"Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... during the ceremony at the Registry Office—I did not at that time say anything, but handed him the coin. I do not know if I should have left him at once, had he not aggravated the baseness of his conduct by using the vulgar expression, 'Fork it out quick!' But I regret to say that his origin is painfully low. Whereas, anybody who consults my relatives will hear from them that they belong to the very highest County Families. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... There was nothing violent in these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar, which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most dogs in their dealings ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... confidence, my son, that there was never a greater fool than that man. He absolutely knows nothing at all. When he dies he will be no more missed in this world than an old dead stage-horse who is made into a manure heap. He is coarse, and vulgar, and mean. His daughter Kate married his clerk, young Tom Witchet—not a cent, you know, but five hundred dollars salary. 'Twas against the old man's will, and he shut his door, and his purse, and his heart. He turned Witchet away; told his ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... countess, before I could answer, you must not expect a mere stiff maiden answer from Miss Byron: she is above all vulgar forms. She and her cousins have too much politeness, and, I will venture to say, discernment, not to be glad of your acquaintance, as an acquaintance— But, for the rest, you ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... elaborately painted and gilt. Mention, however, is made of pulpits at a much earlier period; for in the year 1187 one was set up in the abbey church, Bury St. Edmund's, from which, we are told, the abbot was accustomed to preach to the people in the vulgar tongue and provincial dialect[164-*]. The most ancient pulpit, perhaps, existing in this country, is that in the refectory of the abbey (now in ruins) of Beaulieu, Hampshire: it is of stone, and partly projects from the wall, and is ornamented ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... laudable end:— The general has his star; Shylock his four per cent; The contractor's wife a costly gem To enhance her vulgar charms; The mother a harvest of tears; The wife a broken heart; The unborn babe a prenatal curse; While I have my surfeit ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Her, thee most excellent of all, The best half of creation's best, Its heart to feel, its eye to see, The crown and complex of the rest, Its aim and its epitome. Nay, might I utter my conceit, 'Twere after all a vulgar song, For she's so simply, subtly sweet, My deepest rapture does her wrong. Yet is it now my chosen task To sing her worth as Maid and Wife; Nor happier post than this I ask, To live her laureate all my life. On wings of love uplifted free, And by her gentleness made ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... Richelieu, near Tours, belongs an Academy where besides the exercise of the horse, armes, dauncing, etc., all the sciences are taught in the vulgar French by Professors stipendiated by the great Cardinal. The Academy of Juilly included some study of physical science, mathematics, geography, heraldry, French history, Italian, and Spanish, besides the riding ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... tranquillity. Show yourself a philosopher in practice as well as profession. Think on the impotence and rashness and futility of the common judgments of men, how little they are regulated by reason on any subject, much more on philosophical subjects, which so far exceed the comprehension of the vulgar— ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... would probably be heaped on me by the reproach that I had compromised our dear Weber's memory, because it was none other than I, weak and unimportant as I am, who had first mooted this celebration. Pray, do what you can in order to be helpful to our enterprise, for gradually, as I observe the vulgar indifference of our theatres, which owe so much to Weber, I begin to fear that our fund might easily remain such as it is at present, and that would be tantamount to our having to commence with very inadequate means the erection of a monument which ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... was so little dignity, so little repose. I do not think that people who live in such places can understand what it is to love one's homeland. Everywhere, too, even amongst the aristocracy, one met vulgar people. Shopkeepers and merchants who had made very much money mixed freely with the nobles. They tell me that in England it is also like this. In Theos I ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... glaring, the latter's more close and even: Plautus had the most dazelling out-side, and the most lively Colours, but Terence drew the finest Figures and Postures, and had the best Design; the one pleas'd the Vulgar, but our Author the Better sort of people; the former wou'd usually set his Spectators into a loud Laughter, but the latter steal 'em into a sweet Smile that shou'd continue from the beginning to the end of the Representation: in short, Plautus was more ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... challenges, nor sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside. There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again, as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... through its hollow stalk—Eupatorium purpureum—Queen of the Meadow, Gravel Root: Root used in decoction with a somewhat similar plant called [)A]m[)a]dit[/a][']t[)i] [^u][']tanu, or "large water dipper" (not identified) for difficult urination. Dispensatory: "Said to operate as a diuretic. Its vulgar name of gravel root indicates the popular estimation of its virtues." The genus is described as tonic, diaphoretic, and in large ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... private matter, no vulgar attempt at robbery and crime as you think—or pretend to think—for you are very intelligent, Mr. Neeland, and you know that ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... he, "if I was rude, I'll own to it. I meant no ill, and did nothing out of my just rights; but I am above all these old vulgar notions too; and if I spoke sharp, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forced into visiting promiscuously, they imbibe certain manners, certain peculiarities in mode and words—even in an accent or a pronunciation, which are confined to themselves; and whatever differs from these little eccentricities, they are apt to condemn as vulgar and suburban. Now, the fastidiousness of these sets making them difficult of intimate access, even to many of their superiors in actual rank, those very superiors, by a natural feeling in human nature, of prizing ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... education, yet it was a common saying of the many who knew her, that she would have graced a court. She never said or did any thing that was not delicate and beautiful. Her dress, even when they were very poor, had never a hole nor a spot. She never allowed any rude or vulgar thing to be said in her presence without expressing her displeasure. She was one of nature's nobility. She lived and moved in beauty as well as ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... other talent than that of chloroforming his prey by means of a few tweaks resembling kisses, he would be unknown to the vulgar herd; but he also knows how to light himself like a beacon; he shines, which is an excellent manner of achieving fame. Let us consider more particularly the female, who, while retaining her larval shape, becomes marriageable and glows at her best during the hottest part of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had said it, and in any case it was true. Merely hearing Mrs. Wilkins's evil communications at meals—she did not listen, she avoided listening, yet it was evident she had heard—those communications which, in that they so often were at once vulgar, indelicate and profane, and always, she was sorry to say, laughed at by Lady Caroline, must be classed as evil, was spoiling her own mental manners. Soon she might not only think but say. How terrible that would be. If that were the form her breaking-out was going ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Nor, to the vulgar eye, does there seem much poetry in the French Revolution, though it was the mightiest tide of human passion which ever boiled and raved: a great deal, doubtless, in Burke's "Reflections"—but none in the cry of a liberated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... known, on account of his fame as a writer of Latin verse, as Giovanni del Virgilio, a poetical epistle inviting him to visit the author in his native city. His correspondent, while doing homage to his poetic genius, incidentally censured him for composing his great work in the base tongue of the vulgar[20]. Dante replied in a Vergilian eclogue, courteously declining Giovanni's invitation to Bologna, on the ground that it was a place scarcely safe for his person. As regarded the strictures of his correspondent, his triumphant answer in the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... gloominess. The grandfather of Jane and John-Andrew Vaguener committed a most cold-blooded murder—this in a prologue. Then, when we get to the real story, we find Jane tapping out popular fiction at an amazing pace, and her brother, John-Andrew, living on the proceeds thereof. Jane is noisy, vulgar, and successful in her own line, and gets on John-Andrew's nerves; and when he discovers that she has for once turned aside from tawdry fiction and written a play that is really good he decides ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... and disgraceful male costume" for the most picturesque garments I had—a kilt, a blue blazer, and a yellow turban, which I once wore at a fancy dress ball. Then strolled along Piccadilly to the Club. Rather cool. Having abandoned "the most vulgar form of salutation, the shake-hands," bowed distantly to several men I had known for years—but they looked another way. Met a policeman. "Hullo!" he said. "Come out o' that! Your place is in the road." He mistook me for a sandwich-man! Explained that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... accompany Ralegh into France. Ralegh, with all his wit and experience of men, his wife, with her love and her clearness of vision, the shrewd French diplomatists, and honest King, were dupes of a mere cormorant, like Stukely, and of vulgar knaves, like Cottrell and Hart. Without the least suspicion of foul play Ralegh on that Sunday night, after le Clerc and de Novion had left, went down to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... people, both noble and vulgar, it requires but a very short residence amongst them to be highly disgusted; few receive any thing which deserves the name of a regular Education, & I have been told from, I believe, undoubted Authority, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... forbidden by Mohammed who believed with the vulgar that the Devil has something to do with it. Even Paganini could not escape ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... lofty Calydon,—the youths, And aged seniors weep; the vulgar crowd And nobles mourn alike; the matrons rend Their garments, beat their breasts, and tear their hair. Stretch'd on the earth the wretched sire defiles His hoary locks, and aged face with dust, Cursing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... brighten it up, and changes that would put it over with the Western buyers, Harrietta would regard the mutilated manuscript sorrowingly. "But I can't play this now, you know. It isn't the same part at all. It's—forgive me—vulgar." ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... men who opposed him in this manner were good citizens according to their lights, prominent in the social clubs and in philanthropic circles, men of means and often men of business standing. They disliked coarse and vulgar politicians, and they sincerely reprobated all the shortcomings that were recognized by, and were offensive to, people of their own caste. They had not the slightest understanding of the needs, interests, ways ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... between the so-called Lady Anna and the young tailor. To these distant Lovels,—to Frederic Lovel who had been brought up with the knowledge that he must be the Earl, and to his uncle and aunt by whom he had been brought up,—the women down at Keswick had been represented as vulgar, odious, and disreputable. We all know how firm can be the faith of a family in such matters. The Lovels were not without fear as to the result of the attempt that was being made. They understood quite as well as did Mr. Flick the glory of the position which would attend upon success, and ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... votes Eastbourne vulgar, and the girls (sorry now I sent them to that finishing-school at Clapham) laugh so consumedly whenever I open my mouth to address a native if we go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... tell the good people at home not to bore you with such long letters,' said she; 'and, above all, do bid them write on proper note-paper, and not on those great vulgar sheets. You should see the charming little lady-like notes ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... Warden, would about realize the Northern ideal of a Southern overseer. He was an obstinate man, and his cruelty was low, vulgar, and brutal like his mind. He would have been hypocritical, but that his character was too coarse-grained to be pliant enough for successful dissimulation. The members of the Board of Directors (with one or two exceptions) were ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Baccaloas, of the fish taken there.] Trending this coast, we came to the Iland called Baccalaos, being not past two leagues from the maine: to the South thereof lieth Cape S. Francis, 5. leagues distant from Baccalaos, between which goeth in a great bay by the vulgar sort called the bay of Conception. Here we met with the Swallow againe, whom we had lost in the fogge, and all her men altered into other apparell: whereof it seemed their store was so amended, that for ioy and congratulation ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... nurses' exclamations of surprise—"Oh, I say!" "Not I!" "You don't say so!" "What idiocy!" and the like. No doubt those expressions sounded quite proper among the nurses, but on Tommy's lips they seem curiously more vulgar than his natural and rougher expletives. It is, besides, as if one were eavesdropping outside the nurses' ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the Third Order. Why, then, should it be a subject of astonishment to you, that a cardinal should cover his purple with a garment of ash color, and gird himself with a cord? If this dress seems vulgar and vile, I require it the more, because, finding myself raised to a high degree of honor, I must humble myself the more in order to avoid pride. But is not the garb of St. Francis, which is of ash color, a real ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... himself; and when we were going to enter the carriages he said: 'Now, look here! I give due notice to all and sundry, that I mean to sing that song, and a good many others, during the ride; so those ladies who think them vulgar can go in the other carriages. I am not going to invest my hard-earned penny for nothing.' I was quite certain that Charles Dickens was the last man in the world to shock the modesty of any female, and too much of a gentleman to do anything that was annoying to us, but I thought it as well to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... spectacle of so world-embracing an organism, persistently maintained in action for an anti-social end. There is something Roman in the colossal proportions of Loyola's idea, something Roman in the durability of the structure which perpetuates it. Yet the philosopher cannot but agree with the vulgar in his final judgment on the odiousness of these sacerdotal despots, these unflinching foes not merely to the heroes of the human intellect, and to the champions of right conduct, but also to the very angels of Christianity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... secure us all in case of accidents, etc.(21) I left the Society at seven. I can't drink now at all with any pleasure. I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite. I remember Ppt used to maunder, when I came from a great dinner, and DD had but a bit of mutton. I cannot endure above one dish; nor ever could since I was a boy, and loved stuffing. It was a fine day, which is a rarity with us, I assure ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... was not negligent in encouraging the vulgar and mechanical arts, which have a more sensible, though not a closer, connexion with the interests of society. He invited, from all quarters, industrious foreigners to repeople his country, which had been desolated ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the three partners' cabin at Heavy Tree Hill. His short hair and beard still clung to his head like curled moss or the crisp flocculence of Astrakhan. He was dressed more pretentiously, but still gave the same idea of vulgar strength. She listened to him without emotion, but said, with even a deepening of scorn ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... upon a tiny bit of plate glass. How it ever got there, is more than I can make out; but the thing seems a mistake, a very lie, to look at. Would any fisherman, now, have rowed out here with it and laid it down and rowed away again? I left it where it lay; it was thick and common and vulgar; perhaps a bit of a tramcar window. Once on a time glass was rare, and bottle-green. God's blessing on the old days, when something could ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... opening. Suppose we introduce the hero in his dressing-room. We have something of the kind in Pelham; and if we can't copy his merits, we must his peculiarities. Besides, it always is effective: a dressing-room or boudoir of supposed great people, is admitting the vulgar into the arcana, which ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... peacefully reached the long coveted throne of England in the person of a most unkingly King. Gross in appearance and vulgar in manners, James had none of the royal attributes of his mother. A great deal of knowledge had been crammed into a very small mind. Conceited, vain, pedantic, headstrong, he set to work with the confidence of ignorance to carry out his undigested ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock, confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There was nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror's back was seen escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his return, and Richard at the Waldorf sat amusing himself with those tides of vulgar humanity that ebb and flow in a stretch of garish corridor known as Peacock Lane. Surely it was a hopeless place wherein to seek a wife, and Richard had no such thought. But who shall tell how and when and where his fate will overtake ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... then? You are ruined, that is all! Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... scruple to use this great power to avenge themselves upon those men that had so antagonized them and hindered their investigation. Robert Beverley they represented to the Privy Council as a man of low education and mean parts, bred a vulgar seaman and utterly unfit for high office.[839] Colonel Edward Hill was the most hated man in Charles City county.[840] Ballard, Bray and some of the other Councillors were rash and fiery, active in opposing the King's orders and unjust to the poor people.[841] The Privy ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Buddhas are,' makes answer Akira; 'yet there is truly but one Buddha; the many are forms only. Each of us contains a future Buddha. Alike we all are except in that we are more or less unconscious of the truth. But the vulgar may not understand these things, and so seek refuge in symbols and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... continent as that of his drunkenness has made intemperate. It is not shameful not to be as virtuous as he, and it seems excusable to be no more vicious. We do not believe ourselves to be exactly sharing in the vices of the vulgar, when we see that we are sharing in those of great men; and yet we do not observe that in these matters they are ordinary men. We hold on to them by the same end by which they hold on to the rabble; for, however exalted they are, they are still united at some point to ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... silent sadness that had brought quick response from Wood. Red Pearce was even quicker. He did not seem to regard her proximity as that of a feminine thing which roused the devil in him. Pearce could not be other than coarse and vulgar, but there was pity in him. Joan sensed pity and some other quality still beyond her. This lieutenant of the bandit Kells was just as mysterious as Wood. Joan mended a great jagged rent in his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... "Laughing is vulgar," said Agatha. If any indirect question were ever thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately began expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... thoughts with which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... palace there, and in the tumult which followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his reign, however, Singeric was himself ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible, that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... pussy-wants-a-corner stuff Ed got wise that the thing had come to be a mere vulgar chase, and that his private car was hampering him by being so easy to keep track of. So he disguised himself by taking off his diamond ornaments and leaving his private car at Colfax, and started out to stalk Ben as a common private citizen in a day coach. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... By it the last lingering doubts as to the absolute exactness of the Newtonian Law were dissipated. Recondite analytical methods received a confirmation brilliant and intelligible even to the minds of the vulgar, and emerged from the patient solitude of the study to enjoy an hour of clamorous triumph. For ever invisible to the unaided eye of man, a sister-globe to our earth was shown to circulate, in perpetual frozen exile, at thirty ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the risks to which Bois-Guilbert exposed himself in endeavouring to save Rebecca from the blazing castle, and his neglect of his personal defence in attending to her safety. The men gave these details with the exaggerations common to vulgar minds which have been strongly excited by any remarkable event, and their natural disposition to the marvellous was greatly increased by the satisfaction which their evidence seemed to afford to the eminent ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... visit America. In one of his letters to the late WILLIS GAYLORD CLARK, now lying before us, he writes: 'I have long felt a peculiar admiration for your great and rising country; and it gives me a pleasure far beyond that arising from a vulgar notoriety, to think that I am not unknown to its inhabitants. Some time or other I hope to visit you, and suffer my present prepossessions to be confirmed by actual experience.' . . . WE have received and perused with gratification ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... persecutions, an ancient writer says: "In the year 1243, Pope Innocent II. ordered the Bishop of Metz rigorously to prosecute the Vaudois, especially because they read the sacred books in the vulgar tongue."[95] From time to time, new persecutions were ordered, and conducted with ever-increasing ferocity—the scourge, the brand, and the sword being employed by turns. In 1486, while Luther was still in his cradle, Pope Innocent VIII. issued ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... you that there dwells, within a brief mile of these TUGURIA, the best FABER FERARIUS, the most accomplished blacksmith, that ever nailed iron upon horse. Now, were I to say so, I warrant me you would think yourself COMPOS VOTI, or, as the vulgar have ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... get real salt, and the waiter spoke English and where one had a name instead of a number; and though the tablecloth might be dirty the windows opened so that the air was clean, where one had the excellent company of farmers and men of the wold, who could not be thoroughly vulgar, because they had not the money to be so even if they had wished it. At first the novelty was delightful, and then one day in a queer old inn up Uthering way, beyond Lingwold, I heard for the first time the rumour of the city said to ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... we reached the ranch in safety, and after securing him with a collar and a strong chain, we staked him out in the pasture and removed the cords. Then for the first time I could examine him closely, and proved how unreliable is vulgar report where a living hero or tyrant is concerned. He had not a collar of gold about his neck, nor was there on his shoulders an inverted cross to denote that he had leagued himself with Satan. But I did find ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... gentlewoman as any. You are smiling at my partiality. Shall you be shocked if I add that I have met in Woldshire grand people who, if they were not known by their titles, would be reckoned amongst the very vulgar, and gentry of old extraction who bear no brand of it but that disagreeable manner which is qualified as ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... epochs of great social convulsions events and circumstances put certain individuals into an eminent or elevated position, their names become intertwined with the great epoch. In the eyes of the masses and of the vulgar observers, such names acquire a high importance on account of the commonly made confusion between circumstances and personal merit, and, moonlight-like, such names reverberate not their own, but a borrowed splendor. Thus much for the official ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... me to his cabin. He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... Lordships to bear in mind throughout the whole of this deliberation. It is this: you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant. You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature. My Lords, we have shown to you already, and we shall demonstrate to you more clearly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, "Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... when at last he saw that Germany did not love him. Nothing is so repugnant to the great of the earth, and especially to conquerors, as the thought of death,—death, the only unconquerable foe! What, the first comer, a fool, a vulgar fanatic, can with a kitchen knife lay low the greatest hero, the most illustrious warrior, the mightiest king! At Regensberg, when he was wounded for the first time since he had begun his military career, the hero ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... suppression and patience. They are either biding their time or else they are content with the past and the part played by their ancestors therein. For there is an old French and a new. In Paris the new is spoken—the very newest. Were it anything but French it would be intolerably vulgar; as it is, it is merely ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... one had a pipe in his mouth. Some were talking with loose, loquacious tongues; some were singing; their ugly, jolly visages—half illumined by the light of tallow candles stuck in iron sconces on the wall—were worthy of the vulgar but faithful Dutch pencils of Schalken and Teniers. They were singing a song as the new ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... necessity had taught to read faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents, as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression, she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly, he would not have said to himself, "She is a LADY," for that word meant a good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nape from some deleterious padding or other used in the manufacture of her chignon. Sometimes it is vegetable stuff, sometimes animal, but it always teems with pedicular creatures akin to that low and vulgar kind not usually recognized in polite society. All these horrors come and and don't make much difference in the chignon market; but PUNCHINELLO has a new one that is calculated to create a sensation—about the nape of the female ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... great cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behind the pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. That is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... her. This I have undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe. Your sister keeps me ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... second is accustomed. A poor man who finds himself under the necessity of entertaining a rich one should not feel that he must do it on a grand scale if he has been so entertained by a rich one. Aside from the moral question involved the great game of bluff is too silly and vulgar a one ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the peacocks, when they saw him, One and all began to haul, And to harry and to claw him Till the creature couldn't crawl; While their owner's vulgar daughter, When her startled callers sought her, And to see the struggle brought her, Only ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... (philanthropia) is by far the most prominent characteristic of the God upon earth. Was it that people really felt that to save or benefit mankind was a more godlike thing than to blast and destroy them? Philosophers have generally said that, and the vulgar pretended to believe them. It was at least politic, when ministering to the half-insane pride of one of these princes, to remind him of his mercy rather than of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... always supposed that this and similar expressions in other parts of Grotius' Commentary, were understood, by all who were acquainted with Grotius' history and the times in which he wrote, to be intended for a mere salvo, as a tub thrown out to that great whale the vulgar; to contradict directly whose opinions with regard to the prophecies, was in the time of Grotius very dangerous, as he himself, notwithstanding all his precaution ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... Kathleen that Kate Rourke was rather a vulgar girl. She drew a little nearer to her, however, and fixed her very bright ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... serious ideas about such a person as Ida Palliser; but he liked to talk to her, he liked to watch the sensitive colour come and go upon the perfect oval of her cheek, while the dark eye brightened or clouded with every change of feeling; and while he was yielding to these vulgar distractions there was no chance of his falling in love ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... ignorance, too often also with silliness—which is not the case with you," I added, with a smile. "Real, that is to say, conscious simplicity is not even recognised; and, when it becomes active, it appears to vulgar minds a danger that must be averted. The better to attack it, they disfigure it. It is this proud and noble grace that I want you to acquire. Look, it may be compared with this diamond which I wear on my finger. The stone is absolutely simple; and yet through how many ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... affecting parting?" cry I, jumping up and running to him. "Do not I look as if I had been crying? Quite the contrary, I assure you. But Musgrave and I have been asking each other such amusing riddles—would you like to hear them? Mine is good, plain, vulgar English, but his is French, so we will ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... has taken place in our attitude towards marriage. I am not, however, at all certain. We talk a great deal, I fear, that is all. The innumerable tragedies of marriage among us to-day are witness to our failure; they have a far closer connection than often is recognized with the romantic and vulgar poverty of our ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... galleon, captured off St. Vincent by three English frigates, entered St. James's street, escorted by cavalry and infantry, with trumpets sounding, the enemy's flags waving over the waggons, and the whole surrounded by an immense multitude of spectators. Now here, to the vulgar mind, was a happy augury of the future golden reign of the Royal baby. He comes upon the earth amid a shower of gold! The melodious chink of doubloons and pieces of eight echo his first infant wailings! What a theme for the gipsies of the press—the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to Hyde, "I fear his immoderate delight in empty, effeminate, and vulgar conversations is become an irresistible part of his nature, and will never suffer him to animate his own designs, and others' actions, with that spirit which is requisite for his quality, and much more to his fortune."—27, Jan. ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... and left scarcely any debts. He must have lived amidst many self-deprivations; nor was this difficult to practise for this king, for he was a philosopher, indifferent to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of royalty. Whenever he threw himself into the arms of his Parliament, they left him without a feeling of his distress. In one of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... this prevailing folly—of raising 700l., 1000l., or 1500l. per series, merely by cramming the mouths of the asinine with mock-majestic details of fine life—this found favour with an indolent no less than sagacious humorist; and the fatal example was set. Hence the vile and most vulgar pawings of such miserables as Messrs. Vivian Grey and "The Roue"—creatures who betray in every page, which they stuff full of Marquess and My Lady, that their own manners are as gross as they make it their boast ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... leave to man,—no consolation but what the mind can arrive at unaided, no knowledge but what can be reached by original scientific investigation. He destroys not only all faith but all authority, by a low appeal to prejudices, and by vulgar wit such as the infidels of a former age used in their heartless and flippant controversies. I am not surprised at the hostility displayed even in France against him by both Catholics and Protestants. When he advocated ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... am leading a highly virtuous and praiseworthy life, and have not done the least bit of mischief since I came here, except making the Dean's wife jealous, which I can hardly call a crime, as she is a vulgar little woman with a red nose and a yellow bonnet—the Dean is a fat, good-natured man, and calls here nearly every day. His wife abuses me in all societies, and tries to pass me without speaking. You know how I always return good for evil, so I go up and shake hands with her, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... poor speak correctly; there is no vulgar style; but children have a 'patois' of their own, using many words in their play which men would scorn to repeat. The Bamapela have adopted a click into their dialect, and a large infusion of the ringing "ny", which seems ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... repeatedly pronounce the word suggest as 'sug jest'. Such vagaries as this are not likely ever to be generally adopted. But a good many 'spelling-pronunciations' have found their way into general educated use, and others which are now condemned as vulgar or affected will probably at some future time be universally adopted. I do not share the sentimental regret with which some philologists regard this tendency of the language. It seems to me that each case ought to be judged on its own merits, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... of those who do not know; and, for the benefit of those who do know, it will examine and discuss the right principles on which windows should be made, and the rules of good taste and of imagination, which make such a difference between beautiful and vulgar art; for you may know intimately all the processes I have spoken of, and be skilful in them, and yet misapply them, so that your window had better never ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... contemplate the excesses of the late Jerry. She had always mistrusted the man. She had never liked his face—not merely on aesthetic grounds but because she had seemed to detect in it a lurking savagery. How right events had proved this instinctive feeling. Mrs. Pett was not vulgar enough to describe the feeling, even to herself, as a hunch, but a hunch it had been; and, like every one whose hunches have proved correct, she was conscious in the midst of her grief of a certain complacency. It seemed to her that ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... From Casa Guidi windows, what is done Or undone. Whatsoever deeds they be, Pope Pius will be glorified in none. Record that gain, Mazzini!—it shall top Some heights of sorrow. Peter's rock, so named, Shall lure no vessel any more to drop Among the breakers. Peter's chair is shamed Like any vulgar throne the nations lop To pieces for their firewood unreclaimed,— And, when it burns too, we shall see as well In Italy as elsewhere. Let it burn. The cross, accounted still adorable, Is Christ's cross only!—if the thief's would earn Some stealthy ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain that it begets a terrible astonishment and confusion during the fit. I omit the vulgar sort, to whom it one while represents their great-grandsires risen out of their graves in their shrouds, another while werewolves, nightmares, and chimaeras; but even amongst soldiers, a sort of men over whom, of all others, it ought ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... about thirty feet high, of solid masonry, without door or window or cranny, as shapely as when it first came from the hands of the old builders. Again I had the sense of breaking in on a sanctuary. What right had I, a common vulgar modern, to be looking at this fair thing, among these delicate trees, which some white goddess had once taken ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... he had seen Ratoneau for the first time on horseback, a smart, correct officer, reviewing his troops. Then it would have been easy enough to accept him as a brother-in-law. But this red-faced, slovenly creature in careless undress, made even more repulsive by his uncanny likeness to Napoleon—vulgar in manners, bragging in talk! De Sainfoy had met strange varieties of men among his brother officers, but never anything quite so forbidding as this. He did not give his sister a thought of pity; it ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... however, with their usual superstition attributed its good effects to some mysterious healing power in water itself. Therefore, when the patient was not able to undergo the usual process, or when his medical attendant was above the vulgar and routine practice of his profession, it was administered on the infinitesimal system. The quack muttered a formula over a gourd filled from a neighboring spring and sprinkled it on his patient, or washed the diseased part, or sucked out ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... that of many other men of my character, is one of the many curses of this idiotic nineteenth century! No, I offer you love, Ziska!— ideal, passionate love!—the glowing, rapturous dream of ecstasy in which such a thing as marriage would be impossible, the merest vulgar commonplace—almost a profanity." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and unknown horrors rise: For pomp and splendour, for her guard and crown, A gloomy dungeon, and a keeper's frown: Black thoughts, each morn, invade the lover's breast, Each night, a ruffian locks the queen to rest. Ah mournful change, if judg'd by vulgar minds! But Suffolk's daughter its advantage finds. Religion's force divine is best display'd In deep desertion of all human aid: To succour in extremes, is her delight, And cheer the heart, when terror strikes the sight. We, disbelieving our own senses, gaze, And ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... proportion to the space over which gradation extends, and to its invisible subtilty, is its grandeur, and in proportion to its narrow limits and violent degrees, its vulgarity. In Correggio, it is morbid and vulgar in spite of its refinement of execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is made the most observable and characteristic part of the picture; whereas natural gradation is forever escaping observation to that degree that the greater part of artists in working from nature ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... things sorter tended to make our home in Missouri onpleasant. A disposition to smash furniture, and heave knives around; an inclination to howl when drunk, and that frequent; a habitooal use of vulgar language, and a tendency to cuss the casooal visitor,—seemed to pint," added Mr. McClosky with submissive hesitation "that—she—was—so to speak—quite onsuited to the marriage ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... signal was given for the general battle. The Turks impetuously crossing the narrow stream, assailed the Christian camp in all directions, with their characteristic physical bravery, the most common, cheap and vulgar of all earthly virtues. A few months of military discipline will make fearless soldiers of the most ignominious wretches who can be raked from the gutters of Christian or heathen lands. The battle was waged with intense fierceness on both sides, and was long ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... believe I can do better than marry her when the mourning is ended. My late spouse, to be sure, would make a quiet man rather apprehensive about a second venture; but if Mrs. Kinloch is a Tartar, she is not a vulgar shrew, but will be lady-like, even if she is bitter. I think I shall take her. Of course she'll consent. I should like to see the unmarried woman in Innisfield that would dare refuse Theophilus Clamp. When she knows—that I know—what she knows, she'll do pretty much what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all the more vividly after looking at the thoughtless faces and gay-coloured dresses of the young women—just as one feels the beauty and the greatness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet. But this presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear the better with his mother's mood, which had been becoming more and more querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a strange conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... VULGAR.—Do you love the society of the vulgar? Then you are already debased in your sentiments. Do you seek to be with the profane? In your heart you are like them. Are jesters and buffoons your choice friends? He who loves to laugh at folly is himself a fool. Do you love and seek the society of the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... literature, were founded in almost every community. Their fame reached distant lands. It became a popular saying that "from Kiev shall go forth the Law, and the word of God from Starodub." Horodno, the vulgar pronunciation of Grodno, was construed to mean Har Adonai, "the Mount of the Lord." A pious rabbi did not hesitate to write to a colleague, "Be it known to the high honor of your glory that it is preferable by far to dwell in the land of the Russ and promote the study of the Torah in Israel than ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... detail struck the same curiously national note, from the rare iron-work to the octagonal lantern, a miracle of Plateresque design, which lifted itself, clear and bright, above the centre of the great church. Perhaps the effect lay partly in the gorgeous colour, colour never tawdry, never vulgar, as I had seen it sometimes in Italy; or else in the wonderful reliefs; statues in niches of gold, flowering stones, arabesques, alabaster columns, richly-toned pictures; but no matter whence it came, it was there, and could have been ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... movements are as active and springy as those of a cat; but, unless there is some pressing necessity for nimbleness, Jack regards it as the correct thing and a duty he owes to his own dignity to be deliberate of action. And, above all, whatever the circumstances, there must be no exhibition of vulgar curiosity, no eagerness, no enthusiasm, no astonishment while one of ocean's countless mysteries is unfolding itself before his eyes; he must exhibit an air of semi-contemptuous indifference, as who should say, "I am a seasoned hand—a ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... kiss her, his heart filled with compunction at the thought of the promise he was about to break. It seemed to him almost more than sacrilegious to make of this dear and honoured ornament of old age a vehicle for the satisfaction of the vulgar ambitions and disagreeable curiosity of the couple who dwelt ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... a good memory Air of science calculated to deceive the vulgar And scarcely a woman; for your answers are very short Bad habit of talking very indiscreetly before others Beaumarchais sent arms to the Americans Because he is fat, he is thought dull and heavy Can make a Duchess a beggar, but cannot make a beggar a Duchess Canvassing for a ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... saying, 'Andrew has sneezed, or put some coal on the fire'—the most ordinary way you can imagine. And that was the end of whisky for father. After that he tried to make everyone he knew cast their burden on the Lord. I rather felt like laughing at the time. It seemed rather silly, and just a bit vulgar—most religion is, isn't it? But since I've been worrying myself to death about you I've ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... knew, was a very vulgar word; I had heard Rador use it in a moment of anger to one of the serving maids, and it meant, approximately, "kitchen girl," "scullion." Beneath the insult and the acid disdain, the blood rushed up under ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... nothing's so vulgar as these nicknames in a first-rate situation. It is all very well when one lives with skinflints, but with such a master as our'n, respect's the go. Besides, Madame is not a French 'oman; she is one of the family,—and as ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the lady's hair. The costly furniture, the lady and her lover, the one in black and white, the other in creamy lace, the panelled skirt extended over her knees, filled the room like a picture—an enticing but somewhat vulgar picture of modern refinement and taste. Mike ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... degree. Should the heroine reside in a town, and especially London, she must have dwelt previously in some isolated mansion, seldom visited by beings superior in intellect to the foxes they hunt; an idiot mother, vulgar aunt, a father, an uncle, or a guardian in his dotage, must have superintended her education; and when, at the age of sixteen, some fortunate chance throws her into society, her accomplishments and manners are found more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... that ye had, And that ye had, — as me thought, — in despite Every thing that *sounded unto* bad, *tended unto, accorded with* As rudeness, and peoplish* appetite, *vulgar And that your reason bridled your delight; This made, aboven ev'ry creature, That I was yours, and shall while I ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... they may be for a time set aside. Abraham Lincoln with all his lofty mind, acquiesced in the vulgar belief when he took his son Robert to have the benefit of a "madstone," at a distance from where the boy was dog-bitten. He made the pact with the Divine Power as to the Emancipation Act, with a sincerity ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... water or drop your pocket-handkerchief. You know, of course, that a really elegant cavalier never carries any sort of money about with him short of guineas, and these, too, must be fresh from the mint, and well sprinkled with eau de Cologne or some other perfume, so as to be free from the soil of vulgar hands. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... origin; unless there are preponderant reasons for diverting it, grounded on our need of the word to express a certain sense, and the greater difficulty of finding any other word for the same purpose. It is better to lean to the classical than to the vulgar sense of 'indifferent,' ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... approbation of both sexes that followed his steps, and the untouched heart that escaped so many shafts. Nor, while foremost in the brilliant pleasures that distinguished the British camp and made Philadelphia a Capua to Howe, was he ever known to descend to the vulgar sports of his fellows. In the balls, the theatricals, the picturesque Mischianza, he bore a leading hand; but his affections, meanwhile, appear to have remained where they were earliest and last bestowed. In our altered days, when marriage and divorce seem so often interchangeable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... not always feel obliged to sing his music when they sang at his house. "J'acclamerais avec delice 'Au clair de la lune,' meme avec variations," he said, in his comical way. Rossini's wife's name is Olga. Some one called her Vulgar, she is so ordinary and pretentious, and would make Rossini's home and salon very commonplace if it were not that the master glorified all by his presence. I saw Rossini's writing-table, which is a thing ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... All proverbs are vulgar, and I do believe that is the vulgarest of all. You are really catching Roger ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that darksome avenue which gives access to the historic precincts of the Province House. In short, if any credit be due to the courteous assurances of Mr. Thomas Waite, we had brought his forgotten mansion almost as effectually into public view as if we had thrown down the vulgar range of shoe-shops and dry-good stores which hides its aristocratic front from Washington street. It may be unadvisable, however, to speak too loudly of the increased custom of the house, lest Mr. Waite should ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... business was carried on and these claims for rebates submitted month after month and checks in payment of them drawn month after month. Such a violation of the law, in my opinion, in its essential nature, is a very much more heinous act than the ordinary common, vulgar crimes which come before criminal courts constantly for punishment and which arise from sudden passion or temptation. This crime in this case was committed by men of education and of large business ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... and brutal to carry revenge beyond the grave. The executions in London, after the rebellion of 1745, were followed by such a revolting display, useless for any object of salutary terror, and calculated only to excite a vulgar curiosity. Horace Walpole, in a very few words, describes the feelings with which the public crowded to this sight:—"I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads of Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spying ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... could bear that Jewiston," remarked Miss Leveredge; "I always thought him very under-bred and vulgar. Why will Harry have any thing to do ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... been said, that our poet drew the characters of life as he found them, but bad as his characters are, they exhibit only a vulgar wickedness. Unable to portray a Clytaemnestra, he revels in the continual paltriness of a Menelaus or Ulysses. As if he took a delight in the black side of humanity, he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... of his nation without that heaviness, either of body or of mind, which characterized and deteriorated the Theban people. By the study of philosophy and by other intellectual pursuits his mind was enlarged beyond the sphere of vulgar superstition, and emancipated from that timorous interpretation of nature which caused even some of the leading men of those days to behold a portent in the most ordinary phenomenon. A still rarer accomplishment for a Theban was ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... she came out to her native land and ran everything down in the most merciless manner. They did not do this in England—oh! dear no! nothing so common—the people in Melbourne had such dreadfully vulgar manners; but then, of course, they are not English; there was no aristocracy; even the dogs and horses were different; they had not the stamp of centuries of birth and breeding on them. In fact, to hear Mrs Meddlechip talk one would think that England was a perfect ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... in trembling tones, "if—if you take the dust from those common young women and that vulgar man, I'll ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... fortune made her a woman that one would still take a pleasure in making love to. It would be pleasant to be her lover for many reasons. There were disadvantages, however, for Gertrude, though never vulgar herself, liked vulgar things. Her friends were vulgar; her flat, for she had just left her husband, was opulent, overdecorated; the windows were too heavily curtained, the electric light seemed to be always turned on, and as for the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... courteous and suave. No vulgar crowding would have occurred on the streets of their cities. No ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... him that the gaping sight-seers and the fat strangers with their guide-books, and all those mean, common people who thronged the shop, with their trivial desires and vulgar cares, were mortal and must die. They too loved and must part from those they loved, the son from his mother, the wife from her husband; and perhaps it was more tragic because their lives were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing that gave beauty to the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... was far less brilliant. His principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous, selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of whom there is the most delightfully absurd description ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... bland Jeffersonian toper who carried tippling to the level of a fine art. I have no patience with the doctrine of complete immersion. Ever since I was first admitted to the bar I have deplored the conduct of those violent and vulgar revelers who have brought discredit upon the loveliest, most delicate art known to man. Now, at last, by supreme wisdom, drinking is to be elevated to the dignity of a career. I like to think that I express your sentiment when I say that drinking is too precious, ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... a lady Aunt Sophia is—and compared to you and me, Nancy, she is very stately and very grand and very noble—I would not give you up. Aunt Sophy is a lady with a great brave heart, and her ideas are up-in-the-air ideas, and she doesn't know anything about mean and low and vulgar things. I'd have clung to you, Nancy, and always owned you as my friend, even if Aunt Sophy had taken me into good society. Yes, I'd have stuck to you whatever happened; but now"—Pauline pressed her hand to her heart—"everything is altered. You are cruel, and I don't love you any more. But ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... complete, and Dante left it with the monks of a certain convent while he wandered into a far-distant country. The Frate questioned him eagerly, asking why he had chosen to write the poem in Italian since the vulgar tongue seemed to clothe such a wonderful theme unbecomingly. "When I considered the condition of the present age," the poet replied, "I saw that the songs of the most illustrious poets were neglected of all, and for this ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... officers who acted as executioners and a Rev. Mr. Thomas. After the noose had been adjusted, Hetherington addressed the crowd, claiming to be innocent, and ready to meet his Maker. Brace, every once in a while, interrupted him, using terrible and vulgar language. The caps were adjusted, the ropes cut and the two dropped into eternity. They were left hanging 40 minutes, after which the bodies were removed by the Committee to their rooms and afterwards turned ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... the caterpillars of the commonwealth during the reign of Henry VII., who, being of a noble extract, was executed the first year of Henry VIII., but not thereby so extinct but that he left a plentiful estate, and such a son who, as the vulgar speaks it, would live without a teat. For, out of the ashes of his father's infamy, he rose to be a duke, and as high as subjection could permit or sovereignty endure. And though he could not find out any appellation ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... Penn, who, as we have seen, was at one time Squire of Warminghurst. "In recent years we have gathered from the works of American comic writers and others many words which at first have been termed 'vulgar Americanisms,' but which, on closer examination, have proved to be good old Anglo-Saxon and other terms which had dropped out of notice amongst us, but were retained in the New World! Take, for instance, two 'Southern words,' (probably Sussex) quoted by Ray (1674). ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... He states, that at another time it produced copious bleeding at the nose; the same effect was produced also upon his lady, who was almost rendered incapable of walking. The strange accounts naturally excite the attention and wonder of all classes of people; the learned and the vulgar were equally desirous of experiencing so singular a sensation, and great numbers of half-taught electricians wandered through every part of Europe to gratify ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds, forests are swept away and fishes are driven from the streams. Many birds are becoming extinct, and certain mammals are on the verge of extermination. Vulgar advertisements hide the landscape, and in all that disfigures the wonderful heritage of the beauty of Nature to-day, we ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday |
