"Gentility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not, by their laws, match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, education, and all good affection. In Germany, except they can prove their gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with them. A nobleman must marry a noblewoman; a baron, a baron's daughter; a knight, a knight's. As slaters sort their slates, do they degrees ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... release, on the sudden long prayed-for opening of a way to her, on the end of her shameful servitude and his humiliations? He began to recall the cold and stilted sentences of that difficult composition. The gentility of it! All his life he had been a prey to gentility, had cast himself free from it, only to relapse again in such fashion as this. Would he never be human and passionate and sincere? Of course he was glad, and she ought to ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... in the shape of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion, and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true gentleman, that ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there. There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardiniere set out in a front yard about the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were—just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... found then for Rebecca to do," thought Ruth, "that will not so greatly shock her notions of gentility. Dear me! she's as nice a girl as ever lived; but ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... eye, the pinched-up face, which betokened absolute deprivation of necessary food,—yet withal, the careful adjustment of a faded shawl or dress, the honest pride, even in the depth of misery, to be at least decent, after the effort to preserve the old gentility had been found vain. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... day to ye, Mistress Elliott," said she, and hostility and gentility were nicely mingled in her tones. "A fine day, mem," the laird's wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while her plumage - setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the mere man, the pattern of her India shawl. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wheel everywhere that aid was needed, his boldness in defying those leagued against him, completely changed the aspect of Jamestown. The gentlemen who had refused to wield axe or spade or bricklayer's trowel because of their gentility ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... manners on the West Coast. Of them it is said, as it is said of certain sisterhoods in France, that one may know their graduates by the way they keep their combs and brushes. In two years Eleanor absorbed something of their grave gentility from these Spanish women. Little else she got from that education, seeing that she was a Protestant and studied neither catechism nor church doctrine. She did, indeed, totter once on the brink of Rome—even dared speak to her father about it. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... presumption, all else seems to me clear. Lily's childlike affection for me is too deep and too fond not to warm into a wife's love. Happily, too, she has not been reared in the stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of knowledge and vulgarities of gentility; but educated, like myself, by the free influences of Nature, longing for no halls and palaces save those that we build as we list, in fairyland; educated to comprehend and share the fancies which are more ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was born in that beautiful dingle where we last planted the —— fern. His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility. He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed to him so happy and so beautiful an abode, that his heart felt ready to burst with joy. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... proud of gentility of appearance, a suit of black had been his working day costume, nothing therefore could be more easy than for Dumps to turn gentleman. He did so; took a villa at Gravesend, chose for his own sitting room a chamber that looked against a dead wall, and whilst he was lying in state upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... Wretchedness of Courtezans, this last portion having also more than one section. The first two volumes of the Lost Illusions narrate the early experiences of Lucien de Rubempre, a young poet of Angouleme, whose family, with some claims to gentility, has fallen into narrow circumstances, the widowed mother being obliged to earn money as a midwife, and the daughter as a laundry-woman. The latter's marriage with David Sechard, a printer, alters ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... overclambered by flowering vines. The house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial; it is a very proper gentilhommiere. In a corner of the garden, at the angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, the pigeonnier, the old stone dovecote. It is a great round tower, as broad of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extinguisher, and a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a dove is ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... commercial clerk with his reading, his writing, his arithmetic, and his shorthand is a proletarian, and a very miserable proletarian, only needing to be awakened from his poor little superstition of shabby gentility to take his vote from the Tories and hand it over to us. The small tradesmen and ratepayers who are now allying themselves with the Duke of Westminster in a desperate and unavailing struggle—against the rising rates entailed ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... same earth and dust out of which I was made. If my offence had any proportion with your majesty's mercy, I might despair, or if my deserving had any quantity with your majesty's unmeasurable goodness, I might yet have hope; but it is you that must judge that, not I. Name, blood, gentility or estate, I have none; no not so much as a vitam plantae: I have only a penitent soul in a body of iron, which moveth towards the loadstone of death, and cannot be with-held from touching it, except your majesty's mercy turn the point towards ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... the door, so he knew the house from its neighbours. Baker's Terrace as a whole was a defeated aspiration after gentility. The more auspicious houses were marked by white stones, the steps being scrubbed and hearthstoned almost daily; the gloomier doorsteps were black, except on Sundays. Thus variety was achieved by houses otherwise as monotonous and prosaic ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... brought into fashion, humbug. He could not cast his keen eyes over any considerable circle of society in this country, without perceiving the melancholy fact, that the British nation labours under a universal mania for gentility—all the world hurrying and bustling in the same idle chase—good honest squires and baronets, with pedigrees of a thousand years, and estates of ten thousand acres—ay, and even noble lords—yea, the noblest of the noble themselves (or at least their ladies), rendered fidgety and uncomfortable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... add the perfect good Breeding and Civility of the Knight upon every Occasion; which are some Kind of Merit in his Favour, and entitle him to Respect, by the Rules of common Gentility and Decency; At the same time his Courage, his Honour, Generosity, and Humanity, are conspicuous in every Act and Attempt; The Foibles which he possesses, besides giving you exquisite Pleasure, are ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact with those who were least agreeable to meet. The low-bred youth who amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young people have had time to gain the new scholar's confidence. Myrtle found friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... perhaps because there was nothing particular to strike it. The Misses Harper were, like most female branches of "county families," vegetating on their estates from generation to generation in uninterrupted gentility and uniformity. Of the two, Agatha liked Mary best; for there was great goodnature shining through her fearless plainness—a sort of placid acknowledgment of the fact that she was born for usefulness, not ornament. ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... by blowing with open mouth into the hand, and then shaking it suddenly as if burned. "Flame" and "fire" are represented by a quivering, upward motion of all the fingers. The memory of the ancient ruffled shirt of our forefathers is perpetuated in the sign for "genteel," "gentility" or "fine." It is the whole open hand, with fingers pointing upward, shaken in front of the breast. "Gentleman" and "lady" are expressed by the signs for "man" (the hat-brim) and "woman" (the bonnet-string), followed by the ruffled-shirt sign. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... the scarlet cloak and little round cap of Lincoln green, the puffed and ruffled sleeves, the petticoat of green-drugget cloth, the high heeled leather shoes, with their green ribbon bows, and the riding mask of black velvet which Debby remembered to have heard, only ladies of the highest gentility wore."[129] ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... though careless and lazy, and given to little thefts and large stories, had his good points, as what Irish boy has not. So they, the Mac Donnels, sought out some other home,—safer and more comfortable, if not quite so grand in its isolated, ancient gentility,—and it may be, took the Banshee with them for their comfort. Trouble, I believe, always goes with people in this world, wherever they move to,—in some form or other, it travels with them, and settles down with them,—as sorrow, ill-luck, disease, disgrace, discontent, fear, or remorse,—and ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... shall be said of their dependents, the small fry, earners of salaries, young men of the professions, who saw incomes curtailed or cut off; to whom frank poverty would have been almost a relief but who must, as habit and the custom, of their kind decreed, keep up their sham and shabby gentility? ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... were (as is shewed) taken up at any gentleman's pleasure, yet hath that liberty for many ages been deny'd, and they, by regal authority, made the rewards and ensigns of merit, &c., the gracious favours of princes; no one being, by the law of gentility in England, allowed the bearing thereof, but those that either have them by descent, or grant, or purchase from the body or badge of any prisoner they in open and lawful ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... seems to be losing prestige. Gentility is being made to share its glory with education, 'Ignorant' is becoming a worse insult than 'no class.' Grandfer, in argument will think to prove his case by saying: "Why, a gen'leman told us so t'other day on the Front. A gen'leman told me, I tell thee!" Grandfer's sons would ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... wanter be too previous," suggested Wynbrook. But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant. To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt's gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own. In a few days the whole camp was in love with her. Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment—free from any suspicion of coquetry—that there were no heartburnings, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is perhaps a 'swell' out at elbows, a seedy and somewhat ragged remnant of a very questionable kind of gentility—a gentility engendered in 'coal-holes' and 'cider-cellars,' in 'shades,' and such-like midnight 'kens'—suckled with brandy and water and port-wine negus, and fed with deviled kidneys and toasted cheese. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... together for the space of an hour without biting or scratching one another. There you might have seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other's charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor yet moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons, but free, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... a little more than 15 pounds per annum each. No doubt I might have sent them to a Board school, where they would have received a better education; but in the part of London where I lived there was no Board school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London gamin ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... regulated by law. No person whose estate did not exceed 200 pounds, could wear "gold or silver lace, or any lace above 2 shillings per yard." The "selectmen" were required to take note of the "apparel" of the people, especially their "ribbands and great boots." Only the gentility, including ministers and their wives, received the prefix Mr. and Mrs. to their names. Others, above servitude, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... condition of France. All along the road from Calais to Paris, she sees nothing but "youths galloping their horses in the cavalry costume of Hyde Park," "smart gigs and natty dennets," "cottages of gentility, with white walls and green shutters, and neat offices, rivalling the diversified orders of the Wyatvilles of Islington and Highgate," in short, nothing but "English neatness and propriety on every side," with one terrible exception, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... spot, nevertheless, with not even an air of faded gentility to recommend it. It seemed to have no better days behind it, nor to hold within itself the possibility of any future improvement. It was narrow, and extended only the length of a city block, yet it was by no means wanting in many of those luxuries ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege—even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... who undertakes the care and education of a few backward boys, who are beguiled and trained to study by kind discipline, without the least severity (which too often frustrates the end desired). Situation extremely healthy. Sea and country air; deep gravelly soil. Christian gentility assiduously cultivated on sound Church principles. Diet unsurpassed. Wardrobes carefully preserved. The course of instruction comprises English, classics, mathematics, and science. Inclusive terms, 30 guineas ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Edwards, she had the whole army. If I have hitherto spoken of her in a manner as if she were the only "young lady" in Stockbridge, that is no more than the impression which she gave. Although there were several families in the village which had a claim to equal gentility, their daughters somehow felt that they failed to make good that claim in Desire's presence. They owned, though they found less flattering terms in which to express it, the same air of distinction and dainty aloofness about her, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... extremely difficult, I heard, to make out what he owed, or what he had paid, or of what he died possessed. It was considered likely that for years he could have had no clear opinion on these subjects himself. By little and little it came out, that, in the competition on all points of appearance and gentility then running high in the Commons, he had spent more than his professional income, which was not a very large one, and had reduced his private means, if they ever had been great (which was exceedingly doubtful), to a very low ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... all," repeated Mrs. Jarley. "It's calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings, like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so life-like, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... said I, rallying myself, and speaking with some lightness of tone, "it is clear that Mrs. Tudor is no lady, for all you thought her such a pattern-card of gentility." ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... aigulette, depending from the neck, and attached here and there about the person. A separate one, at a distance, united their ankles. These served to measure and graduate their movements; keeping their gestures, paces, and attitudes, within the prescribed standard of Tapparian gentility. When they went abroad, they were preceded by certain footmen; who placed before them small, carved boards, whereon their masters stepped; thus avoiding contact with the earth. The simple device of a shoe, as a fixture for the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... should possess for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think necessary, in his parentage of either side,—such as was indicated also by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books, and a love for and interest in even the material form ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... barrier of table-shaped mountains, the country became very monotonous. It is on a higher level, and though tolerably fertile, is deficient in verdure, the olive being almost the only tree met with. Lambesc, like Orgon, which it much exceeds in size, has an air of faded gentility and desertion, and its fine public fountains tell a tale of better days. In this town the states of Provence were convened annually in the reign of Louis XIV.; and it possessed also many of the privileges of a capital in the days of the counts of Provence, but at present it ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... has made some approach To gentility, now that he's stretched in a coach! He's taking a drive in his carriage at last! But it will not be long, if he goes on so fast: Rattle his bones over the stones! He's only a ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... own spoon from beneath his mattress on which we were seated: "They'll give you yours downstairs and when you get it you want to hide it or it'll be pinched"—and in company with Monsieur Bragard, who had refused the morning promenade, and whose gentility would not permit him to hurry when it was a question of such a low craving as hunger, we joined the dancing roaring throng at the door. I was not too famished myself to be unimpressed by the instantaneous change which had come over The Enormous Room's occupants. Never ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... was looking very well, and who was most becomingly dressed, moved to a seat from which she could command a view of the road outside. She was the first to recover herself. Her aunt, a faded, anaemic-looking lady of somewhat too obtrusive gentility, was still sitting with her ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... now to leave the scene, so Charley and I went to look for our gig (evidence of gentility from the time of Thurtell and Hunt's trial for ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the theory that ladies should dress inconspicuously in the public streets and hostelries, and for a woman to do otherwise, he considered, was to prove that she had no claim upon gentility. Evan used to go so far as to say that the only people who display their fine clothes in hotels are those who have no homes ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of Mrs. Cunningham was but a few blocks away. Mrs. Cunningham did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. She proved to be an Irish lady with a gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She was ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... exclusive alliance between two powers is often the same thing as a declaration of war against a third. Rockland was soon split into a triumphant minority, invited to Mrs. Sprowle's party, and a great majority, uninvited, of which the fraction just on the border line between recognized "gentility" and the level of the ungloved masses was in an active state of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it in the language of sentimental science she felt he ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... send back the Gainsboro' copy {56a} at once; I think the Original must be one of the happiest of the Painter's; while he had Vandyke in his Eye, with whom he was to go to Heaven. {56b} I will not argue how far he was superior to Reynolds in Colour; but in the Air of Dignity and Gentility (in the better Sense) he was surely inferior; it must be so, from the Difference of Character in the two men. Madame D'Arblay (Miss Burney) relates how one day when she was dining with Sir Joshua at Richmond, she chanced to see him ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... modern society, on the other hand, there is hardly any one whose position is so fixed, that he may not easily rise above or fall below it, and hence there is constant room for social ambition, social disappointment, and social jealousy. Again, the broad line of gentility, which now corresponds most closely with the old distinction of nobility, is determined by such a number of considerations,—birth, connexions, means, manners, education, with the arbitrary, though almost essential, condition of not being ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... but it so happened that his progress was a good deal baffled by the conflict constantly kept up in his brain, between the desire to use his legs in the natural manner, and to preserve that antique pace of tottering gentility which he had acquired from that devilish fine old fellow, the Prince of Baden-Baden, so that at one moment he was in the very hands of the enemy, and at the next, flying like an antelope in the distance. The gun, constantly following ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... slight, with dark hair and eyes—a perfect face, though worn and sad. She invariably wore over her cotton gown, on occasions when she went out, a very fine, very thin old-fashioned mantilla, bordered with a deep black fringe. This pathetic remnant of gentility, borne rudely about by the Wallencamp winds, with Lydia's refined face and melancholy dark eyes, gave her a very interesting and picturesque appearance; though I never thought she wore the mantilla during the winter for effect. ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... one another. Each possessed pre-eminently the various requisites and qualifications in which the other happened to be deficient. Tall, slender, elderly, with a fine bald head, a mild countenance, a most insinuating address, and a general air of faded gentility, Mr. Thomas Long was exactly the foreman to give respectability to his employer; whilst bold, fluent, rapid, loud, dashing in aspect and manner, with a great fund of animal spirits, and a prodigious stock of assurance and conceit, respectability was, to say the ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... cod-fishing and even whaling enterprises. Its harbor has suffered since; the rails too have gone through to Spain, and St. Jean is left mildly and interestingly mournful, in its lessened power, its decayed gentility. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... their own position are much more likely to avoid "putting on airs" than those who have recently been elevated in the social scale. Frank was destined that same evening to see the contrast between true and false gentility. ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... irresistible—the soft grey ripple of hair about her brow, the shy girlish eyes, the long delicate hand with the fingers which, in spite of their declared readiness to work, trembled a little, and the voice which spoke the Northern speech with such clear-cut gentility, that the words fell on the ear with a certain cool freshness, like the splash of water in a fountain or the tinkle of a burn flowing ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... sacred triangle of gentility (as it was known in Eden Valley), of which the manse, the General's bungalow, and the residence of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe occupied the three angles, my grandmother was the first caller upon the lonely children in the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... my joy I was able to relinquish Mr. Lambie. That timid soul had been on thorns ever since I mooted my new projects. He implored me to put them from me; he drew such pictures of the power of the English traders, you would have thought them the prince merchants of Venice; he saw all his hard-won gentility gone at a blow, and himself an outcast precluded for ever from great men's recognition. He could not bear it, and though he was loyal to my uncle's firm in his own way, he sought a change. One day he announced that he had been offered a post as steward to a big planter at Henricus, and when ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the group. Behind him was a short but dignified gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other passengers pressed ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the perfections of manly beauty which were assembled in his form, he had an air of neatness and gentility, certain smartness in the carriage and port of his head, that yet more distinguished him; his eyes were sprightly and full of meaning; his looks had in them something at once sweet and commanding; his complexion out-bloomed the ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the diocese by a protege of his own, and at ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... some of the ladies even remarked how well he behaved for a poor boy. The dinner was finished at last, and "it was a tip-top dinner, too," for besides chowder and fried fish, there were roast beef and roast chicken, boiled salmon, puddings, pies, and ice-cream. Perhaps Bobtail ate too much for strict gentility, but he excused himself by declaring that not only the stewards, but all the party, "kept making him ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... promise. His sons and daughters became solid stones in the foundation of a commonwealth, and his grandchildren are still at work on the structure. State and national legislatures had known the Calhouns from the beginning. Battlefields had tested their valor, and drawing-rooms had proved their gentility. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... forces of society, you know—the exclusive force, and the inclusive force: the force that says, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'; and the force which says, 'The more the merrier.' The exclusive force is represented by caste and class, by gentility and donnishness, by sectarianism and nationalism, and even by patriotism—and the inclusive force is represented by Walt Whitmanism ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... among gay, green woods under the shelter of mighty rocks, passed more ruins. We stopped to examine these older ruins of the ancient O'Ruarkes. A Milesian gentleman showed us through them. It is the correct thing to have a ruin on your place; it is a kind of patent of gentility. If a banshee could be thrown in along with a ruin, a new man would give a great price for an old place. But banshees are getting scarce and decline to be caught. This ruin has been patched over, clumsily but earnestly, so that hardly a speck of the original ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... ambition. This last was nothing less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently bourgeois of London. It seemed that the situation of the wealthy English middle class, with just enough gentility above to aspire to, and sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his imagination, though of course he did not put it ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... mean by this outrage?" she stormed. Her voice was low and rich, with a charming roundness that seemed the very hallmark of gentility. But, now, it was surcharged with an indignant amazement over the indignity put upon her by the representatives of the law. Then, abruptly, the blue eyes were softened in their fires, as by the sudden nearness ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... are unbearable in the impertinent equality with which they treat people. For, in short, there ought to be a certain subordination in things; and what puts me out of all patience is that a town upstart, whether with two days' gentility to boast of or with two hundred years', should have impudence enough to say that he is as much of a gentleman as my late husband, who lived in the country, kept a pack of hounds, and took the title of Count in all the ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... the Marshalsea, as he grew more dependent on the contributions of his changing family, made the greater stand by his forlorn gentility. So the pretence had to be kept up that neither of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... anybody, to see any thing—especially in a gig." Those were days in which a gig was a vehicle the existence of which was not only recognized in civilized society, but supposed to confer a diploma of "gentility" upon its possessor. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Wits, felons, clergymen, adventurers, millionaires and spendthrifts, all had answered to the unobtrusive cognomen. It was plain and commonplace, but as baffling as a disguise. With Talbot, Meredith, or Percival, the case is different, such nomenclature presupposes gentility. As the name "Percival" crossed the girl's mind in her whimsical musings, her thoughts seized upon it and fitted it instantly to the name which had preceded it, Percival—and Smith! Percival Smith! That was the name signed ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... classes". There is a little town in Suffolk called Eye, where the subject of one of these readings was a tale (by Mr. Wilkie Collins) from the last Christmas Number of this Journal, entitled "Picking up Waifs at Sea". It appears that the Eye gentility was shocked by the introduction of this rude piece among the taste and musical glasses of that important town, on which the eyes of Europe are notoriously always fixed. In particular, the feelings of the vicar's family ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... no sort of home though it may get you a living. His feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his rank of life he had that truly aristocratic temperament characterized by a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory nature of certain occupations. For his own part he had always preferred sailing merchant ships (which is a straightforward occupation) to buying and selling merchandise, of which the essence is to get the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... Benevolent Fund makes no pretensions to gentility, squanders no treasure in keeping up appearances, that it considers that the money given for the widow and the orphan, should really be held for the widow and the orphan, I think I have exhausted the case, which I desire most strenuously to commend ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... and they be ranked among those who have nothing to show for their honesty but their money, nothing for their religion but their dissembling, or a fat benefice, nothing for their wit but their dressing, for their nobility but their title, for their gentility but their sword, for their courage but their huffing, for their preferment but their assurance, for their learning but their degrees, or for their gravity but their wrinkles or dulness. They had better laugh at one another here, as it is the custom of the world. Laughing is of all professions; the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... which an ignorant panegyrist has praised him for not being proud; when the truth is, that the appellation of Gentleman, though now lost in the indiscriminate assumption of Esquire, was commonly taken by those who could not boast of gentility. His father was Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, who settled in Lichfield as a bookseller and stationer. His mother was Sarah Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Elsie, Mrs. Lawson, and I walked soberly along. Then we popped into separate bathing houses, still looking like respectable and responsible members of society, and popped out five minutes afterward—scarecrows! spooks! animated rag-bags! with the last vestige of our gentility and good looks departed. ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... built and afterward inhabited for a term of years by one of the city fathers, a well-known and still widely remembered merchant. No unusual manifestations had marked it during his occupancy. Not till it had run to seed and been the home of decaying gentility, and later of actual poverty, did it acquire a name which made it difficult to rent, though the neighborhood was a growing one and the house itself well-enough built to make it a desirable residence. Those who had been ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... altogether spoilt by civilization. He learns to wear clothes, but he does not learn that clothes need to be changed and washed occasionally, and are not intended for use by day and night. He has an insane veneration for the tall silk hat which is the badge of modern gentility, and, given an old silk hat, he will never allow it off his head. He quickly learns to smoke and to drink, and, when he comes into contact with the Chinese, to eat opium. He cannot be broken into any ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... officers here?" he exclaimed, turning away, however, from the second mate. "Where is Mr Grimes? what is the fellow about? send him here, some one. And you, sir—you think yourself a navigator— go and get your sextant and prove yourself one," he added, turning fiercely to me. "You young slips of gentility must be kept ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... small smooth hand in constant requisition, as if it were a witness to his gentility that had often done ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... me to the posada, and even attempted to penetrate to the apartment to which I was conducted. "Who are you?" said I to a woman who flung herself at my feet, and who bore in her countenance evident marks of former gentility. "A widow, sir," she replied, in very good French; "a widow of a brave officer, once admiral of this port." The misery and degradation of modern Spain are nowhere so strikingly manifested as ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... said Abel, waving a long arm at them. "They are the trees of princesses. When I was a boy they were fashionable. Anyone who had any pretensions to gentility had a row of Lombardies at the foot of his lawn or up his lane, or at any rate one on either side of his front door. They're out of fashion now. Folks complain they die at the top and get ragged-looking. So they do—so they do, if you don't risk ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... dressmaker. A very bad one certainly, but still she could gore a skirt. She was not a native of the village, and signified her superior gentility by a mincing pronunciation. She had also a hiss with the sibilants peculiar to herself. Before I could remonstrate, Jack was knocking ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack—who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... replied Madame Griggs, hopping nervously along by the boy's side, poor little dressmaker, aping French gentility, holding her skirts high, with a disclosure of a papery silk petticoat and a meagre ankle. Even in her distress she felt of her frizzes to see if they were in order after a breeze had struck her in the sharp, eager face. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fact. In the race of fashion the resolute and active De Mogyns has passed the poor old Clapperclaw. Her progress in gentility may be traced by the sets of friends whom she has courted, and made, and cut, and left behind her. She has struggled so gallantly for polite reputation that she has won it: pitilessly kicking down the ladder as she advanced degree ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the people, I cannot tell, but great feet had been the fashion there time immemorial, and the higher the family the larger were they. It was, therefore, the aim of everybody above the degree of shepherds, and such-like rustics, to swell out and enlarge their feet by way of gentility; and so successful were they in these undertakings that, on a pinch, respectable people's slippers ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... conceivable pattern, from the sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... tanned by the weather, as if he were perpetually exposed to sun and wind, rain and hail; sharp of movement, evidently of more than ordinary intelligence, and, in spite of his rough garments and fur cap, having an indefinable air of gentility and breeding about him. Brereton had already noticed the pitch and inflection of his voice; now, as Harborough touched his cap to the Mayor, he noticed that his hands, though coarsened and weather-browned, were well-shaped and delicate. Something ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... "I am utterly wretched now. The simplest gentility—" she paused, but her wish was clear. He restrained himself with difficulty. Drifting slowly across the scattered roofs of the town was the leaden smoke of his mills and fires; as they drove into the main street the thin crash of his iron was audible. Men everywhere bowed to him with ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is eagerly attentive, obsequious, and rapacious; her eyebrows are closely shaven, her teeth carefully lacquered with black, as befits a lady of gentility, and at all and no matter what hours, she appears on all fours at the entrance of our apartment, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... weeks after he had taken his seat in Congress, a young man was ushered into his private room. Looking up, he saw a man of about his own age, dressed with some attempt at style, but on the whole wearing a look of faded gentility. ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... type—is flourishing and multiplying among us, I fear, and such are the wishbone, or sickly conscience, and not the backbone, or sterling principle, of the nation. After all, fortunes alone do not make real gentility—thanks be! But you know as well as I that all the—the Gorgeous Girls and their kind and you and I and the next chap we meet belong to the great majority, and of that we have every right to ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... make-believe. Something serious has occurred in your life, and changed all in an instant. You have been thrown against the real world. You find it not to be what you supposed. It is no cause for shame or regret; womanhood lies deeper than any pretense at gentility. Men seldom fail to recognize this fact—their lives of struggle compel them to, but a woman finds it ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... said it? Didn't know you had such a reputation." Sissy was recovering. "Never mind, Split," she added, heavily sarcastic and assuming a comforting air that maddened Irene, who desired nothing more than to impress her new suitor with the elegant gentility of her manner, her family's, and all that was hers. "Just to have a boy from the city even pretend to think you're good-looking is worth living for. Boys know so much—in ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... little enthusiasm. It compelled a certain measure of her difficult respect, especially when she beheld him worm his truck through crowded River Street with a supreme disregard for the imminent catastrophe—which somehow never ensued. But it lacked gentility. At twenty-eight Winona was not only perfected in the grammar of morals, more than ever alert for infractions of the merely social code, but her ideals of refinement and elegance had become more demanding. She would have had the boy engage in a pursuit that ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... passed through it daily on their way to and from the adjoining stables, thereby endangering the lives of precocious babies who could crawl, but could not walk away from home, as well as affording food for criticism and scandal, not to mention the leaving behind of a species of secondhand odour of gentility such as coachmen ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... ever enjoyed a more perfect hospitality. I have been in many a richer home where there was not a hundredth part of the true gentility—the gentility ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... course; beaten path, beaten track, beaten ground. prescription, custom, use, usage, immemorial usage, practice; prevalence, observance; conventionalism, conventionality; mode, fashion, vogue; etiquette &c. (gentility) 852; order of the day, cry; conformity &c. 82; consuetude,.dustoor[obs3]. one's old way, old school, veteris vestigia flammae[Lat]; laudator temporis acti[Lat]. rule, standing order, precedent, routine; red-tape, red-tapism[obs3]; pipe clay; rut, groove. cacoethes[Lat]; bad ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... had no direct agency in changing; for, while this singular being was not brawlingly rude and vulgar, like the coarser set of his own countrymen, with whom he had occasionally been brought in contact, he was so manifestly uncivilized in many material points, as to put his claim to gentility much beyond a cavil, and ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... arrogance that claims a superiority of class, and the obsequiousness that loves a lord, all this Nietschean "pathos of distance," whether felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its distinction is liberality, that is, the habit ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... neither young nor old to have an everlasting simper on their faces, and their bodies sawing in an everlasting bow: and, how many youths have I seen who, if they had spent, in the learning of grammar, a tenth part of the time that they have consumed in earning merited contempt for their affected gentility, would have laid the foundation of sincere respect towards them for the whole ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... outside the place had a dilapidated look that surprised Lindsay. The bell was of that brand you keep pulling till you discover it is out of order. Decayed gentility marked the neighborhood, though the blank front of the houses looked ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... doesn't like my going to business. I can have the best of everything at home. I don't want you to think I work because I need to." Philip knew that she was not speaking the truth. The gentility of her class made her use this pretence to avoid the stigma ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... on the word Master,) "will you be pleased to undo the door?—What ails you?—are you at your prayers in private, to complete the devotion which you left unfinished in public?—Surely we must have a screened seat for you in the chapel, that your gentility may be free from the eyes of common folks!" Still no whisper was heard in reply. "Well, master Roland," said the waiting-maid, "I must tell my mistress, that if she would have an answer, she must either come herself, or send those on errand to ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... said the principal, addressing the young lady at the bar, with Botany Bay ease, and New South Wales gentility; 'which is Mr. Pickwick's room, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out—for Coventry had a rough spinous humour—at the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... your gentility," replied the Bailie; "carry your gentle bluid to the Cross, and see what ye'll buy wi't. But, if I were to come, wad ye really and ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... never heard of them in Scotland until after the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence. From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire. Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar. I remember going as a child or boy to see the representative of that branch, either in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to give you a lesson in gentility," she said. "Understand, Miss Beauty, that English Cats veil natural acts, which are opposed to the laws of English respectability, in the most profound mystery, and banish all that is improper, applying ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... to cut your stick, tell us what's up,' said an old Republican colonel, who cared not a rap for Imperial gentility and ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... having lived a life of such irreproachable gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, one June morning, while ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... had fully realised how unfit he was for the vivid, rapid life of the West. The cultivated, gentlemanly drawl of his speech was of itself an offence; his slow, unruffled movements and attitudes, his "ancient" ways of thinking, his conservatism and gentility and ultra-superficial refinement were the very qualities not valued and not needed in a community full of new life, ardent, impulsive, rapid, looking forward, and determined not ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... over, and the trenchers scraped—for Isel lived in great gentility, seeing that she ate from wooden trenchers, and not on plates made of thick slices of bread—when a rap on the door heralded the visit of a very superior person. Long ago, when a young girl, Isel had been chamberer, or bower-woman, of a lady named Mildred de Hameldun; and ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... discharged their pieces at the mark, and had their good or bad address rewarded by the laughter or applause of the spectators. But when a slender young man, dressed with great simplicity, yet not without a certain air of pretension to elegance and gentility, approached the station with his fusee in his hand, his dark-green cloak thrown back over his shoulder, his laced ruff and feathered cap indicating a superior rank to the vulgar, there was a murmur of interest among the spectators, whether altogether ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... half-educated, timid creatures who are to be found now and then painfully earning the bread which is very bitter to them in richer people's houses, and preserving in their little silent souls some fetish in the shape of a scrap of gentility, which is their sole comfort, or almost their sole comfort. Mrs. Copperhead's fetish was the dear recollection that she was "an officer's daughter;" or rather this had been her fetish in the days when she had nothing, and was free to plume herself on the reflected glory. Whether ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... cultured families and were university trained. Their work, in strong contrast with Jonson's, is intensely romantic, and in it all, however coarse or brutal the scene, there is still, as Emerson pointed out, the subtle "recognition of gentility." ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... at this man with growing wonder. Of course he would like the simple things. No man of her acquaintance had ever possessed truer standards: no sophistication or cultural growth such as she herself had know could have given him a truer gentility. What was this thing that men could learn in the woods and in the North that gave them such poise, such standards, and brought out such qualities of manhood? Yet she knew that the forests did not treat all ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... friend of mine, who was always aiming at "gentility," remarked to me with an air of disgust ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... at right angles to the shore, running up the valley of the Avon; but it soon ceased to be fishy, and became agricultural, owning a few cottages of very humble gentility, which were wont to hang out boards to attract lodgers of small means. At one of these Grace rang, and obtained admittance to a parlour with crazy French windows opening on a little strip of garden. In a large wheeled chair, between the fire and the window, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flow! John Gubbins sat at the top of the table, looking fat and anxious, half shy and half foolish; the man with the false hair and ornaments placed himself next to him. Three other strangers were present, a mixture of sham gentility and swagger, of whom it would be difficult to say which had descended into the lowest depths of blackguardism. And now business was begun; the glasses were transferred to the larger table, the bottle uncorked, lemons ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... people below them. Long after the nobility has lost every other social function connected with its vocation the ideals of the nobility have survived in our conception of the gentleman, genteel manners and bearing—gentility. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... or less musical verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of lords and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and the manners of European high-life-below-stairs in every line and verse." Thus incited to poetic self-expression, Whitman (adds Mr. Conway) "wrote on a sheet of paper, in large letters, these words, 'Make ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... this phase of the subject is a consideration of those who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility. They are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel. When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... I desired to restrict my activities to boys coming from homes of the utmost culture and refinement, where principles of undoubted gentility were implanted from the cradle up. Yet it would seem that the germ of the thought touching on the Boy Scouts lingered within that marvellous human organism, the brain, resulting finally in consequences of ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... their recesses and intermissions mostly in making faces through the knot-holes in the fence, and over the top of it when they could get there, which wasn't an easy thing to do, as the fence was pretty high. The Knight girls could make faces too, for all their gentility. Their yard had one great advantage over the other: it possessed a wood-shed, with a climbable roof, which commanded Miss Miller's premises, and upon this the girls used to sit in rows, turning up their noses at the next yard, and irritating the foe by ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... of gold and jewelry. He had the very knocker to his door made to strike upon a heart. Under the eaves of his observatory he had his negro sculptured hugging his money-box, and a little beyond an angel exhibiting his newly-acquired coat-of-arms. The one led to the other—the money-box brought on gentility. Hard by is the shield of an allied commercial family, their coat one of fleurs-de-lis interspersed with woolsacks. The Fuggers of Augsburg, when desiring a coat, asked Maximilian for lilies—for, said these wealthy spinners—as for the lilies, "They toil not, neither ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... old social order; it carried, cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in China—the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized social system the old order ever developed—it finds ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... supererogatory soap. Pass through the baize doors and you will see the nave filled with well-shaped benches, understood to be free seats; while in certain eligible corners, less directly under the fire of the clergyman's eye, there are pews reserved for the Shepperton gentility. Ample galleries are supported on iron pillars, and in one of them stands the crowning glory, the very clasp or aigrette of Shepperton church-adornment—namely, an organ, not very much out of repair, on which a collector of small rents, differentiated by the force ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... would not be likely to receive an invitation to the governor's ball unless he had some pretensions to gentility, or was locally important. Yet, I suppose that the recipient of such an invite might turn up at Government House in a grey jumper and moleskins, if he were so minded, and would pass unquestioned. In such a case it would only be surmised that Mr. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... generally a cast-off mansion of gentility. There are a score of things about it to remind you that it was once a home, and to set you to speculating on the ways of the grim fate that has changed it into a place of torment. Whole volumes have been written on the subject, and all agree that is simply what I have described ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... people. It is true that men, in this present age, become distinguished for other things, and may have name and fame, and flatterers and lacqueys, and the oblation of flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been despised for the want in them of all true gentility and courage; and that such men are as likely as any to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or discern or receive truth; who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and ready to worship the prosperous; who love accusation and hate apologies; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sixty years ago. My wife, though a rum one, is not Mrs. Herne, brother. I think she is rather fond of Frenchmen and French discourse. I tell you what, brother, if ever gypsyism breaks up, it will be owing to our chies having been bitten by that mad puppy they calls gentility." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... I think; but, on the contrary, has a keep appreciation and enjoyment of your book. As I read his article in THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh. But he is writing for Catholics and Established Church people, and high-toned, antiquated, conservative gentility, whom it is a delight to him to help you shock, while he pretends to shake his head with owlish density. He is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... representative of the family, the thought struck him that his coming hither had dug up, as it were, a buried secret that immediately assumed life and activity the moment that it was above ground again. For seven generations the family had vegetated in the quietude of English country gentility, doing nothing to make itself known, passing from the cradle to the tomb amid the same old woods that had waved over it before his ancestor had impressed the bloody footstep; and yet the instant that he came back, an influence seemed to be at work that was likely to renew the old history ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... man you must be then, he said; you are not an Athenian at all if you have no ancestral gods or temples, or any other mark of gentility. ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... entire street of high garden-walls, with houses inside full of the retired exclusive comforts, the dainty economical refinement peculiar to such places; and where the good people consider their own society as a warrant of gentility less splendid, but not less assured, than the favour of Majesty itself. Naturally there are no Dissenters in Carlingford—that is to say, none above the rank of a greengrocer or milkman; and in bosoms devoted to the Church it may be well imagined that the advent of the new Rector was ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features,—these temporary deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,—contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... the first man they met, in a way of speaking, fell in love with Elizabeth, the younger. The way it happened was this. She was walking down Mount Street with Maria, and she let fall her purse, and nothing in it but a pocket-piece to save her gentility. Harry was strolling off to my Lord Cappoquin's, from mounting guard at the Castle (for at that time his Lordship lived in Merrion Square); and indeed Mr Lepel was as fine a figure of a young man as a girl could wish to see, in his regimentals all laced with gold and his handsome head above ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... subtle distinctions which she would draw between best and second-best, and every-day; to receive her somewhat prolix admonition how he was to demean himself in respect of the wearing of each one; for Miss Emily Sewell was a gentlewoman, and held rigidly to various traditions of gentility which had been handed down in the Sewell family, and which afforded her brother too much quiet amusement to be disturbed. He would not have overthrown one of her quiddities for the world; it would be taking away a part of his capital ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her Uncle Samuel and Cousin Calvin; she in the second with Mr. Purchase, Peter Benny, and Mr. Tulse the lawyer, a large-headed, pallid man, with a strong, clean-shaven face and an air of having attended so many funerals that he paid this one no particular attention. His careless gentility obviously impressed Mr. Purchase, who mopped his forehead at half-minute intervals and as frequently remarked that the day was hot even for the time of year. Mr. Benny was solicitous to know if Mr. Tulse preferred the window up or down. Mr. Tulse preferred it down, and took snuff in such profusion ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bitters regular," she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... her grip on his collar. "That's your look-out, and I should have thought you'd have made sure you knew before you decided on your base perfidy." And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. "Of course—I may mention again—if you too distinctly object to the trouble of looking, you know where to ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... on the contrary, he has swallowed them all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and stage manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a would-be author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof and punishment as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape from dismissal from the service so narrow that if the emigration ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... her new cousin innumerable questions, showing an intense curiosity as to Bannisdale and the Helbecks, a burning desire to know whether Laura had any money of her own, or was still dependent upon her stepmother, and a joyous appropriative pride in Miss Fountain's gentility ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
