but one side of the paper, otherwise the office may require them to be printed. All interlineations and erasures must be clearly marked in marginal or foot notes, written on the same page. Legal cap paper, with ...
— Patent Laws of the Republic of Hawaii - and Rules of Practice in the Patent Office • Hawaii

... of the middle-class Corsican on his travels. Miss Nevil's attention was first attracted by the woman's remarkable beauty. She seemed about twenty years of age; she was tall and pale, with dark blue eyes, red lips, and teeth like enamel. In her expression pride, anxiety, and sadness were all legible. On her head she wore a black silk veil called a mezzaro, which the Genoese introduced into Corsica, and which is so becoming to women. Long braids of chestnut hair formed a sort of turban round her head. Her dress was neat, but simple ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee

... prestidigitation build, construct tree, arbor ask, interrogate wench, virgin frisk, caper fill, replenish water, irrigate silly, foolish coming, advent feeling, sentiment old, antiquated forerunner, precursor sew, embroider unload, exonerate grave, sepulcher readable, legible tell, narrate kiss, osculate nose, proboscis striking, percussion green, verdant stroke, concussion grass, verdure bowman, archer drive, propel greed, avarice book, volume stingy, parsimonious warrior, belligerent bath, ablution ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... reading to the Skipper every day, I did not forget to exercise myself in that other art of Writing, and was in time serviceable enough to be able to keep, in something like a rational and legible form the Log of The Humane Hopwood, which heretofore had been a kind of cabalistic Register, full of blots, crosses, half-moons, and zigzags, like the chalk score of an unlettered Ale-wife. And the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... up the fallen papers the letter Bernal had left lay open before her, a letter written in long, slanting but vividly legible characters. And then, quite before she recognised what letter it was, or could feel curious concerning it, the first illuminating line of it had flashed irrevocably ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... September, at Bathsheba (a bathing-place on the west of Barbadoes), by a gentleman who was bathing there, who, on breaking it, found the melancholy account of the fate of the ship Kent, contained in a folded paper written with pencil, but scarcely legible." The words of the letter were then given, and a facsimile of it will be found on the next page. The letter itself, taken from the bottle thickly encrusted with shells and seaweed, was returned to the writer when he arrived, shortly after its discovery, at Barbadoes, as Lieut.-Colonel of ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor

... when told by his worthy son, Colonel Frederick Dent Grant, that his father had not ceased up to the last day of his life to cherish the same kind feeling he had always manifested toward me, and that one of his last fruitless efforts, when he could no longer speak, was to put on paper some legible words mentioning ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... tablet of stone, on tablet of wood, on tablet of steel,—the first giving the law to everything; the second true Athenian, like Athena's first statue in olive-wood, making the law legible and homely; and the third true Vulcanian, having the splendor and power ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... inside or outside every hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads. I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry. If Nature's handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed among any class of men ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... to submit contributions in handwriting to a busy editor who has to read through a bushel of manuscripts a day. The more legible the manuscript, the better are your chances to win a fair reading. I will go further, and declare that a manuscript which has all the earmarks of being by a professional is not only more carefully read, but also is likely to be treated with more consideration ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing

... which the child was taught to write the letters of the English alphabet. Mademoiselle Mulot's claim for award was that with the machine generally in use it was necessary to teach the child a language of dots and dashes which was not legible by people in general. Although ingenious, Mademoiselle Mulot's machine was not considered striking or new enough to ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... undefined misgiving as she tore open the envelope. Though she had never seen Giovanni's handwriting, she had no doubt that it was his. It looked as though it might not be very legible at best; but on the sheet before her the shaking, uneven letters trailed off into such filiform indistinctness that she had to go through it several times before she could decipher the following, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... gift of nature by an artificial production. True dignity does not blush for nature, but only for brute nature; it always has an open and frank air; feeling gleams in its look; calm and serenity of mind is legible upon the brow in eloquent traits. False gravity, on the contrary, places its dignity in the lines of its visage; it is close, mysterious, and guards its features with the care of an actor; all the muscles of its face are tormented, all natural and true ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... letters on a black background, and this showed faintly through the thick coating of distemper which had been applied. He damped a handkerchief with his tongue and rubbed away some of the whitewash where the letters were least legible and read: ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... the early time of the Lower Empire, and the cross has not yet been effaced from some which serve as head-stones for the True Believers. I was particularly struck with the abundance of altars, some of which contained entire and legible inscriptions. In the town there is the same abundance of ruins. The lid of a sarcophagus, formed of a single block of marble, now serves as a water-trough, and the fountain is constructed of ancient tablets. The town stands on a mound which appears to be composed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... the queen, to whom he presented it at Hampton Court, all of it written within the circle of a single penny, inchased in a ring and borders of gold, and covered with a crystal, so accurately wrought as to be very plainly legible; to the great admiration of her majesty, the whole privy council, and several ambassadors then at court?" Bales was likewise very dexterous in imitating handwritings, and between 1576 and 1590 was employed by Secretary Walsingham in certain political manoeuvres. We find him at the head ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... was in all the papers about February 28th (1894), with replies from Balfour and Chamberlain. Mr. Gladstone's reply, written just before he resigned, was in his own hand, and more than usually legible. Though it was not marked "Private," I did not print it, as it seemed too personal and playful. It meant that he had resigned, but I did not know this till an hour ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... It was as he had expected, as he had hoped. They were from Mary Josephine. He arranged them—nine in all—in the sequence of their dates, which ran back nearly eight years. All of them had been written within a period of eleven months. They were as legible as print. And as he passed from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, and then read on into the others, he forgot there was such a thing as time and that Mary Josephine was waiting for him. The clippings had told him one thing; here, like bits of driftage ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood

... three documents out of a large envelope, 'to observe this.' The parchments were so changed as scarcely to seem the same; their smoky brown was bleached to a perfect whiteness; and upon each, clear and legible in the middle of the page, below the signature of Charles ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... as the deliverer and the lawgiver of Israel—still higher that as the prophet of the Lord. He was the promulgator of the great moral laws of the universe, originally engraven on the hearts of men, but now so effaced by sin as to be scarcely legible;—he was to establish those institutions which were to perpetuate the name and the worship of Jehovah among the children of men; and that memorial which, by a long line of types and sacrifices, was at once to prefigure and prepare for the great ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous

... as I say, on these things, Hugh became aware, with a growing astonishment, that though mankind attributed, in an easy and perfunctory way, all these phenomena to the creative hand of God, yet instead of trying to form a conception of Him and His dark thoughts from this legible and gigantic handwriting, which revealed so impenetrable, so imperturbable a will, they sought to trace His influence only in some bewildered region of the human spirit, the struggles of inherited conscience, the patient charity of men, that ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... leather pocket-book, mouldy and rotten like the clothing. On opening it, it fell to pieces. There was nothing in it but a piece of paper, also mouldy and rotten. This I unfolded with great care, and saw writing there, which, though faded, was still legible. It was a letter, and there were still signs of long and frequent perusals, and marks, too, which looked as though made by tears—tears, perhaps of the writer, perhaps of the reader: who can tell? I have preserved this letter ever since, and ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... until it has obtruded itself upon him in the form of an inhibition. The books that are imperative for the tired eyes of middle age, are equally necessary for those of youth—did youth but know it. Curiously enough, we are accustomed to begin, in teaching the young to read, with very legible type. When the eyes grow stronger, we begin to maltreat them. So it is, also, with the digestive organs, which we first coddle with pap, then treat awhile with pork and cocktails, and then, perforce, entertain with pap of the second and final period. What ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... returning once very late, he instantly conceived and executed some verses, that were the best of his day. On another day, he was as prompt, and thought to have been more lucky than before; when, lo, the next morning he was flogged! for the exercise was so ill written, that it was not legible even ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... intellect is to a great extent legible in her books. But there are thousands of her readers in both hemispheres who would like to possess a more concrete image of her in their minds—an image which should give back the personal peculiarities of face, voice, and manner, that made up her outward form and semblance. I cannot pretend ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... the first. It was a simple and appropriate composition, a shield flanked with two letters B. These were capitals or not. One was reversed or not, with little arbitrariness, for the mark was legible and unmistakable in any case, even though the weaver took great liberties—as he sometimes did. The place for this mark was the galloon, and it was usually executed in a lighter colour, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... perplexity, a messenger arrived from Histiaeus at Susa, who brought with him an express command to revolt, the particulars of which were impressed in legible characters upon his skull. Histiaeus was desirous to communicate his intentions to Aristagoras; but as the ways were strictly guarded, he could devise no other method. He therefore took one of the most faithful of his slaves, and inscribed what we ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... Tib. B.V., fol. 59). This gives us the most interesting and accurate view of the world that we get in the pre-Crusading Christian science. The square, but not conventional outline is detailed with considerable care and precision. The writing, though minute, is legible; but the Nile, which, like the Red Sea in Africa, is coloured red, in contrast to the ordinary grey of water in this example, is made to wander about Africa from side to side, with occasional disappearances, in a thoroughly mythical fashion. This map, from a ms. of Priscian's Peviegesis, ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... two words were scarcely legible. I returned the letter to Armand, who had, no doubt, read it over again in his mind while I was reading it on paper, for he said to ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils

... is written in rather a small, concentrated hand, not overwhelmingly legible perhaps, but, as we say, "full of character," on paper lightly blueish, in the prescribed corner of which a tiny ducal coronet is embossed, above the initials "B. S." curiously interlaced in ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... at all," said I. "That a man should hang upon his wall an inscription that is legible to him does not seem to me at all out of the way. It would be much more singular if he should hang up an inscription that ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... inexhaustible reversible plausible permissible accessible digestible responsible admissible fallible flexible incorrigible irresistible ostensible tangible contemptible divisible discernible corruptible edible legible indelible indigestible ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... routed by other lines, over-ridden and trampled down by word upon triumphing word. Above the hideous confusion at least two verses shone luminous and clear; they had come swinging into the pure ether, full-formed and golden from their birth. And over the whole he wrote in legible characters, "On Harcombe Hill." ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary—scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid from science, that there were two currents, one of which comes round in a curve and effects the exit for the other which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... who knew him so well. Does any one ever know a man so well as his doctor? They are quite excellent and admirably translated. Meneval also—the patient Meneval—who wrote for untold hours to dictation at ordinary talking speed, and yet was expected to be legible and to make no mistakes. At least his master could not fairly criticize his legibility, for is it not on record that when Napoleon's holograph account of an engagement was laid before the President of the Senate, the worthy man thought that it was a drawn plan of the battle? ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... moment, with their orator in front of them, to meet the mighty guest, the grandeur of the scene had been somewhat screened by unpleasant sensations. If Messer Luca Corsini could have had a brief Latin welcome depending from his mouth in legible characters, it would have been less confusing when the rain came on, and created an impatience in men and horses that broke off the delivery of his well-studied periods, and reduced the representatives of the scholarly city to offer a makeshift ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... not black bronze, as I expected to find them, and grace the glorious church I am never weary of admiring; where I went one day on purpose to find out the red marble on which Pope Alexander III. sate, and placed his foot upon the neck of the Emperor: the stone has this inscription half legible round it, Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis[Footnote: Thou shalt tread on the asp and the basilisk]. How does this lovely Piazza di San Marco render a newly-arrived spectator breathless with delight! ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... this wonderful mountain became the habitation of a religious community, may be pretty nearly ascertained by the following singular epitaph, on a beautiful monument, still legible in the ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... pages of large law books. Matthew Hale for years studied law sixteen hours a day. Speaking of Fox, some one declared that he wrote "drop by drop." Rousseau says of the labor involved in his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched, interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me. There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe four or five times before it went to press. . . . Some of my periods I have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they were fit ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... practical education of the Auscultator began with keeping the minutes of the Criminal Courts, and to this post I was promoted out of my proper turn by the Rath, Herr von Brauchitsch, under whom I worked, because in those days I wrote a more than usually quick and legible hand. On the examinations, as criminal proceedings in the inquisitorial method of that day were called, the one that has made the most lasting impression upon me related to a widely ramifying association in Berlin for the purpose of unnatural vice. The club arrangements ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... of the churchyard of Dalgarno—now a section of the parish of Closeburn—there is a small, but neat headstone, with two figures joining hands, as if in the attitude of marrying. Beneath is written, and still legible—"John Porter and Augnas Milligan. They were lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided." There is neither date nor narrative; but, as this part of the churchyard has not been used as a burial-ground ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... astonished, that after a night so passed I was ill and feverish in the morning. To my horror, Madame de la Rougierre came to visit me at my bedside. Not a trace of guilty consciousness of what had passed during the night was legible in her face. She had no sign of late watching, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... it guiltily, and, lifting the slanting desk which stood there, examined the surface below. Dick had been perfectly correct. There it was, glaringly fresh and distinct, not large but very deeply cut and fearfully legible. "R. Bultitude." It might have been done that day. Dick had probably performed it out of bravado, or under the impression that he was not going ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... all! It was all about preparations for the double wedding, written in scraps by different hands, at different times, evidently snatched from many avocations and much interruption. Of mamma there was really least of all; but squeezed into a corner, scarcely legible, Gillian read, 'As to lessons, if At. J. approves.' It was evidently an afterthought; and Gillian could, and chose to refer it to a certain inquiry about learning the violin, which had never been answered—-for the confusion that reigned at Columbo was plainly unfavourable ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in that capacity. "If you should know of any one, sir, as is in want of a steady servant," the man continued, as he led the way into the house, with a shrewd glance at Mr Proctor, whose "intentions" were legible enough to John's experienced eyes—"not as I'm afeared of getting suited, being well known in Carlingford; but it would come natural to be with a friend of the family. There aint a servant in the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... doing away with competition use the word in another sense than is here intended. Within the course of the longest human life there is necessarily a complete renewal of the persons whose communication and co-operation make up the life of society. The new members come into the world without any legible sign to indicate what they are fit for, a mystery to others from the first and to themselves as soon as they are capable of reflection: the young man does not know for what he is adapted, and no one else ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... presence opposite precede disappoint imminent preceptor disappearance immediately accommodation fiend choose commission siege chosen grammar friend inflammation yielding boundary recommend elementary summary seize symmetrical receive final committee receipt finally usual ledger succeed usually legible proceed ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... relations of the earlier writers—were neglected or concealed, inaccessible, unexplored, all but unknown. Now these hidden sources have been revealed. A flood of light streams back upon that bygone age, filling every obscure nook, making legible and plain what before could neither be read nor understood. Or rather, the effect is such as when distant objects, seen dimly and confusedly with the naked eye, are brought within the range of a powerful telescope, which dissolves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... after a lapse of three or four years only, under a layer of dust and ashes on a small scale. Taking for granted (what was perhaps doubtful enough) that the fragments of the letter could be recovered, my own conviction was that the writing on them, though it might be faded, would certainly still be legible. The very accumulations which Mr. Playmore deplored would be the means of preserving them from the rain and the damp. With these modest hints I closed my letter; and thus for once, thanks to my Continental experience, I was able to ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... remained standing on the same spot, he asked the reason of such an outrage on humanity. The stranger, slowly turning round, and disclosing a countenance which—(Here the manuscript was illegible for a few lines), said in English—(A long hiatus followed here, and the next passage that was legible, though it proved to be a continuation of the narrative, was ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... seven years might retrieve the worst losses we experience from the bigotry of popes and califs. I do not intend to assert that every Herculanean manuscript might, within that period, be unfolded; but the three first legible sentences might be; which is quite sufficient to inform the intelligent reader whether a farther attempt on the scroll would repay his trouble. There are fewer than thirty Greek authors worth inquiring for; they exist, beyond doubt, and beyond doubt they may, by attention, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various

... with their different ages, their nests, their young, their eggs, and their skeletons side by side; and in accordance with the admirable plan which is pursued in this museum, a tablet, telling the spectator in legible characters what they are and what they mean. For the instruction and recreation of the public such a typical collection would be of far greater value than any many-acred imitation of ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley

... his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by parsing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... with it went a very exciting story. This was the rumor of another will, and of Henderson's vast scheme of benevolence. Mr. Sage had been interviewed and Carmen had been interviewed. The memorandum (which was only rough and not wholly legible notes) had been found and sent to Carmen. There was no concealment about it. She gave the reporters all the details, and to every one she said that it was her intention to carry out her husband's wishes, so far as they could be ascertained from this memorandum, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... in the possession of his family a manuscript work, consisting of memoirs of his own time, written in his own autograph, which was clean and legible. This work, which has furnished many of the anecdotes connected with his court life in the foregoing pages, was long guarded from the eye of any but the Hervey family, owing to an injunction given in his will by Augustus, third Earl of Bristol, Lord Hervey's son, that ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... widow, partly completed and occupied Nauvoo House after the departure of the Mormons for Utah, and some years later he took out the cornerstone and opened it, but found the manuscript so ruined by moisture that only a little was legible. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... advertisement in the local press will reach its mark. It is this permanency which gives another value to the circular and the poster; the circular is folded up and preserved to be looked at again like a book of reference; the poster remains on the dry wall of the barn, and the ink is legible months after it was first ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain's widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... morning, about ten o'clock, riding along the public road—which was a great thoroughfare—towards the locality of the station with the history of the previous night's transaction written as clearly oh his back as if it had been labelled there in large and legible print. The truth is, the humane and charitable priest had neglected to get his coat brushed—an operation which it never underwent unless on a Sunday morning—and the consequence was, that whilst the front part of his dress was ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... out by the major. At last, the doctor wrote: "Bismillah arachmani arachemi" ("In the name of the great and most merciful God") in large Koran characters. He made so deep an impression on the paper, that after using the india-rubber the words still appeared legible, the fighi remarking: "They are the words of God, delivered to our prophet: I defy you to erase them." The sultan and all around him gazed at the paper with intense satisfaction, exclaiming that ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... merry enough to send you a sad song.[72] You once asked me for some words which you would set. Now you may set or not, as you like,—but there they are, in a legible hand[73], and not in mine, but of my own scribbling; so you may say of them what you please. Why don't you write to me? I shall make you 'a speech'[74] ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... demanded a reason why it should be thought more proper to silence all heretics by sword and faggot, rather than convert them by moderate and sober arguments? A certain cynical old blade, who bore the character of a divine, legible in the frowns and wrinkles of his face, not without a great deal of disdain answered, that it was the express injunction of St. Paul himself, in those directions to Titus (A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject), quoting it in Latin, where the word reject is ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... opposite to me at the table, "it is soon done; for, mark me, lad, these things must always be short; if thou be long-winded, they put thee away, and tell some of the clerks to look after thee—and there's an end of it. Be brief, therefore, and next—be legible—write in a good, large round hand; just as, if thou wert speaking, thou wouldst talk with a fine, clear, distinct voice. Well, then, begin thus, 'Republic of France, one and indivisible!' Make a flourish ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... innumerable assembly of white marble statues, of every form, and in multitudinous posture, filling the hall throughout. These stood, in the ruddy glow of the great lamp, upon pedestals of jet black. Around the lamp shone in golden letters, plainly legible from where ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... opinions, statistics, comparisons, and contradictions while they are being read is most desirable and worthy of cultivation. The student should be taught the wisdom of keeping his notes in a neat, legible, and easily available form. Shorthand methods should be discouraged. With a little tactful direction early in the year, the student may be led to form a most useful habit. The greater the proportion of intelligent note-taking that is done without compulsion, ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell

... glimpse of the river directly at the foot of the ledge our trail followed, and the water looked invitingly cool. All at once Dixie stopped so suddenly that Ranger West almost took a header. A man's hat was lying in the trail. Dismounting, the men looked for tracks. A quite legible story was written there for them to read. Some tenderfoot, thirst-crazed, had stumbled along that trail since we had passed that way a couple of hours earlier. Putting our horses to a lope we rode on until we came to his empty canteen; and a little farther on to a discarded coat and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... say a few words by way of summing up his pretensions as a man, and his intellectual power in the age to which he belonged. His rank and value as a moral being are so plain as to be legible to him who runs. Everybody must feel that his temperament and constitutional tendency was of that happy quality, the animal so nicely balanced with the intellectual, that with any ordinary measure of prosperity he could not be otherwise than a good ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... no longer disguised; impudence and bravado were legible in the Prophet's looks. Thinking that, with such an adversary, the dispute might become serious, Dagobert, who wished to avoid a quarrel at any price, carried off his tub to the other end of the porch, hoping thus ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... are told." Can we then no more find for ourselves this writing on our hearts—or has it ceased to be legible? ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... five years, the famous Bible with 42 lines to a page, and a Donatus (Latin grammar) of 32 lines. The printer of the Bible with 36 lines to a page, that is the next oldest surviving monument, was apparently a helper of Gutenberg, who set up an independent press in 1454. Legible, clean-cut, comparatively cheap, these books demonstrated once for all the success of the new art, even though, for illuminated initials, they were still dependent on the hand of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... glossary of Scotch expressions. We have referred to it as we went along, and found everything quite intelligible. As, however, we have no room to publish the glossary, we can only appeal to the indulgence of our readers. The story itself was written in a very clear, legible hand, and was enclosed in a wrapper labelled, "Arcadia Mixture. Strength and Aroma combined. Sold in Six-shilling cases. Special terms for Southrons. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various

... to the depth of sixteen feet, but the soil has since been dug away from its base, which is now lower than that of the road which passes through the neighboring gate of San Paolo. Midway up the pyramid, cut in the marble, is an inscription in large Roman letters, still almost as legible as when ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... for peace's sake, as most agreeable to the inclinations of the people, was settled in Scotland as the government of Christ's church there. Thus, there is a settlement of religion, and yet not one line of scripture authority, or reformation principles legible therein: and, as one said (though a strenuous defender of the settlement), "The glory of that church is at a low pass, which hangs upon the nail of legal securities by kings and parliaments, instead of the nail which God has ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... Wangrave would have seemed only born to be gay—the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature, that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of such works of nature as encroach ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... towards Blackfriars, over a small triangular-fronted shop, scarcely big enough to hold three persons at a time, the eye of the passing traveller is greeted with the following welcome information, painted in large and legible characters, the letters being each ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... "I will tell you what," she said presently. "I have a small typewriting machine which I will teach you how to use. It is very simple, and you spell so nicely that it will be no time before you could manage a perfectly legible letter to your father." ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... for me!" cried Miss Peppy, with a slight look of disappointment; "but, to be sure, I'm not at home, though, after all, letters might come to me when I'm away if they were only rightly addressed, but letters are never legible on the back; it is a perfect mystery to me how the postmen ever find out where to go to with letters, and they are such illiterate men too! But what can one expect in a world of inconsistencies, where things ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne

... the secretary's room by the hall door, and looked at the manuscript which had been left on the table. It was written in an excellent hand, not too large, very legible, and correctly punctuated. Everything had been done properly, except that after the first three pages she had forgotten to number the leaves at the top; but as every sheet was placed in its proper order, this was an omission which could ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton

... it. At night Joy was sitting upstairs writing a letter to her father, when a gust of wind took the sheet and blew it to Gypsy's feet. Gypsy picked it up to carry it to her, and in doing so, her eyes fell accidentally on some large, legible words at the bottom of the page. She had not the slightest intention of reading them, but their meaning came to her against her will, in that curious way we see things in a flash sometimes. This was what ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... windows in the room. The light entered from above through two simple round apertures covered with white glass. Book cases stood about the room filled with large folios, which, as I observed from a few spread upon the table, were not printed books, but filled with writing in a round, clear hand, legible at ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... his pocket-book; on a card bearing his name and address was written in his own legible hand, "HOME, AND ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik



Words linked to "Legible" :   readable, fair, decipherable, clear, clean, legibility



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