"High life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about all these projected marriages in high life—they are not much in my way; but since he has come down from London to take his share in the business, I think I have heard more of the news and the scandal of what, I suppose, would be considered high life, than ever I did before; and Mr Donne's proceedings seem to be an especial ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell. The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one note—that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"—the most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the delicacy of its ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... in life, as you say, ma'm; that is, nothing in high life, I'm sure, ma'm; nay, I dare a'most venture to swear. Would you believe it, Mr. Talbot is one of the few young gentlemen of Eton that has not bespoke from me a fancy dress ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... was crippled. And when, finally, in the earlier centuries of our era, the old gods disappeared, the rise of monotheistic belief was accompanied by a transformation of the conception of the future of the soul; it was to be no longer the inert earthly thing of the old theories but instinct with a high life that fitted it to be the companion of divine beings and the sharer of their knowledge and their ideals.[1697] This conception led to the belief in the possibility of a nonmagical friendly intercourse with the departed, who, it was assumed, would be willing to impart ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... address themselves only to sovereign mercies. It is beyond endurance, that the messages of grace should come to them, as condemned, guilty, and perishing sinners; and that as such they should be invited to the cross. Hence the scornful air, the undissembled disgust, with which so many, in high life, turn their backs upon the preaching of the cross. And hence, encouraged by their example, multitudes cluster round the standard of a haughty and malignant opposition to ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... Godfrey as we have already said was tall and genteel. There was a diffidence in his manner, that seemed to prove that he had not possessed the most extensive acquaintance with high life; but he had a natural politeness that amply compensated for the polish and forms of society. His air was serious and somewhat melancholy; but there was a fire and animation in his eye that was in the ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... and little, old and young, fat and thin, pretty and ugly—and it seemed to him the fatter and older and uglier they were, the more intently they gazed into the little hand-mirrors. He watched them with hungry eyes, for he knew that here he was in the midst of high life, the real thing, the utmost glory to which man could ever hope to attain, and he wanted to know all there was to know about it. He strolled on, innocent and unsuspecting, and the two hundred and twenty-four white ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... the baroness, for the simple reason that the baroness was a hearty good friend to her from first to last. Believe that or not, as you please. For five years she traveled about all over the Continent with these card-sharpers in high life, and she might have been among them at this moment, for anything I know to the contrary, if the baroness had not caught a Tartar at Naples, in the shape of a rich traveling Englishman, named Waldron. Aha! that name ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... themselves with the idea, that if they were not permitted to join the fashionables at the Springs, it would at lest be supposed that they had gone some where into the country, and thus they hoped to escape the terrible penalty of losing caste for not conforming to an indispensable rule of high life. ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... day Where Love looks up at you! The bright day, the bright day! The sorrows fade from view; The white day, the light day, The child heart always knew! The bright day, the bright day! The sun is golden there; The sad clouds are glad clouds And gone is every care. The sky life, the high life, Is waiting at the shore; The bright day, the bright day, ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... which has ever occurred in this town—is really, and without exaggeration, a tragedy in high life. The lady who was strangled by a brute's clutch, was a woman of the highest culture and most estimable character. Her sister, who is supposed to have been the unconscious cause of the crime, is a young girl of blameless record. Of the man who was seen bending over ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... the quiet measured life into which I am about again to enter—conventionalities, forms, social life, all this cramps my soul together, and makes it inclined to excesses. Instead of sitting in select society, and drinking tea in 'high life,' would I rather roam about the world in Viking expeditions—rather eat locusts with John the Baptist in the wilderness, and go hither and thither in a garment of camel's hair; and after all, such apparel as this must be very convenient in comparison ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... bating," and I have a reverence for poor old maids as great as for the nine Muses. Commonplace people are only commonplace from character, and no position affects that. So forgive me once more, patient reader, if I offer to you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman who could not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... lepidi homines. Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged as a kinsman. About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of "foundations," ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... hand-made thing you must have toiled in the sweat of your brow. In Britain it is a little difficult to persuade people that the writing of plays and novels is work. To many it remains one of those inventions of a certain potentate for idle hands to do. To some persons in high life, and addicted to field sports, it is still a species of licensed buffoonery, to be regulated by a sort of circus-master with a whip in one hand and a gingerbread nut in the other. By the truly simple soul it is thus summed up: "Work! Why, 'e sits ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... shop in High Street, where she saw everything that was going on, yet the increase in gentility was unquestionable. The house which they were fortunate enough to secure in this desirable locality had been once in the occupation of Lady Weston, and there was accordingly an aroma of high life about it, although somebody less important had lived in it in the mean time, and it had fallen into a state of considerable dilapidation, which naturally made it cheaper. Mr. Tozer had solidly repaired all that was necessary for ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... correct to a supreme degree; by respecting all that should be respected, by condemning all that should be condemned, by never being mistaken on a point of worldly dogma or hesitating over a detail of etiquette, they had succeeded in passing in the eyes of many for the finest flower of high life. Their opinion formed a sort of code of correct form and their presence in a house gave it ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... stairs. The place is kept dark and quiet, in order to avoid the attention of the police. The houses are more or less comfortable and handsome, according to the class by which they are patronized. They are sometimes preferred by guilty parties in high life, as the risk of being seen and recognized is less there than in more aristocratic houses. These houses have a constant run of visitors from about eight o'clock until long ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Humaine, has reviewed with a master-hand almost every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and Thackeray left hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but so great have been the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) since then, that, could Balzac come back to his beloved Paris, he would feel like a foreigner there; and Thackeray, who was among us ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... winter season, he was a lion, and one of an unwonted kind. Philosophers, historians, and scholars had shaken the elegant coteries of the city with their wit, or enlightened them with their learning, but they were all men who had been polished by polite letters or by intercourse with high life, and there was a sameness in their very dress as well as address, of which peers and peeresses had become weary. They therefore welcomed this rustic candidate for the honour of giving wings to their hours of lassitude and weariness, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet. Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life. Moliere's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are, philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote ground, clean of all local ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the wrists; and she would have been almost too much for him, had not Kit Smallbones come to his assistance, and carried her, kicking and screaming like a naughty child, into the house. There was small restraint of temper in those days even in high life, and below it, there was some reason for the employment of the padlock and the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Triboulet. "But a moment ago Duke Robert did whisper to his bride-to-be, and the fool's hand trembled like a leaf and dropped his glass. Tra! la! la! What a situation! Holy Saint-Bagpipe! Here's a comedy in high life!" ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... we have got company. Were that Scotch hag to be for ever in the family, she would never learn politeness, nor forget that absurd poisonous accent of hers, or testify the smallest specimen of breeding or high life; and yet it is very surprising too, as I had her from a parliament man, a friend of mine, from the highlands, one of the politest men in the ...
— English Satires • Various
... called moraines, which lie at the foot of the glaciers, will serve to remind you of the gold-fields to which I have referred, for much of what composes those moraines was once solid rock in a fixed position on the heights, or glittering ice which reflected the sun's dazzling rays on surrounding high life, though it lies low in the earth now. To a lady of your intelligence, madam, I need not expound my parable. There are many avalanches, great and small, in English society as well as among the Swiss mountains; and, whether by gradual ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed in a cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta over his eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his brow on a level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen in "high life." His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot, in garments that were very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented the profundity ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... received his guests with the frankness of good feelings, if not with the polish of high life; while his wife, who seldom thought of the former, would have been mortally offended with the person who could have suggested that she omitted any of the elegancies of the latter. Her daughters were rather ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... began with his "social" cuts for Punch, selecting "low life" for the most part, as Mr. du Maurier chose high life, and making for every picture as careful a study from Nature as ever Charles Keene did—and probably as many of them. Furthermore, he prefers to seek out his jokes for himself. When he was in New York and found that the professional joke-purveyor was untrustworthy, he sauntered ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... a great many ways of considering a subject like that," we replied. "We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... romance in high life, Babe?' he observed, as they were leaving the court. 'But of course you haven't. You ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... understand that they were people of real fashion; and the eldest lady spoke of persons and things which denoted that high life was familiar to her. This gave Clarke a new opportunity of wondering how he, a poor carpenter, came into such company: which he directly expressed to me, with the simplicity and undisguise that are common ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... chosen friends, with whom she corresponded on terms of perfect confidence, were among the best people in London—not the circulators of club-house canards, the pickers-up of second-hand gossip from the society papers, but actors in the comedy of high life, arbiters of fashion and taste, born and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... N. fashion, style, ton, bon ton|!, society; good society, polite society; monde[Fr]; drawing-room, civilized life, civilization, town, beau monde[Fr], high life, court; world; fashionable world, gay world; Vanity Fair; show &c. (ostentation) 822. manners, breeding &c. (politeness) 894; air, demeanor &c. (appearance) 448; savoir faire[Fr]; gentlemanliness[obs3], gentility, decorum, propriety, biensance[Fr]; conventions of society; Mrs. Grundy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Balzac, where there is no such difficulty, but where the cosmos itself is something other than yours; of Dumas, where half the actual history of France is disrealised for your delectation. On a lesser scale you have the manners of town and country, of high life and low life, of Paris most of all, given you through all sorts of perspectives and in all sorts of settings by Paul de Kock and George Sand, by Sandeau and Bernard, by Alexandre Dumas fils and Feuillet, by Theuriet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... truth that you all know, although the pulpit has not yet uttered it, that much of the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his son in 1751 (Letters, iii. 136) said:—'People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind, as surgeons are to their bodily pains; they see and hear of them all day long, and even of so many simulated ones, that they do not know which has are real, and which are not. Other sentiments are therefore ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... I went to a play myself, which surely I may live long enough and never forget. It was "Seduction," a very clever piece, but containing a dreadful picture of vice and dissipation in high life, written by Mr. Miles Andrews, with an epilogue—O, such an epilogue! I was listening to it with uncommon attention, from a compliment paid in it to Mrs. Montagu, among other female writers; but imagine what became ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... in the city, as he is so wealthy; Mary will have an opportunity of tasting the fascinations of high life. I shall introduce her to a clique of great refinement at once. Don't you think Saratoga the most delightful place in the world, Miss Wyllys? I am never so happy as when here. I delight so much in the gay world; it appears to me that I breathe more freely in a crowd—solitude ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which remained ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... repelled by the mistress. At the next house he learned the cause of her irritation—her only daughter had just given birth to a Negro babe. After making diligent inquiry he failed to find another such instance in high life, but in South Carolina districts where the black population was densest and the poor whites most degraded 'these unnatural unions were more frequent than anywhere else' (III, 29). In every case, however, he says it was a woman of the lowest class, generally ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... bear in mind that we are not so vicious and contaminated here, as you are in the old country. You don't see our newspapers filled, as your's are, with crim. cons, in high life. No, sir, our institutions are favourable to virtue and morality, and our women are as virtuous as our ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... in just estimation, but in our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial wall that rises above ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... to put a heartiness in my voice and drive away his depression, "let's go ashore for dinner! Then the Opera—and afterwards another bite where the high life eats? ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the nineteenth century to make Russian poets take anything but a gloomy view of matters in general. Griboyedoff, as an unprejudiced man, endowed with great poetical gifts, and remarkable powers of observation, was able to give a faithful and wonderfully complete picture of high life in Moscow of that day, in his famous comedy "Woe from Wit" ("Gore ot Uma"), and introduce to the stage types which had never, hitherto, appeared in Russian comedy, because no one had looked deep enough into Russian hearts, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... I laughed at her, finding nothing so ridiculous as the high life she thought she was leading. I would interrupt her description of a ball to inquire about her husband and her father-in-law, both of whom she detested, the one because he was her husband, and the other because he was only a peasant; in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... present day, what so easily, or quietly, or satisfactorily arranged, as a divorce in high life, leaving behind it neither spot nor scar, nor anything unpleasant in the way of social ostracism? ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... were a thing of which she was not ashamed, and Agnes answered: "Yes, I was Sarah Agnes Morris; once for three months your grandmother's hired girl, and afterward adopted by a lady who gave me what education I possess, together with that taste for high life which prompted me to jilt your Uncle Joseph when a richer man than ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... known by name. A French artist, Jean Labraellier, worked in ivory for Charles V. of France; and in Germany it must have been quite a fashionable pursuit in high life; the Elector of Saxony, August the Pious, who died in 1586, was an ivory worker, and there are two snuff-boxes shown as the work of Peter the Great. The Elector of Brandenburgh and Maximilian of Bavaria both carved ivory for their own recreation. In ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... but vague aspirations and self-conceits must be bound together by some practical necessity—perhaps a very homely and a very vulgar one—or they scatter and evaporate. One would think that rich people in high life ought to do more than poor folks in humble life. More pains are taken with their education; they have more leisure for following the bent of their genius: yet it is the poor folks, often half self-educated, and with pinched bellies, that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized quarter—who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops, where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these balconied upper stories—who, what, ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... while the logical male in him scathingly condemned this feminine defect of character, his private soul was glad of it, for he well knew that he would have been considerably irked by the complexities and grandeurs of high life. But never would he have ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... survey of these four friends. In the first place, there was Lord Featherstone himself, young, handsome, languid, good-natured to a fault, with plenty of muscle if he chose to exert it, and plenty of brain if he chose to make use of it—a man who had become weary of the monotony of high life, and, like many of his order, was fond of seeking relief from the ennui of prosperity amid the excitements of the sea. Next to him was Dr. Congreve, a middle-aged man, with iron-gray hair, short beard and mustache, short nose, gray eyes, ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... "Scandal in High Life.—Some strange revelations are shortly expected in aristocratic circles. A few days since a noble lord, bearing one of the most ancient titles in England, was married. The marriage took place under circumstances of ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... Gladstone invited me to meet the hero at a reception in Carlton Gardens, where I took note of Garibaldi, with his hostess on his arm, as he walked in his simple red shirt, through a bowing lane of feathered fashionables, whom he greeted right and left as if he had been always used to such London high life. On that occasion I had the honour of standing between Palmerston and Lord John Russell, who kindly conversed with me, as also did the chief guest, specially thanking me for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... visitors and they immediately launched forth into a breezy, sparkling conversation with that easy confidence which is to be found only among persons accustomed to high life. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... having received a grammatical education, and been brought up as a peruke-maker from my earliest years—besides having seen a deal of high life, and the world in general, in carrying false curls, bandeaux, and other artificial head-gear paraphernalia, in bandboxes to boarding schools, and so on—a desire naturally sprung up within me, being now in my twenty-first year, and worth a guinea a week of wages, to look about ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... had met with at the Court of Vienna, and having till then seen nothing of high life, the Abbe de Vermond admired no other customs than those of the imperial family; he ridiculed the etiquette of the House of Bourbon incessantly; the young Dauphiness was constantly incited by his sarcasms to get rid of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... and by the slight importance he attached to his own; and also his love of truth when, a propos of some book of travels she was praising, he told her that he preferred a simple but true tale of voyages to all the pomp of lies. In speaking about an adventure in high life that was then making a great noise in England, she was able to appreciate his high sentiments of delicacy and honor. When the conversation fell on religion, she had the happiness of hearing him declare he abhorred atheism and unbelief; and when his childhood was touched upon, of hearing ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... a difficult matter to discuss. Naturally if this woman sees the Prince talking to that one, this one is going to eat vinegar," which gives us a glimpse of some of the domestic difficulties in Chinese high life. However it is a fact worth remembering that the Manchu prince does not receive his full stipend from the government until he has five concubines, each of whom is ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... eminently ridiculous; shallow things, who, by continual dissipation, had annihilated the few ideas nature had given them, and yet were celebrated for wonderful pretty gentlemen; young ladies extolled for their wit, because they were handsome; illiterate empty women as well as men, in high life, admired for their knowledge, from their being resolutely positive; and women of real understanding so far from pleasing the polite million, that they frightened them away, and were left solitary. When we ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... in want o' some siller in thir hard times, I thocht I would tak the liberty o' ca'in upon yer leddyship, as weel for the sake o' being better acquainted wi' a leddy o' yer station and presence, as for the sake o' gettin' the little I require on my first introduction to high life." ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... who said that it meant nothing; but then, what should the smile of a young married woman mean? She had not been born in the purple, like Lady Glencora, her father being a country clergyman who had never reached a higher grade than that of an archdeacon; but she knew the ways of high life, and what an exigeant husband would demand of her, much better than poor Glencora. She would have spoken of no man as a baboon with a bristly beard. She never talked of the long and the short of it. She did not wander out o' nights in winter among the ruins. She ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... literature, manners, and customs of Italy made him appreciate his advantages; the friendship of the Count prevented Dick from feeling otherwise than perfectly at home; and as for the Senator, if it had been possible for him to feel otherwise, his experience of high life at Florence would have enabled him to bear himself serenely here. His complete self-possession, his unfaltering gaze, his calm countenance, were ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning, even a "lady" could be a woman—and remain a woman, even though she be turned ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... something quite racy!" she cried, drawing her chair up closer to the bedside. "A scandal in high life. This is ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... their maturity. Beauty doctors gnashed their teeth, and plastic surgeons looked forward to the day when they must play upon some other form of human credulity. As a subject for the press it rivalled strikes, prohibition, German reparations, Lenin, prize-fights, censorship and scandalous divorces in high life. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in a brief introductory speech, said that the achievements of Professor Splurgeson beggared the vocabulary of eulogy. More than any other thinker he had succeeded in reconciling high life with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... full of dressy ideas and high life, sister. I don't care for such things, but mean to cultivate my mind as fast as I can. That girl says she is in college, and named over more studies than I can count. I do wish we were to stop and see a little of the refined society of ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... any rate, the son could not marry without his father's consent. This we learn from a suit in high life, in the time of Cyrus.(275) A high official of the king's, A, brought a suit against B, who was "over the house," before the nobles and the king's judges. A accused B and C, an official of his house, of having given a tablet of marriage-contract of D, a sister of C's, to A's son ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... natural of the group is the floriated fish, whose general form has evidently been based on that of the dolphin. When Hogarth ridiculed the taste for virtu, which the fashionable people of his own era carried to a childish extent, and displayed its follies in his picture of "Taste in high life," and in the furniture of his scenes of the "Marriage-a-la-mode," he exhibited a somewhat similar absurdity in porcelain ornament. In the second scene of the "Marriage" is an amusing example of false combination, in which a fat Chinese is embowered in foliage, above whom floats in air a ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... shamefaced pleasure conceals itself,—those were the only memories bequeathed to her by that liaison of two weeks, that loveless sin, wherein not even her pride had succeeded in satisfying itself by the notoriety of a scandal in high life. The fruitless, ineffaceable stain, the senseless fall into the gutter of a woman who cannot walk, and upon whom the ironical pity of the passers-by weighs heavily when she ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... country people can know about that! You should see what devils of indigestions we get in high life—eating 'normous great dinners and suppers that require clever physicians to carry 'em off, or else they'd carry us off with gout next day; and waking in the morning with such a splitting headache, and dry throat, and inward cusses about human nature, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... 't will be some years still ere the country is entirely subdued, out of the question 't will be that ye go to Greenwood. I will resign my post, being now rich enough, and we'll all go to London, where I'll take a big house, and ye shall be my guests. Once let the girl taste of high life, with its frocks and jewels and carriages, and all that tempts the sex, and she'll quickly see their provider in ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... is not a disease, it is a natural process, but is more frequently unfortunate in high life than amongst the middle class of females; which may be owing partly to fear, with which the priests of LUCINA are liable to inspire the ladies of fashion to induce them to lie in in town; and partly to the bad air of London, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Frontignac was one of those women whose beauty is so striking and imposing, that they seem to kindle up, even in the most prosaic apartment, an atmosphere of enchantment. All the pomp and splendor of high life, the wit, the refinements, the nameless graces and luxuries of courts, seemed to breathe in invisible airs around her, and she made a Faubourg St. Germain of the darkest room into which she entered. Mary thought, when she came in, that she had never seen anything so splendid. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... magnificent gold snuff-box, in acknowledgment of the services he should have rendered to his distinguished guest and client. Titmouse was in the highest possible spirits. This, his first glimpse into high life, equalled all his expectations. Round and round went the bottles—crack went joke after joke. Slang sang song upon song, of, however, so very coarse and broad a character as infinitely disgusted Gammon, and apparently shocked the alderman;—though I greatly distrust ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... fingers of it inside you you would bury your face in your hands and cry because there wasn't anything more worth while around for you to lick than little Jim Jeffries. Yes, sir, the stuff in that second barrel was distilled elixir of battle, money and high life. It was the color of gold and as clear as glass, and it shone after dark like the sunshine was still in it. A thousand years from now you'll get a drink ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... politeness. My family, in all its branches, came into her Grace's quick recollection; and I was thus indebted to my adventure, not only for an introduction to one of the most elegant women of her time—to the goddess of fashion in her temple, the Circe of high life, at the "witching hour," but of being most "graciously" received; and even hearing a panegyric on my chivalry, from the Marechal, smilingly echoed by lips which seemed made ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... time the main entrance hall was crowded with people, tenants and passers-by attracted by the unwonted commotion. A scandal in high life is always caviare to the sensation seeker. Everybody excitedly inquired of ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... place that has not a clean-shaven lawn and beds of unvarying circles, pyrethrum, calceolaria, and geranium, and brakes of rare roses, and glass-houses with orchids worth fifty pound each, which is a garden in high life, full of luxury, extravagance, weariness. As Kate entered, a moss rose which wandered at its will caught her skirt, and the General cut a blossom which she fastened in her breast, and surely there is no flower so winsome and fragrant as this ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... trust a man when he came to trade. The formation of this society gave rise to another, whose members pledged themselves to have no dealing with a member of the "Shylock Society," and also to publish all defaulters in "high life," which served to check these ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... comrade,—I have just been in receipt of your epistle, profound, interesting, but antagonistic concerning your JOHN BULL's prizefighting, high life, sportsman's game, your Jeu de Cricquette, about which I will reply to you in my next. Accept the assurance of my most ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... is reduced to this material expression, how dull and beggarly does not life become,—mere atomic integration and disintegration, the poor human pneumatic-machine purring along the dusty road of matter, bound and helpless and soulless as a clanking engine! No high life, in individuals or nations, is to be hoped for, unless it is enrooted in the infinite spiritual reality,—in God. It is forever indubitable that the highest is not material, and no argument is therefore needed to show that when spiritual ideals lose their power of attraction, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... them I will pay for them; but I will neither pay for, nor suffer, the unbecoming, disgraceful, and degrading pleasures (they should not be called pleasures), of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a Stoic would blame, my indulgence; but I am yet no Stoic, though turned of five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people of the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... famous dog pictures are "Low Life and High Life," "Dignity and Impudence" and "The Sleeping Bloodhound," all in ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... this point. Baltimore gathered figs, raisins, almonds and juicy grapes from Spain. Wines and brandies from France; teas of various flavor, from China; and rich, aromatic coffee from Java, all conspired to swell the tide of high life, where pride and indolence rolled and lounged ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... one set to another, through which Tarde's laws of imitation operate. But for large sections of the population there are no such channels. For them the patented accounts of society and the moving pictures of high life have to serve. They may develop a social hierarchy of their own, almost unnoticed, as have the Negroes and the "foreign element," but among that assimilated mass which always considers itself the "nation," there is in spite of the great separateness of sets, a variety of personal ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... bookkeeper in a large establishment in New York with which he was himself remotely connected. Thither about Christmas J.C. and Nellie went, and from her small back room in the fifth story of a New York boarding-house Nellie writes to Louis glowing descriptions of high life in the city, and Louis, glancing at his crutches and withered feet, smiles as he thinks how weary he should be climbing the four flights of stairs which ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... often find themselves in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who recently made a successful lecturing tour ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... savage,—the complete savage in low life,—the civilized savage in high. The complete savage is found in the dockyard labourer, who makes a woman bear his children and then kicks her to death,—the savage in high life is the man who equally kills the mother of his children, but in another way, namely, by neglect and infidelity, while he treats his numerous mistresses just as the Turk treats the creatures of his harem— merely as so many pretty soft animals, requiring to be fed with sweets and ornamented with ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... was heard, Nor ceas'd till D——'s airy form appear'd. No common offering she seem'd to bear; Connubial tenderness,—the watchful care Which tender Infants from their Mothers claim, The sage demeanor, and the blameless name In which High Life should ever be array'd, Her steady ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... complaint somewhat in vogue in high life—he had a sudden fit of convenient deafness. He said a few words in a cold voice to Mrs. Meadowsweet, crushed the little Bells by his icy manner, and took the first opportunity of finding more ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Mary Ellen was alone, her work done, her nose buried in a novel of such fine print that it necessitated the lamp's being perilously near the fringe of frowsy hair that covered her forehead. We were inside the kitchen before she was recalled from the high life ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and look at the performances. There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the sentimental, and some light comic business; the whole accompanied by appropriate scenery, and brilliantly illuminated with ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... most brilliant and successful affair, and the reporters, who had been hired to be present, did it ample justice in the next day's papers. "Festivities in High Life" headed the column, in which the beauty and accomplishments of the bride were dwelt upon at large, while free scope was given to the imagination and the pen when it came to the elegant manners of ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... own dignity, saying, "How are you, Charley? How's things with you?" He was proud enough of his connection with a prosperous man like Millard, and among his comrades in the shop he often affected to settle points in dispute regarding finance or the ways of people in high life by gravely reminding the others that he had superior opportunities for knowing, since his nephew was a banker and "knew all the rich men in Wall street." But face to face with Charley Millard his ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... and on which experienced masculine observers, on the other hand, look with some awe. The correspondents of the daily papers, whose pleasure and privilege it is to be able to instruct us in all the secrets of high life, have given us recently to understand that, for some time back, Her Majesty has been hard at work on the Emperor's soul. Every thoughtful woman likes to be at work on her husband's soul. Young ladies enjoy the prospect before ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... not degrade woman. On the contrary, it ennobles her and brings out all the strong attributes of true womanhood. To their credit be it said, the women are almost a unit for ability, honesty and integrity wherever found, in high life or low life. A man must walk straight in Wyoming, for the women hold the balance of power and they are using it wisely and judiciously. The cause of education is their first aim. They are making our schools the model of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... seclusion, was all delight at the idea of seeing such high life, and the lovers talked of nothing else all the next day,—when Reynard, towards evening, putting his head out of the window, saw his old friend the dog lying as usual and watching him very grimly. "Ah, that cursed creature! I had quite forgotten him; what is to be done now? He would ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he was a great fool, that let fools have the management of his affairs, and sent his faithful servants to prison. In the end, the lady gained the victory, and the nobleman went free. Violent quarrels of this kind were very frequent between these high life lovers, and they always ended in the triumph of Lady Castlemaine. She used to threaten, as a last resort, that if the king came to an open rupture with her, she would print the letters that he had written to her, and this always brought ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... dinners, matinees, morning calls, drives, visits and shopping; how fast one crowded upon the other, leaving scarcely an hour of leisure to the devotee of fashion who attended to them all. How astonished Helen was to find what high life in New York implied, ceasing to wonder that so many of the young girls grew haggard and old before their time, or that the dowagers grew selfish and hard and scheming. She would die outright, she thought, and she pitied poor little Katy, who, having once ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... was taking pains to assure us that in less than a month the Villerville beaches would be crowded; only the artists of the brushes were here now; the artists of high life would scarcely be found deserting the Avenue des ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... has neither speech nor gesture Infinitesimal quantities Inflection, a modification of sound their importance illustrations of rules of must not be multiplied special life revealed through four millions of the melody of the ear the gesture of the blind differentiating the high life of speech medallion of Ingres Inspiration, when allowable the sign of Interjection, the Interpellation Interrogative surprise Intonations, caressing Italian, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... watch, and discovered that the time of his appointment with Rose at St. Gregory's had nearly come. He was by no means sorry at the prospect of giving back his silk mantle and plumed bonnet to his substitute, for he began to find high life not quite to his taste. As he was going to the door, the Negro once more came up to him, and whispered: "Your Highness, Duke Herrman is seeking for you everywhere." Philip shook his head impatiently and hurried out, followed by the Negro. When they got to the ante-chamber, the Negro cried out, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... if you will, it was ridiculous. That was the story I hesitated to tell, but now I'm going to tell it. Do you know how people in high life look from the under world? No, of course you don't. They look like hawks and eagles whose backs one seldom sees, for they soar up above. I lived in a hovel provided by the state, with seven brothers and sisters and ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... elaborate high saddles and embroidered trappings rather the worse for wear were being led up and down the walk. As we neared the door there was a strong smell of rosewater and native perfumes and hookah tobacco—the indescribable odour of Eastern high life. There was also a general air of wasteful and tawdry dowdiness, if I may coin such a word, which one constantly sees in the retinues of native princes and rich native merchants, ill contrasting with the great intrinsic ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... more!' I exclaimed, drunk with rapture. The journals lie before me. Three columns to Guy Darrell's speech last night; a column more to its effect on a senate, on an empire; and two lines—two little lines—to the sentence that struck Guy Darrell out of the world of men! 'Marriage in high life.—Marquess of Montfort-Caroline Lyndsay.' And the sun did not fall from heaven! Vulgarest of ends to the tritest of romances! In the gay world these things happen every day. Young ladies are privileged to give hopes to one man—their hands to another. 'Is the sin so unpardonable?' ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... astrology, but I cannot. I should like to believe that the heavenly bodies sort themselves into certain positions in order that Zadkiel may be kept in touch with the future; the idea of a star whizzing a million miles out of its path by way of indicating a "sensational divorce case in high life" is extraordinarily massive. But, candidly, I do not believe the stars bother. What the stars are for, what they are like when you get there, I do not know; but a starry night would not be so beautiful if it were simply meant as a warning to some ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... "Well, I suppose you were awfully firm this morning, eh? Went down into the kitchen and roared like a little tyrant, eh? I really was afraid to read the paper on the way home. Didn't know but what I'd read of a 'Horrid Accident in High Life. Mrs. Thaddeus Perkins's Endeavor to Maintain Discipline in the Household Results Fatally. Two Old Family Servants Instantly Killed, and Three of the Kitchen Table Legs ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... Grafton, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the Duchess of Buckingham, Lady Townshend, were at different times among the hearers.[758] Horace Walpole tells us that in 1766 it was quite the rage at Bath among persons in high life to form parties to hear the different preachers who 'supplied' the chapel. The bishops themselves did not disdain to attend 'incognito;' curtained seats were placed immediately inside the door, where the prelates ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... divorce his wife, no matter what he believes her conduct to have been; but for the protection of his own name, and that of the children, he allows her to get her freedom on other than criminal grounds. No matter who he may be, whether rich, or poor, in high life or low, the man who publicly besmirches his wife's name, besmirches still more his own, and proves that he is not, was not, and never ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... aristocracy Is reckon'd positive hypocrisy; The noble votaries of fashion Are ignorant of the tender passion. A shepherd, if his nymph doth alter, Killeth woe by means of halter: But in high life, if ladies prove Indifferent to an ardent love, What does the enamour'd title do, But set about and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... high opinion of the journalist, remarking, "He is marvellously well-informed of all that is going on." "It was curious," writes Madame, "how a keen clever man like the Prince attached so much importance to anything Blowitz said." For the side-lights which it flashes on high life in Paris at a critical period of the Republic the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... you. They never introduced a soul to us, the band played out of tune, it was as dull as ditch-water,—just dreary, ill-dressed people wandering in and out, and trying to look as if five sour strawberries on a plate, and a thimbleful of ice cream were bliss and high life and all the rest of it. The only thing really nice was the roses; those were delicious. Lady Mary Ponsonby gave me three,—to make up for not presenting any ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the subject of "handy things for an engineer," I want to say to the engineer who takes pride in his work, that if you would enjoy a touch of high life in engineering, persuade your boss, if you have one, to get you a Fuller Tender made by the Parson's Band Cutter and Feeder Co., Newton, Iowa, and attach to your engine. It may look a little expensive, but a luxury ...
— Rough and Tumble Engineering • James H. Maggard
... of the great reporters of his day, with an eye that took in unconsciously every detail of face, costume or scene and reproduced it with perfect accuracy. The reader of his novels is entertained by a series of pen pictures of men and women and scenes in high life and life below stairs that are photographic in their clearness and fidelity. Dickens always failed when he came to depict British aristocratic life; but Thackeray moved in drawing-rooms and brilliant assemblages ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and I am glad to say, she sold the rights to the first edition for $1,200, before the critics got hold of it. The scene is laid in New York and in high life. The story, said the North American Review, is "improbable" but not "dull." Miss Dewey says, "It is the most romantic and at the same time the wittiest of her novels," but Bryant says it has been the least read. ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... world, as it tries to do? Let us hope not. Let the pampered daughter of wealth and social fame, who goes astray, share the pitiless fate of the beggar who does likewise, or, better still, let the beggar be shown such mercy, and justification and pardon as is granted her sister in high life. In the sight of God crime is the one color, why not so with men? If anything, vice repels far more forcibly, when attired in its velvets and silks, than when it looks out from scanty rags, which after all, may be turned more easily to sack cloth. Who can doubt that there are hundreds ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... undisturbed by the evil deeds of our neighbor. We are unwilling to incur his displeasure by manifesting indignation and offering rebuke for his wickedness, or by withdrawing from his society. Especially do we hesitate when we thus must endanger body or life; for instance, when the vices of those in high life demand our censure. By such weakness on our part we merely dissimulate love. Paul requires, not only a secret abhorrence of evil, but an open manifestation of it in word and deed. True love is not influenced by the closeness ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... courtesy of a man accustomed to high life; and I entered on the purport of my visit at once. He was perfectly astonished at my tidings. He had known that strong resolutions had been adopted by the party opposed to the Cabinet; but was startled by the distinct avowal of its intention to overthrow the monarchy. I was struck with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... gambler, and was withal a moral man, no great inroad upon his purse would have resulted from a few entertainments thus bestowed upon his sponging acquaintances,—who, as he really supposed, were reversing the order of the obligation, by the light and flashy touches they gave him of high life in Europe,—relating, with great particularity, their adventures in France,—dining with the Dukes of Chartres and Angouleme, and attending the opera with the Duke of Berry and the Countess de Chausel,—visiting Rome with the grand Duke of Tuscany, and flirting with the Countess Guiccioli, ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... as well as high life in Pompey the Little, sketches after Hogarth, no less than studies a la Watteau. But the high life is by far the better described. Francis Coventry was the cousin of the Earl of that name, he who married the beautiful and silly Maria Gunning. When he painted the ladies of quality ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... George would show them Coney Island. By going out early in the morning, and in the evenings, and rehearsing his day's route in advance, George had managed so far to conduct his little Company around the city without running them into any "High Life." But he knew that if that crowd ever struck Coney Island on a good busy afternoon, his hopes of becoming a ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... rest. The papers the next day were full of the elopement in high life. They told how the Scrappe divorce had been granted at five o'clock in the afternoon the day before, how Colonel Scrappe and Mrs. Van Raffles had sped to New York in the automobile and been quietly married at the Little Church Around the Corner, ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... gracious princess; and is presented to the chief lords and ladies, and then comes supper and a bank at faro, where he loses or wins a thousand pieces by daylight. If it is a German Court, you may add not a little drunkenness to this picture of high life; but German, or French, or Spanish, if you can see out of your palace-windows beyond the trim-cut forest vistas, misery is lying outside; hunger is stalking about the bare villages, listlessly following precarious husbandry; ploughing stony fields with starved cattle; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... even a Methodist's "Experience" in the Gospel Magazine without receiving instruction and amusement; and I should almost despair of that man who could peruse the Life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart. As to my Life, it has all the charms of variety,—high life and low life, vices and virtues, great folly and some wisdom. However, what I am depends on what I have been; and you, my best friend, have a right to the narration. To me the task will be a useful one. It will renew and deepen my reflections on the past; and ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Inn, yet I never taste beer, I never smoke, chew, or use snuff; I am seen in high life, yet I'm true to my wife, And now ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... but I wish he was as blind too, as Sampson was.—Well Charley, we have been dispos'd to be a little merry with this ridiculous parade, this high life below stairs. I wish you had begun your description a little sooner, before they were all gone; the looks of these wiseacres afford us some mirth, tho' we despise them and their politics, and it's not unlikely ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... a bit disgusted at his host's lack of discrimination. "Does he think I'm a soft mark too?" he wondered. "If this is what he calls high life I've had more than ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... apprehend nothing more than too much raising her hopes and her views, which the natural vivacity of her disposition would render but too easy to effect. The town-acquaintance of Mrs. Mirvan are all in the circle of high life; this artless young creature, with too much beauty to escape notice, has too much sensibility to be indifferent to it; but she has too little wealth to be sought with propriety by ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... If you vote me into one of those empty chairs, you'll have among you a man with a fund of gentlemanly information that'll rather astonish you. I can let you into a few anecdotes about some fine women of title, that are quite high life, sir - the tiptop sort of thing. I know the name of every man who has been out on an affair of honour within the last five-and-twenty years; I know the private particulars of every cross and squabble that has taken place upon the turf, at the gaming-table, or elsewhere, during the whole of that ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... was the rule of modern high life not to drink to any body; but that I might have the satisfaction for once to look the duchess in the face, with a glass in my hand, I with a respectful air addressed her,—'My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink your grace's good health.' I repeated the words audibly, and with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... aristocracies of the old world, who, when beaten, retire upon their dignity and hide their time. They are, on the contrary, an enterprising gang of desperadoes, who for the nonce may find it convenient to play the role of high life and dignified pretension, but who, on the slightest change of circumstances, are ready for any shift, any seeming degradation or humiliation, any temporary lowering of their claims, in order to rise higher on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the silent Harold, he began to discover his own accession of dignity. "Then it all belongs to me. I am master. I am squire—Eustace Alison, Esquire, of Arghouse. How well it sounds. Doesn't it, Harry, doesn't it, Lucy? Uncle Smith always said I was the one cut out for high life. Besides, I've been presented, and have been to a ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Precaution" was a compromise between the purely fashionable novel and that collection of moral disquisitions of which Hannah More's Coelebs was the great exemplar, and still remained the most popular representative. As in most tales of high life, nobody of low condition plays a prominent part in the story, save for the purpose of setting off the dukes, earls, baronets, generals, and colonels that throng its pages. A novelist in his first production never limits his creative activity in any ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... portrait of the Duke of Wellington was preferred by that famous soldier to any other that had been made of him. The Iron Duke was, in fact, a frequent visitor at Gore House, and he had a very high opinion of Count d'Orsay. Lady Blessington herself engaged in writing novels of "high life," some of which were very popular in their day. But of all that she wrote there remains only one book which is of permanent value—her Conversations with Lord Byron, a very valuable contribution to our ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... in India, seven years after I had left Florence. The post brought me some English papers, and in one of them was a letter from Italy, with a lot of so-called 'fashionable intelligence.' There, among various scandals in high life, and other delectable items, I read that the Countess Bianca Salvi, famous for some years as the presiding genius of the most agreeable seen in Florence, was about to bestow her hand upon Count Camerino, a distinguished Bolognese. Ah, my dear boy, it was a tremendous escape! ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... lookin' for a place like that," said Brevoort, suddenly loquacious. "We sure aim to see this town. We just been paid off—we was workin' for the Bar-Cross—and we figured on seein' a little high life a-fore we went to punchin' again. Is that hotel you was speakin' about open ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... I was able to understand, he has a very important case on hand—a sort of romance in high life; and I think he wants your assistance to unravel it; it seems ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... and hear. There were bets that the trial would not be over in seven days, and odds were taken against its lasting seven weeks. Society forgot its ennui and settled itself complacently to listen to a piquant story of scandal, intrigue, imposition, and robbery in high life. ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... hence high life is oft a dreary void, A rack of pleasures, where we must invent A something wherewithal to be annoyed. Bards may sing what they please about Content; Contented, when translated, means but cloyed; And hence arise the woes of Sentiment, Blue-devils—and Blue-stockings—and Romances ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 'Tis from high life high characters are drawn; A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn; A judge is just, a chancellor juster still; A gownman, learn'd; a bishop, what you will; Wise, if a minister; but, if a king, More wise, more learn'd, more just, more everything, 140 Court-virtues bear, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... whole of Mr. Brooks' millions to himself. It was a terrible and very daring accusation directed against a gentleman who, in spite of his many wild oats sowed in early youth, was a prominent and important figure in Irish high life. ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... beyond were in their freshest and proudest leaf. A church tower rose appropriately in a corner of the park, and on the other side of the deer-fence beyond the lake a herd of red deer were feeding. Doris could not help feeling as though the whole scene had been lately painted for a new "high life" play at the St. James's Theatre, and she half expected to see Sir George Alexander walk ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... Glen" and of "The Well of the Saints" and of "The Tinker's Wedding." And perhaps had not the Abbey Theatre grown to be a theatre for folk-drama and for poetic drama of court romance alone, Synge would have made Wicklow the background of dramas of a high life of yesterday. Certain it is that in these passages ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... for the reader as much interest as the presentation of some of the ephemeral weeds of that period. But Mr. Strahan's blue eyes were really animated as he ventured perilously near a recent scandal in high life. His budget of news was interspersed with compliments to his hostess, which, like the extract on his handkerchief, were too pronounced. Mr. Lane regarded him with politely veiled disgust, but was too well-bred not to second Miss Vosburgh's ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... behaved, as old Gatliffe said, like a thorough-bred gentlewoman in shutting the door against Mr. Frank in the first instance. So, to cut the matter short, things were at last made up pleasant enough. The time was fixed for the wedding, and an announcement about it—Marriage in High Life and all that—put into the county paper. There was a regular biography, besides, of the governess's father, so as to stop people from talking—a great flourish about his pedigree, and a long account of his services ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins |
