"Legerdemain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Riga. The instrumental phenomena are not one whit scarcer. Classical pianists pour in from Germany principally; popular pianists, who delight in fantasias rather than concertos, and who play such tricks with the keyboards, that the performances have much more of the character of legerdemain than of art, arrive by scores; violinists, violoncellists, professors of the trombone, of the ophicleide, of the bassoon, of every unwieldy and unmanageable instrument in fact, are particularly abundant; and perhaps the most popular of all are the particularly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... inspired by the mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse: most obvious in "Sordello," in portions of "The Ring and the Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations are like the larvae ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... "that comes quite natural. I never knew one of these legerdemain fellows, who pass their lives, as one may say, in dancing upon a tight rope, but what they came at length to caper at ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... his position, and yet every day, when the things fell to be returned, the plug had disappeared; he had found the means to conceal it in the roof, whence he could radiantly produce it on the morrow. Although this piece of legerdemain was performed regularly before three or four pairs of eyes, we could never catch him in the fact; although we searched after he was gone, we could never find the tobacco. Such were the diversions ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as in chymistry and astrology. As an abstruse and esoteric doctrine, it was strictly confined to the priests, or to the favoured few who were admitted to initiation. The magic excellence of the magicians, who successfully emulated the miracles of Moses, was apparently assisted by a legerdemain similar to that of the Hindu jugglers ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... performed gastrotomy on a man, who, while attempting a feat of legerdemain, allowed a bar of lead, 10 1/8 inches long, 1 1/2 inches wide, and 9 1/2 ounces in weight, to slip into his stomach. The bar was removed and the patient recovered. Gussenbauer gives an account of a juggler who turned ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... am not now speaking of those who pretend to cure disease—are sometimes successful in their legerdemain, to a degree, which almost makes a convert of the sceptic. The following story is related by ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain. Though, really, the fallacy which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... will take him for one of us, or worse. Whilst they torment us with this complication and confusion of words, it fares with them, methinks, as with jugglers; their dexterity imposes upon our senses, but does not at all work upon our belief this legerdemain excepted, they perform nothing that is not very ordinary and mean: for being the more learned, they are ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the transient emotions, with which one passes from the earth, can decide his fate, but the real good or evil of his soul, the genuine fitness or unfitness of his soul, his soul's inherent merits of bliss or bale. There is no time nor power in the instant of death, by any magical legerdemain, to turn away the impending retributions of wickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions of Infinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of all traditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations. What can it avail ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... stay in this palace, we were every day entertained with a variety of recreations; as shows upon the river, stage plays, dancing, men playing at legerdemain, which were constantly ushered in with very ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... Sunstar, acquired considerable reputation by his skill in legerdemain. If you lent him a watch or a coin, with one turn of his hand he would make it disappear; he could do the same thing when you had not lent it. He could make anything disappear that was not absolutely screwed to the floor, and at public-houses where he was known the pewter ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... the destruction of all the rest. I repeat that the integrity of the physiological unity at the top of the scale, is far more complete, with all its complexity, than is the integrity of the physiological unity at the bottom of the scale, with its marked simplicity of structure. By no sort of legerdemain or surgical skill can we make an individual mammal become two. If we divide it, the whole dies. Not so, however, with some of the lower grades of animal existence. Cut a hydra into thirty or forty pieces, and each piece will become a distinct animal—a facsimile of the original ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... denied that the negro, although our amended Constitution promises him all the privileges of citizenship, is in many parts of our country practically divested of his vote. By a species of legerdemain in the communities in which he is most numerous and most needs protection, he is to all intents and purposes disfranchised. What will follow as the final outcome we do not know, but that is the beginning of his attempted re-enslavement. It is beyond any question ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... ordinary impostor, but a man of consummate cunning and address, is very evident from this letter. The Bishop was fairly taken in by his clever legerdemain, and when once his first distrust was conquered, appeared as anxious to deceive himself as even Delisle could have wished. His faith was so abundant that he made the case of his protege his own, and would not suffer the breath of suspicion ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... juggler has to put himself through, to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession. The execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force; and much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is indeed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. Now, when powers of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity, descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at last, what is not so much a trained artist, as a new species of animal, with whose instinctive gifts ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... musique better than we looked for, and the acting not much worse, because I expected as bad as could be: and I was not much mistaken, for it was so. I was prettily served this day at the playhouse-door; where, giving six shillings into the fellow's hand for three of us, the fellow by legerdemain did convey one away, and with so much grace faced me down that I did give him but five, that, though I knew the contrary, yet I was overpowered by his so grave and serious demanding the other shilling, that I could not deny him, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... denominate "universals." As yet, however, he has only attained to "general notions," which are purely subjective, that is, to logical definitions, and these logical definitions are subsequently elevated to the dignity of "universal principles and causes" by a species of philosophic legerdemain. Philosophy is thus stripped of its metaphysical character, and assumes a strictly logical aspect. The key of the Aristotelian ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... jump out of your pulpit to pick up an old woman's umbrella?' the squire asked him in wrath, and muttered of requiring none of his clerical legerdemain with books of business. Tears were in Peterborough's eyes. My aunt Dorothy's eyes dwelt kindly on him to encourage him, but the man's irritable nose was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a theatre in the Passage Choiseul where children perform, which may be considered as a sort of nursery for the theatres in general; but what afford the most amusement are his extraordinary feats of legerdemain, which are certainly wonderfully clever. The prices are from about one franc ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... English name, as it would to the Macedonian argyraspides, if suspecting that, in some coming century, their mighty leader, 'the great Emathian conqueror,' could by any possible Dean of St. Patrick, and by any conceivable audacity of legerdemain, be traced back to All-eggs-under-the-grate. If the name really is good English, in that case a separate and extra labour arises for us all; there must have been some old Danish name for this most serviceable of fells; and then we ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... enough has been quoted to justify the tradition which Lincoln left behind him at the bar of Illinois. His weak as well as his strong qualities have been indicated. He never learned the technicalities, what some would call the tricks, of the profession. The sleight of plea and demurrer, the legerdemain by which justice is balked and a weak case is made to gain an unfair advantage, was too subtle and shifty for his strong and straightforward intelligence. He met these manoeuvres sufficiently well, when practiced by others, but he never could get ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... conviviality, while actually maintaining a hawk-like watch upon the two conspirators as she now felt them to be. She was amused by the frequency with which Shine Taylor and Reginald Warren plied their guest with cigarettes: Shirley's legerdemain in substituting them was ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... believers in that forgotten and despised science was a late eminent professor of the art of legerdemain. One would have thought that a person of this description ought, from his knowledge of the thousand ways in which human eyes could be deceived, to have been less than others subject to the fantasies of superstition. Perhaps the habitual use of those abstruse ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... constantly flourishing his admirable moral sense in our faces, dilating upon his simplicity, modesty, fidelity to his friends, indifference to the charms of fame, till we are almost convinced that he has imposed upon himself. By some strange piece of legerdemain he must surely have succeeded in regarding even his deliberate artifices, with the astonishing masses of hypocritical falsehoods which they entailed, as in some way legitimate weapons against a world full of piratical Curlls and deep laid plots. And, indeed, with all his delinquencies, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... rich harvest. Some article of stolen property is found in one man's house, and by a little legerdemain it is conveyed to that of another, both of whom are made to pay liberally; the man robbed also pays, and all the members of the village community are made to do the same. They are all called to the court of the Thanadar to give evidence as to what they have seen or heard regarding either ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... truth of this assertion we rely upon the express authority of God himself. We affirm that since slavery has been ordained by him, it cannot be always and everywhere wrong. And how does the abolitionist attempt to meet this reply? Why, by a little legerdemain, he converts this reply from an argument against his position, that slavery is always and everywhere wrong, into an argument in favor of the monstrous dogma that it is always and everywhere right! If we should contend that, in some cases, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... distinctly bad form to practise legerdemain or feats of sleight-of-hand at a dinner party. Time was when it was considered correct for a young man who could do card or other tricks to add to the gayety of the party by displaying his skill, but that time is past, and the guest of today, who thinks to ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... bad law, but maintain that it may have been good morals, and that Douglas honestly held it. But many of us have not yet advanced so far in critical generosity, and cannot help feeling that Douglas's position remains political legerdemain—an attempt by a great officer of the government, professing to defend the Supreme Court, to show the people how to go through the motions of obedience to the Court while defeating its intention. If not double-dealing in a strict sense, it must yet be considered as having in it the temper of double-dealing.* ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... out. According to one informant, when Blind Mike, one of the well-known doctors in historic times, was becoming a doctor, his teacher required him to smoke four hand-rolled cigarettes in a row without allowing the smoke to escape from his lungs. This was not considered an exercise in legerdemain but a way to develop the younger man's ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... plausible, and long tormented ourselves with an old spinning-wheel and some medicine bottles, without producing even the smallest result. We nevertheless adhered to our belief, and were much delighted, when at the time of the fair, among other rarities, magical and legerdemain tricks, an electrical machine performed its marvels, which, like those of magnetism, were at that time already ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... legerdemain he took out his handkerchief and brushed some crumbs from his beard. His cup slid to the edge of the saucer and peeped over, but, throwing the spoon overboard, righted itself just in time. Somewhat pleased with himself ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... species of legerdemain this doctrine of non-intervention has come to extend to a paralysis of the Government on the whole subject, to exclude the Congress from any kind of legislation whatever, I am at a loss to conceive. Certain it is, it was not the theory of that period, and it was not contended for in all ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the background. And yet to combine many periods in one and commit no anachronism, to put something French, something Spanish, something Italian, and something English into an American house and have the result the perfection of American taste—is a feat of legerdemain that has been accomplished time ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the miracles he performed soon ceased to have the literary tincture of the one related above, and they became mere vulgar juggleries and exhibitions of legerdemain, suited to the taste of the multitude. Scholars turned their backs on him, and we find him only among tipplers and associates of the lowest kind. At one of their carousals his half-intoxicated companions asked him for a specimen of his witchcraft. He declared himself willing to gratify them in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... is to instruct the Students in State Legerdemain, as how to take off the Impression of a Seal, to split a Wafer, to open a Letter, to fold it up again, with other the like ingenious Feats of Dexterity and Art. When the Students have accomplished themselves in this Part of their Profession, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... engrossed with her receipts and diagrams than with his tricks, Miss Matty and Mrs Forrester were mystified and perplexed to the highest degree. Mrs Jamieson kept taking her spectacles off and wiping them, as if she thought it was something defective in them which made the legerdemain; and Lady Glenmire, who had seen many curious sights in Edinburgh, was very much struck with the tricks, and would not at all agree with Miss Pole, who declared that anybody could do them with a little practice, and that she would, herself, undertake to do all he ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hell, which are fit for nothing but to fodder asses with. If our historian means by every little invention to increase the powers of mankind, as an enterprise of such renown, he is deceived; this glory is not due to such as go about with a dog and a hoop, nor to the practicers of legerdemain, or upon the high or low rope; not to every mountebank and his man Andrew; all which, with many other mechanical and experimental philosophers, do in some sort increase the powers of mankind, and differ no more from some of the virtuosi, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... having to pay rates at the end of the year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the peasants in general understood by "partition," that the State lands, especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood, free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own to further the general "partition" ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment, vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech. Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer, detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... giving them a little social sense. He preaches, not against distinct moral turpitude like hypocrisy and avarice, but against inordinate affection for lap-dogs (Melampe), pietistic objections to masked balls {Masquerades}, and superstitious belief in legerdemain (Witchcraft). Holberg voices the urbane humanistic spirit that characterized the eighteenth century ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... Mill's essay consists in one simple trick of legerdemain. It consists in using words of the sort which we have been describing first in one sense and then in another. Men will take the objects of their desire if they can. Unquestionably:—but this is an identical proposition: for an object of desire means ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... where I was staying. I was out riding alone on an errand for Mrs. Mackenzie when he met me and made me go with him. He has arranged to have me meet his wife in Mexico. The show wouldn't draw well without me. You know I do legerdemain," Frank explained, in his low, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... wheel. The doll's hand appeared to be turning the handle. As a matter of fact, the machine was electrically driven, and the wheel turned the hand of the doll. In the realm of cause and effect we are frequently the dupes and victims of a very dexterous system of legerdemain. The resultant quantity is invariably clear; the contributing causes ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... fire. A year or two later fire was followed by panic, and Marshall felt himself crowded towards the brink of ruin. In a moment of weakness he permitted himself a course to which only so great an emergency could have prompted him. The situation was saved by a species of legerdemain—of card-shuffling, so to speak—which was quite outside the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality itself. An instrument willing to lend itself to this feat of juggling was needed, and was found in a pushing young fellow who left a rival house ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... something, the theme of one of the bard's effusions, and at once Jocelyn Wray complied. Lord Ronsdale stood sedulously near, turning the leaves; Steele watched the deft hand; it was slim, aristocratic and suggested possibilities in legerdemain. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell |
