"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthy oppressors of the People, the Church but ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... some justice in the affection the general reader entertains for the old-fashioned and now somewhat obsolete custom, of giving to him, at the close of a work, the latest news of those who sought his ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the precious document. I soon flung it from me, thinking it worthy of the fate of many a better production in the olden times, that of being burned by the common hangman; but, happily, the office of hangman has become obsolete in Canada, and the editors of these refined journals may go on abusing their betters ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the associations of the early Heraldry of the best and most artistic eras, Iseek to derive a Heraldry which we may rightly consider to be our own, and which we may transmit with honour to our successors. Ido not suggest the adoption, for present use, of an obsolete system. But, while I earnestly repudiate the acceptance and the maintenance amongst ourselves of a most degenerate substitute for a noble Science, Ido aspire to aid in restoring HERALDRY to its becoming rank, ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and frustrating ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... old political power. The reaction of princedom, instead of proving that it makes the old society, rather proves that it is at the end of its tether so soon as the material conditions of the old society are obsolete. Its reaction is at the same time the reaction of the old society, which is still ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... with a large body of adherents. An attendant on the consul demanded their dispersion, on which he was cut down by a zealous Gracchian. On this, a tumult arose. Gracchus in vain sought to be heard, and even interrupted a tribune in the act of speaking, which was against an obsolete law. This offense furnished a pretense for the Senate and the citizens to arm. Gracchus retired to the temple of Castor, and passed the night, while the capitol was filled with armed men. The next day, he fled beyond the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... morning and evening and to do much of my Embassy work at the same disadvantage. I have attempted to solve the difficulty by engaging by the week one of those archaic old horse chaises called fiacres. London has placed a hansom in the British Museum with the other obsolete and historic styles of equipages, but frugal Paris has kept her out-of-date vehicles on exhibition in active use on the boulevards. These conveyances, so recently looked down upon for their slow pace as compared with the speed of taxis, are now restored to ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... it thus ascertained that at least one species of Sarracenia allures flies to their ruin than it began to appear that—just as in the case of Drosera—most of this was a mere revival of obsolete knowledge. The "insect-destroying process" was known and well described sixty years ago, the part played by the sweet exudation indicated, and even the intoxication perhaps hinted at, although evidently little thought of in those ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... sons must be carefully guarded and the rights of the first-born fully recognized. The man is of more value than the mother in the scale of being whatever her graces and virtues may be. If these Jewish ideas were obsolete they might not be worth our attention, but our creeds and codes are still tinged with the Mosaic laws and customs. The English law of primogeniture has its foundation in the above text. The position of the wife under the old common law has the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... development and had used, before it was announced by Prof. Avenarius of Austria, a method of dividing the electric current, by the insertion of a polariser in a secondary circuit connected with each lamp, a method, it need not be said to electricians, now utterly obsolete. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the culmination of the Protestant movement in its decisive proclamation by Luther. For nearly three hundred years already the power of the Church had been declining, and its function as a civilizing agency had been growing more and more obsolete. The first great blow at its supremacy had been directed with partial success in the thirteenth century by the Emperor Frederick II. Coincident with this attack from without, we find a reformation begun within, as exemplified in the Dominican and Franciscan movements. The second great ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... lad," said he, showing the depth of his feelings as much by a tenderness very odd in so cold a man, as by reverting to the old pronoun now becoming obsolete except with Quakers, "and bring thee safe out of it all, and make thy ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... that subject. He then discoursed upon it at great length, using the most violent language about Obscurantism, Packed Boards, the Tutorial Profession, Sacrifice of Research to Examination, Frivolous Aims and Obsolete Methods, ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... "because you adopted the obsolete hat of your people. Whatever vanity led you to do it, it was the satisfaction of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... style which we seldom meet with was some part of the picture covered with the almost obsolete "aerophane," a kind of chiffon or crape which was much in request even up to fifty years ago. A certain part of the draperies was worked on the silk ground, without any attempt at finish. This was covered with ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... and religion that is now recognized by many theologians, and in the liberalizing of the church that has marked the last two decades, are not most of your contentions already granted? Is not the "lake of fire and brimstone" an obsolete issue? ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... comprehensive genius. There is no wickedness that they would not make profitable to the Church. Hence, it appears from Lord BROUGHAM'S speech that John Jones "was guilty of other excesses, and had been sent to prison for a violation of that dormant—he wished he could say of it obsolete—law!" There being "other excesses" for which, it appears, there is no statute remedy, the magistrates commit a piece of pious injustice, and lump sundry laical sins into the one crime against the Church. John Jones,—for who shall conceive the profanity of man?—may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... costumes, and old-fashioned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen. Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination. She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... understand that the world of thought in those days was in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formulae, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges. Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man's lips. I was brought up by my mother in a quaint old-fashioned narrow faith ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... more fix the exact time when the terms optimates and populares superseded previous party watchwords than we can when Tory gave place to Conservative, and Whig to Liberal. Thus patricians and plebeians were obsolete terms, and nobles and plebeians no longer had any political meaning, for each was equal in the sight of the law; each had a vote; each was eligible to every office. But when the fall of Carthage freed Rome from ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... cause which induced the scribes to expressly prescribe certain passages to be read in the marginal version, I will now touch on, for not all the marginal notes are various readings, but some mark expressions which have passed out of common use, obsolete words and terms which current decency did not allow to be read in a public assembly. (88) The ancient writers, without any evil intention, employed no courtly paraphrase, but called things by their plain names. (891) Afterwards, through the spread of evil thoughts and luxury, words which ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... preacher; and the language, clear, vigorous, and modern, clothed these thoughts in the most impressive manner. There were none of the conventionalisms of the pulpit orator, who often weakens the strongest ideas by the hackneyed or obsolete phraseology ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... acquiescence. But Edwin, whose indignation was reawakened at this exclusion of his friend from the privilege of his birth, said something so warm to the marshal that Wallace, in a low voice, was obliged to check his vehemence by a declaration, that, however obsolete the custom, and revived in his case only, it was his determination to submit himself in every respect to whatever was exacted of him by ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... of chemistry. Steel is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"— celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,—states that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII, was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... not present a portrait here. But a study of the proboscis of the fly reveals a wonderful adaptability of the mouth-parts of this insect to their uses. We have already noticed the most perfect condition of these parts as seen in the horse fly. In the proboscis of the house fly the hard parts are obsolete, and instead we have a fleshy tongue like organ (Fig. 84), bent up beneath the head when at rest. The maxillae are minute, their palpi (mp) being single-jointed, and the mandibles (m) are comparatively useless, being very short and small, compared with the lancet-like jaws ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... All this means an ideal, nay, a religion. Yes; people, quite matter-of-fact, worldly people, are perpetually sacrificing to ideals. And what is more, quite superior, virtuous people, religious in the best sense of the word, are apt to have, besides the ostensible and perhaps rather obsolete one of churches and meeting-houses, another cultus, esoteric, unspoken but acted upon, of which the priests and casuists ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... power with whom we could act against her? On this new system of optimism, it is so much the better: so much the further are we removed from the contact with infectious despotism. No longer a thought of a barrier in the Netherlands to Holland against France. All that is obsolete policy. It is fit that France should have both Holland and the Austrian Netherlands too, as a barrier to her against the attacks of despotism. She cannot multiply her securities too much; and as to our security, it is to be found in hers. Had we cherished her from the beginning, and felt ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... their rows of vines; not that the buildings throughout the city should be detached from each other, only in some parts of it; thus elegance and safety will be equally consulted. With respect to walls, those who say that a courageous people ought not to have any, pay too much respect to obsolete notions; particularly as we may see those who pride themselves therein continually confuted by facts. It is indeed disreputable for those who are equal, or nearly so, to the enemy, to endeavour to take refuge within their walls—but since it very often happens, that those who make the attack ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... the time of Boccace, who likewise received no little help from his master Petrarch. But the reformation of their prose was wholly owing to Boccace himself, who is yet the standard of purity in the Italian tongue, though many of his phrases are become obsolete, as in process of time it must needs happen. Chaucer (as you have formerly been told by our learned Mr. Rymer) first adorned and amplified our barren tongue from the Provencal, [Footnote: No one now believes this. An excellent discussion of the subject will be found in Professor ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Public Services Commission, though now too obviously obsolete to be discussed, caused both disappointment and resentment; for it showed that, in the eyes of the majority of the Commissioners, English domination in Indian administration was to be perpetual, and that thirty ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... but his exact association with the deaths first of the Chinaman Pi Lung, and second of Cohen, remained to be proved. Certain critics have declared the Metropolitan detective service to be obsolete and inefficient. Kerry, as a potential superintendent, resented these criticisms, and in his protege Durham, perceived a member of the new generation who was likely in time to produce results calculated to remove ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... for a worthy book of sound hygienic and medical facts for the non-medical people. The Ideal Book for this mission should be compact in form, but large enough to give the salient facts, and give these in understandable language; it must not be "loaded" with obsolete and useless junk of odds and ends which have long ceased to be even interesting; it must carry with it the stamp of genuine reliability; it should treat all the ordinary and most common forms of ailments and accidents; it must be safe in its teachings; ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... of its far-reaching history, and in its definiteness and certainty as well as in its arrangement it reveals the great progress that had been made since the law books of the reign of Henry I. That progress continued so rapid that within a hundred years Glanvill's book had become obsolete, but by that time it had been succeeded by others in the long series of great books on our common law. Nor ought we perhaps entirely to overlook another book, as interesting in its way, the Dialogue of the Exchequer. ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... in the dark," replied Legrand, "for a few days, during which I made diligent inquiry, in the neighborhood of Sullivan's Island, for any building, which went by the name of the 'Bishop's Hotel'—for of course I dropped the obsolete word 'hostel.' Gaining no information on the subject, I was on the point of extending my sphere of search, and proceeding in a more systematic manner, when, one morning, it entered into my head, quite suddenly, that this 'Bishop's Hostel' ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... me also in the dark," replied Legrand, "for a few days; during which I made diligent inquiry, in the neighborhood of Sullivan's Island, for any building which went by the name of the 'Bishop's Hotel'; for, of course, I dropped the obsolete word 'hostel.' Gaining no information on the subject, I was on the point of extending my sphere of search, and proceeding in a more systematic manner, when one morning it entered into my head, quite suddenly, that this 'Bishop's Hostel' might have ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The Nightingale' in Lyrical Ballads. In later editions he altered ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... inspiring sentiments. They are still being read by thousands of boys and girls, every year, but they are being read to the accompaniment of grammars, lexicons, and the commentary of learned professors, upon roots, derivatives and obsolete usages. A vast amount of time and energy is devoted to this undertaking, which is usually justified on the ground that it affords excellent training for the intellect. But how about the feelings of admiration and enthusiasm which works of such great beauty ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... mediaeval atmosphere. Her story is grievously overburdened with elaborate descriptions of customs and ceremonies, and she adds laborious notes, citing passages from learned authorities, such as Leland's Collectanea, Pegge's dissertation on the obsolete office of Esquire of the King's Body, Sir George Bulke's account of the coronation of Richard III., Mador's History of the Exchequer, etc. We are transported from the eighteenth century, not actually to mediaeval ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... upstairs, and after a little while came down again in his best black coat, carefully smoothing a tall hat of obsolete shape with his pocket-handkerchief. 'I ain't wore it for years,' he said. 'I ought to 'a' wore it—it might 'a' pleased 'er. She used to say she wouldn't walk with me in no other—when I used to meet ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... empathy, asserts itself in answer to every act of contemplative attention, and is as enduring and intrinsic as the other values are apt to be momentary and relative. A Greek vase with its bottom knocked out and with a scarce intelligible incident of obsolete mythology portrayed upon it, has claims upon our feelings which the most useful modern mechanism ceases to have even in the intervals of its use, and which the newspaper, crammed full of the most important tidings, loses as soon as we have taken ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... where instruments of punishment were piled up. There were rattans and bamboos for flogging purposes by the side of yokes, collars, and fetters, carefully designed for subduing the refractory. There was a double set of stocks like those now obsolete in America, and their appearance indicated frequent use. To be cornered in these would be as unpleasant as in ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... social influence than appears on the surface. In a considerable part of the area of social inspiration the Church has an absolute monopoly. The rural church, however, has been until recently too well content with an individual ethics that modern life has made obsolete. In our day healthy-minded religion is forcing men and women to see their duties in social forms. It is becoming clear that one cannot save his own soul in full degree if attention is concentrated upon personal salvation. The country ministry is ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... obsolete. It is as good doctrine to-day as it was in poor Richard's time. Of that I ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... taught to consider above them, and learn to count their own lives a failure. Girls starve in a mean poverty, or do worse, because they are too proud to work in a chamber, or go into a shop. American servants are obsolete, all common employments are at a discount, the professions are crowded to overflowing, the country throngs with demagogues, and a general discontent with a humble lot prevails, simply because the youth of America have had the idea drilled into them that to be in private life, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... he may be distinguished from his relatives by the dimness of the spots upon his breast. The wood thrush has very clear, distinct oval spots on a white ground; in the hermit, the spots run more into lines, on a ground of a faint bluish white; in the veery, the marks are almost obsolete, and a few rods off his breast presents only a dull yellowish appearance. To get a good view of him you have only to sit down in his haunts, as in such cases he seems equally anxious to get a good ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... of it—the manner of it! That was the serious part. It could have far-reaching results; results whose gravity might transcend all guessing. It might be the initial step toward a return to government by force, a restoration of the irresponsible methods of obsolete times. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... paltry equipages, tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some haunted place, it appears to be beloved and frequented only by the apparitions of an obsolete race. Yet many minds will find it infinitely more congenial thus, than amidst all the popular splendours of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... war came, it was wholly unprepared. That it was able to offer the stubborn and heroic resistance which it did to the advance of the German legions speaks volumes for Belgian stamina and courage. Many of the troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete pattern, the supply of ammunition was insufficient, and though the artillery was on the whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a tremendous disadvantage by the superior range and calibre of the German field- guns. The men did ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... of life, however, has already become obsolete among the more advanced biologists as a result of the wonderful discoveries of modern science, which are fast bridging the chasm between the material and the spiritual ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... IN NOMENCLATURE.—The old name of "Turnpike Roads" has, long ago, with the almost universal disappearance of the ancient turnpikes, become obsolete. Nowadays, bicycles being "always with us," why not for "Turnpike Roads" substitute "Turn-bike roads"? This ought to suit the "B. B. ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... public affairs, appeared confronting each other. During some years they were designated as Cavaliers and Roundheads. They were subsequently called Tories and Whigs; nor does it seem that these appellations are likely soon to become obsolete. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are practices against which congregations have a right to protest, not only as Christians, but as free Englishmen. Congregations have a right to protest against any minister who introduces obsolete ceremonies which empty his church and drive away his people. Those ceremonies may be quite harmless in themselves, as I really believe most of them are; many of them may be beautiful, and, if properly ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... The artificiality attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... his whole life. What better recommendation could anyone require? But vaguely he felt that the unique document would be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the Eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words—in ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... songs in the morning. They sing with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls. And yet in a sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters "prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars." The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well "worthy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eclogue. The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... want with her? What was he asking? What was he doing now—with both her hands in his, and her gaze deeply lost in his—and the ninth volume of Lamour on the floor between them, sprawling there, abandoned, waving its helpless, discredited leaves in air—discredited, abandoned, obsolete as her own specialty—her life's work! He had taken that, too—taken her life's work from her. And in return she was holding nothing!—nothing except a young man's hands—strong, muscular hands which, after all, were holding her own imprisoned. So she had nothing in exchange for the ninth volume ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... haunted by imaginary spectres; and, besides, there were said to be deserters from the Confederate Army hidden in those recesses who, by way of sport, would relieve any negro lad of his ears if they chanced to meet with him. Such were the last repellent phases of that phase of that now obsolete world of slavery in Old Virginia as ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... with resistance. If the people are then as good as their word, they may keep the government within the bounds they have set for it; otherwise it will disregard them as is proved by the example of all our American governments, in which the constitutions have all become obsolete, at the moment of their adoption, for nearly or quite all purposes except the appointment of officers, who at once become practically absolute, except so far as they are restrained by the fear ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... a foolish, obsolete Rabbinical myth. You must not talk such old-fashioned folly. Hearken to the solemn truth that underlies that fable; Moloch reigns here, in far more pomp and splendour than the Ammonites ever dreamed of. Crowned and sceptred, he is now called 'Wealth and Fashion,' holds ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... did in due course, before the Juge d'Instruction, he attempted to fall back on the obsolete Civis Romanus sum! He was an English citizen. He had written to the English ambassador, or rather to an old St. Gatien's man, an attache of the embassy, whom he luckily happened to know. But this great ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... accidental collision, on the other. But, as every one anticipated, the charge of the judge and the finding of the jury demanded strenuously the extreme penalty of the law. Besides this the judge deemed it advisable to introduce into the sentence one of those already obsolete penalties of posthumous degradation, devised in coarser ages for the purpose of making an awful impression upon ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... development of aircraft is the rapidity with which that development proceeds. Before a Congressional Committee last January an official testified that grave delay in the manufacture of airplanes for the army had been caused by the fact that types adopted a scant three months before had become obsolete, because of experience on the European battlefields, and later inventions before the first machines could be completed. There may be exaggeration in the statement but it is largely true. Neither the machines nor the tactics employed at the beginning of the war were ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... we could sympathize with their sufferings, lament their death and share in the joy of their return to life. In those vast collections of archaic rites that hazily perpetuated the memory of abolished creeds we would find traditional formulas couched in obsolete language that was scarcely understood, naive prayers conceived by the faith of the earliest ages, sanctified by the devotion of past centuries, and almost ennobled by the joys and sufferings of past generations. We would also read those hymns in which philosophic thought ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... rise to such a height. But with the spiritual quickening and the greater earnestness which will have their roots in this bloody passion of mankind, many will perceive what is reasonable and true, so that even if the Old Testament should remain, like some obsolete appendix in the animal frame, to mark a lower stage through which development has passed, it will more and more be recognised as a document which has lost all validity and which should no longer be allowed to influence human conduct, save by way of pointing out much which we may ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... acquired in England a reputation for originality. Philip had read some of his articles. He had formed a style for himself by a close imitation of Sir Thomas Browne; he used elaborate sentences, carefully balanced, and obsolete, resplendent words: it gave his writing an appearance of individuality. Leonard Upjohn had induced Cronshaw to give him all his poems and found that there were enough to make a volume of reasonable size. He promised to use his influence ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... writer of this page used to dine with a conveyancer—a lawyer of an old and almost obsolete school—who had a numerous household, and kept a hospitable table in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but the conveyancer was almost the last of his species. The householding legal resident of the Fields, like the domestic resident of the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... even wavered. British rule passed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities. The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... forward as a servant announced them, and tortures are obsolete words in gay Paris and even in the reign of terror, such a fair vision would surely have escaped. "A hundred thousand welcomes," he continued, shaking hands with all, "and I feel sure no bachelor under the McMahon regime ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... de Grammont, with an obsolete commission and a small party of men, made a brilliant night assault on La Guayra, the seaport of Caracas. Only forty-seven men took part in the actual attack on the town, which was guarded by two forts and by cannon upon the walls. The pirates ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... purchase what he did not think it worth-while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... obsolete wire system; no longer provides a telephone for every village; in 1992, following the fall of the communist government, peasants cut the wire to about 1,000 villages and used it to build fences international: inadequate; international traffic carried ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the extracts made by M. de Praun fell by some chance into the hands of Count de Veltheim, under whose direction they were published at Strasburg, in 1789, with no other alterations than the correction of the obsolete and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and others. Eight words have been sent. They are Scion, Suspicion, Coercion, Pernicion, Epinicion, Internecion, Ostracion, Cestracion; these are all to be found in Worcester's Dictionary. There is also Cion, which is synonymous with Scion. There are, besides, several obsolete words with the same ending not to be found in ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... assigned to this singular practice. (See Southey's Common-Place Book, 4th series, p. 379.) Mr. Water states that one of these iron frames still exists at Ferring in Sussex. The iron extinguishers still to be found on the railing opposite large houses in London, are a similar memorial of an obsolete custom. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... a coherence of them with one another, and a dependence on the main design: no leaping from Troy to the Grecian tents, and thence back again, in the same act, but a due proportion of time allowed for every motion. I need not say that I have refined the language, which before was obsolete; but I am willing to acknowledge, that as I have often drawn his English nearer to our times, so I have sometimes conformed my own to his; and consequently, the language is not altogether so pure as it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... year 1820 subjected the European concert to a severe strain. An insurrection broke out in Spain on January 1, and on March 9 the king was forced to swear fidelity to the obsolete constitution of 1812. The result was to plunge the country into disorder, as both the clerical party and the extreme revolutionists refused to accept the constitution. Meanwhile the assassination by a working man of the Duke of Berry, who died ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... photographs he had taken, I was able to write to him, and tell him that had I known beforehand that he wished to photograph these places, I could have supplied him with some ready made, as the forts which they recorded were now obsolete. ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... flaps (or 'ailerons') instead. This was a distinct change for the better, as continually warping the wings by bending down the extremities of the rear spars was bound in time to produce 'fatigue' in that member and lead to breakage; and the practice became completely obsolete during the next two ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... never shall be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... recently in use in one of the public schools of New York City was a curious example of ignorant compilation. It exhibited the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, the Bangweolo of Livingstone, and the Upper Congo of Stanley, all obsolete for practical purposes years before this map was printed. Most of our home map-makers were very slow in availing themselves of the rich materials constantly supplied for the maps by the army of explorers in Africa. But the most alert cartographers, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... means keeping inactive at considerable cost a number of machines which may never be used and which, however carefully stored, quickly deteriorate. Knowledge of aeronautics is still slender and improvements are made so continuously that machines may become obsolete within a few months. Moreover, the growth of service aviation in peace must tend to become artificial and conventional rather than natural, and this will react on design and construction, which will be cramped, both ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... cannot expect to derive much advantage from this reprint of the Roxburghe broadsides. But the antiquary, who has a natural taste for the cast-off raiment of the world, will doubtless fasten upon the volume; and the critical commentator may glean from it some scraps of obsolete information. To them accordingly we leave it, and pass ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... is as ugly a monster as has been yet produced. In uncouthness of form it outdoes those obsolete old brutes who used to roam about the semi-aqueous world, and live a most uncomfortable life with their great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws. The elevator itself consists of a big movable trunk—movable ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Hindus, is gradually losing its hold, particularly upon the upper classes, because they cannot adjust it to the requirements of modern civilization and to the foreign customs they imitate and value so highly. Very high authorities have predicted in my hearing that caste will be practically obsolete within the next fifty years, and entirely disappear before the end of the century, provided the missionaries and other reformers will let it alone and not keep it alive by controversy. It is a sacred fetich, and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... utensils of the present Ditmarshers are more Frisian than Platt-Deutsch. Now whatever the ancient tongue of Ditmarsh may have been, it was not the present Platt-Deutsch; yet, if it were Frisian, it had become obsolete ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... such persons as very dangerous to Ireland and to the repeal of the Union; and we request them not to push their principles too far in the disturbed parts of the country. Could society hold together a single day, if nothing but truth were spoken, would not law and lawyers soon become obsolete, if nothing but truth were sworn what would become of parliament if truth alone were uttered there? Its annual proceedings might be dispatched in a month. Fiction is the basis of society, the bond of commercial prosperity, the channel of communication ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Date entries have been normalized. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation have been fixed. Corrections [in brackets] in the ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Steeple tower, The Vicar from his gloomy house hard by Came forth to greet me, and when he had ask'd, "How fares Joanna, that wild-hearted Maid! And when will she return to us?" he paus'd, And after short exchange of village news, He with grave looks demanded, for what cause, Reviving obsolete Idolatry, I like a Runic Priest, in characters Of formidable size, had chisel'd out Some uncouth name upon the native rock, Above the Rotha, by the forest side. —Now, by those dear immunities of heart Engender'd betwixt ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... Secondary Schools, to the undoubted benefit of the scientific course, which enjoys a double subsidy from the State, and is subject to the superior method of examination by the Department, being treated as a detached subject and the candidates being passed en bloc. On the other hand, the obsolete method of examination by the Board tends to the serious disadvantage of the classical curriculum, the grants being made on the unprofitable results of a general examination of individual candidates, the class not being regarded as a whole, as is the case with the Department. By the repeal ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... at Hoogli in 1783, with types cut by Wilkins, the first grammar, but it had become obsolete and was imperfect. Such had been the tentative efforts of the civilians and officials of the Company when Carey began anew the work from the only secure foundation, the level of daily sympathetic intercourse with the people and their Brahmans, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... for his "adjustables" and looked round upon the mixture of dirty, frowsy figures. He stirred Nobby into wakefulness by the simple expedient of tickling him beneath the chin with a grimy big toe protruding from a rent in an obsolete and far from ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... THRUDUR. Thrudr is an obsolete N. word signifying fortitude, firmness; but it appears to have originally had, in most of the Teutonic languages the sig. of maiden, virgin; and was afterwards used in the ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism. It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal—every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... invaders made their first large capture of war material, which included 130 guns, though most of them were said to be of an obsolete pattern, the others being without breech-blocks. Within forty-eight hours the Germans had reached Krushevatz, where 3,000 Serbian soldiers were captured, not counting 1,500 wounded lying in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the courts had been frowning on witch prosecution. Now there arose in England judges who definitely nullified the law on the statute-book. By the decisions of Powell and Parker, and most of all by those of Holt, the statute of the first year of James I was practically made obsolete twenty-five or fifty years before its actual repeal in 1736. We shall see that the gradual breaking down of the law by the judges did not take place without a struggle. At the famous trial in Hertford in 1712 the whole ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... by all men or forgotten by all men, does verily remain the fact, even in Arkwright Joe-Manton ages! But it is incalculable, when litanies have grown obsolete; when fodercorns, avragiums, and all human dues and reciprocities have been fully changed into one great due of cash payment; and man's duty to man reduces itself to handing him certain metal coins, or covenanted money-wages, and then shoving him out of doors; and man's duty to God becomes ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Aulularia of Plautus. Offensive as such an application of a sacred building would be to modern feelings, it probably shocked no one in an age when the practice of performing dramatic entertainments in churches, introduced with the mysteries and moralities of the middle ages, was scarcely obsolete, and certainly not forgotten. Neither was the representation of plays on Sundays at this time ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... day. The fair sex appeared only at 'functions,' at church, and at the Sunday promenade in the Place. The moderns dress better than their parents, who affected the most violent colours, an exceedingly pink pink upon a remarkably green green; and the shape of the garment was an obsolete caricature of London and Paris. They no longer assume the peculiar waddle, looking as if the lower limbs were unequal to the weight of the upper story; but the walk never equals that of the Spanish woman. This applies to Portugal as well. The strong ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... had not touched, and presenting them as models of style; and thus a new school very fain of antiquity had sprung up, with Fronto for its acknowledged chief—a school pre-occupied above all things by the form; obsolete words set in a new setting, modern words introduced into old cadences to freshen them with a bright and delightful varnish, in a word, a language under visible sign of decay ... yet how full of dim idea and evanescent music—a sort of Indian summer, a season of dependency ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Christians to observe the law of Moses? Ought they to become Jews before they became Christians? Were there to be two churches? One for Jewish and another for Gentile Christians? These questions are obsolete now, but then they were burning ones and hotly debated. Hence this Jerusalem Council, where the matter was debated and settled, was exceedingly important and fraught with great and grave consequences for the future welfare ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... provincial Faubourg Saint-Germain nicknamed the salon "The Collection of Antiquities," and called the Marquis himself "M. Carol." The receiver of taxes, for instance, addressed his applications to "M. Carol (ci-devant des Grignons)," maliciously adopting the obsolete way of spelling. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... sound, because its enforcement is important to our peace and safety as a nation and is essential to the integrity of our free institutions and the tranquil maintenance of our distinctive form of government. It was intended to apply to every stage of our national life and can not become obsolete while our Republic endures. If the balance of power is justly a cause for jealous anxiety among the Governments of the Old World and a subject for our absolute noninterference, none the less is an observance of the Monroe doctrine ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... have a removable sealing nut around each post to make a tight joint between the post and cell cover, as described on page 19. Formerly some Exide batteries had cell connectors which were bolted to the cell posts, but this construction is now obsolete. Types KXD, LXRE, and XE have cell connectors made of flexible, lead coated ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... knocks"; this phrase is now obsolete: it alludes to a dog at table, who while picking up the crumbs, often gets a bite and a buffet or knock with it, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete prerogative. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Horace Walpole (who is Robert's Brother, and whose Secretary is Sir Thomas Robinson, "QUOI DONE, CRUSOE?" whom we shall hear of farther); and Stephen Poyntz, a once bright gentleman, now dim and obsolete, whom the readers of Coxe's Walpole have some nominal acquaintance with. Here, for Chronology's sake, is a clipping from the old English newspapers to accompany them: "There is rumor that POLLY PEACHUM is gone to attend the Congress at Soissons; where, it is ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a surplice, worn by bishops, under their satin robes. The word, it is true, is not obsolete, nor the thing disused, but it is little known."—Nares. ("Lent unto thomas Dowton, the 11 of Aprel 1598, to bye tafitie to macke a Rochet for the beshoppe in earlle good wine, xxiiii s." Henslowe's ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... infantile voice, as if he relished the obsolete forms of the words, he read the terms of the contract that united the parties "in the custom of Old Castile." Then he enumerated the conditions of the marriage, the penalties either of the contracting parties might incur if ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... good cheer reached the thirsty Englishmen, the first pinch of hunger came upon the men of Rouen, as, one by one, their last communications were cut off. Their attacks upon the enemy became more frequent and more desperate every day. With artillery, with every weapon they could scrape together, obsolete or not, they kept a continual hail of missiles on the English camp, especially harassing the quarters of the Duke of Gloucester, absolutely preventing the King's soldiers from ever approaching near ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... plateau just above Government House, where the best view in the whole island was to be obtained, above which towered the old battery on Richmond Hill, armed with obsolete and worm-eaten thirty-two pounders, once deemed sufficient protection for the Carenage or harbour below, which it commanded. Fort George, another fortification equally powerless nowadays either for attack or defence, lay on the right; and looking beyond, over a series of terraces of ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... But, as I have said before, prejudice dies hard, and sentimental pity is often only prejudice in a satin cloak. The Irish peasant is still assumed to be a helpless victim, the Irish landlord a ruffianly tyrant; and a state of things as obsolete as the Ogham language itself still rouses active passion as against a living wrong. I go back to that statement in the Pall Matt Gazette, to which I have before alluded, as an instance of the way ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... Thornton had killed the girl, and her brother, a mere lad, caused an appeal to be entered according to the English statute, and Thornton was again arraigned before the King's Bench. In the mean time his counsel had looked up the obsolete proceedings about "assize of battle," and when Thornton was placed at the bar he threw down his glove upon the floor according to the ancient forms, and challenged his accuser to mortal combat. In reply, the appellant, Ashford, set forth facts so clearly showing Thornton's guilt ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... together. Philological treatises were numerous. There were dictionaries and grammars for explaining the Sumerian language to Semitic pupils, interlinear translations of Sumerian texts, phrase-books, lists of synonyms, and commentaries on difficult or obsolete words and passages, besides syllabaries, in which the cuneiform characters were catalogued and explained. Mathematics were diligently studied, and tables of squares and cubes have come to us from the library of Larsa. Geography was represented by descriptions of the countries ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... programme. I'm only thinking out loud. I see little hope of doing anything so long as we choose to be ruled by an obsolete remark made by ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the transition from Communism in 1989 with a largely obsolete industrial base and a pattern of output unsuited to the country's needs. The country emerged in 2000 from a punishing three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Despite the global slowdown in 2001-02, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of this mansion of rather obsolete luxurious comfort was strikingly singular. She was a woman about sixty years old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as "un embonpoint flottant," and was habitually dressed in a white linen cambric gown, long and tending to train, but as plain and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... duty to their people is still allowed. He is a good King that preserves his people: and if temporizing answers that end, is it not justifiable? You who are as moral as wise, answer my questions. Grotius is obsolete. Dr. Joseph(310) and Dr. Frederic(311) with four hundred thousand commentators, are reading new lectures—and I should say, thank God, to One another, if the four hundred thousand commentators were not in worse danger than they.(312) Louis XVI. is grown a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... studies now, and contemn, gravely or jeeringly, the obsolete practice of "going through" the Bible yearly by reading a given number of chapters every day. We assume that those were mechanical contrivances which, at the best, filled the mind with an undigested mass of Biblical matter and made sacred things ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... tried under the comparatively obsolete Roman Dutch Law, which punished the crime of treason with death; but they would be tried and punished under, and in accordance with, the code laws of the Transvaal Republic, which imposed penalties of fine and imprisonment for the crime charged in ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... gallants of fashion at the hour of Vespers, whose practice it was to salute the ladies of their acquaintance at the door by sprinkling their dainty fingers with holy water. Religion combined with gallantry is a form of devotion not quite obsolete at the present day, and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... reasoning founded on moral entities. It may be explained in a manner consistent with the most just philosophy. He used, as every writer must do, the scientific language of his own time. I only assert that, to those who are unacquainted with ancient systems, his philosophical vocabulary is obsolete and unintelligible. ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... personal use lingered on in places and isolated industries long after the rise of the system of wage-paid labor and production for profit. But the old methods of production and exchange gradually became rare and almost obsolete. In accordance with the stern economic law that Marx afterward developed so clearly, the man whose methods of production, including his tools, are less efficient and economical than those of his fellows, thereby making his labor more expensive, must either adapt himself to the new conditions ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... things resting upon a patriarchal conception of kingly power, in favour of which analogies might no doubt have been found in the early state of the kingdoms of the West, but which was now becoming more and more obsolete. What had still been possible under Elizabeth, when the sovereign and her Parliament formed one party, was no longer so now; especially as a man who had attracted universal hatred stood at the head of affairs. Besides this ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... was becoming less and less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too intricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, new names, new tricks tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and more on the clerical staff and the finger-print bureau records. His position became that of a villager ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... The charm was less in his words than in his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in every look and gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony; parties of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... with a host of other forces, such as ubiquitous computing, advances in interface design, and the on-line transition, is prompting the consumers of computation to do their own computing, and is thus rendering obsolete the traditional distinction between end users ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... windmills. He fought for ideas, indeed, but his distempered imagination quite overlooked the fact that they were ideas long since dead, beyond hope of resurrection. And it is but the statement of palpable truth to declare that whatever ideas the South is fighting for now, are of a like obsolete character. The glory of feudalism, as a system of society, is departed; and its attendant glories of knight-errantry and human slavery are departed with it. Don Quixote thought to reestablish the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Shakspere, must sometimes have asked themselves the meaning of such old choruses as "Down, down, derry down," "With a fal, lal, la" "Tooral, looral," "Hey, nonnie, nonnie," and many others. These choruses are by no means obsolete, though not so frequently heard in our day as they used to be a hundred years ago. "Down, down, derry down," still flourishes in immortal youth in every village alehouse and beershop where the farm labourers ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... warming up exercise of the editor's vocabulary. When he really cut loose on Andy P. Symes the graves of dead and buried adjectives opened to do him honor. In the lurid lexicon of his eloquence there was no such word as obsolete and no known synonym failed to pay tribute to this "mental and physical colossus." In his shirt sleeves, minus his cuffs, with his brain in a lather, one might say, Sylvanus Starr painted a picture ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... of a man's general notions by the putting of a thorny special case was rather resented by the Dean; it reminded him of the voluble atheist in Hyde Park, who bases his attack on the supernatural on the obsolete enactments of the Book of Leviticus. None the less he was rather puzzled as to what he had a right to wish about Alexander Quisante, and so he had recourse to his usual remedy—a consultation with his wife. He had the greatest faith in Mrs. Baxter's eye for morality; perhaps generations ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... was dressed in an obsolete fashion: or rather, was not so much dressed as put into a case of inferior pepper-and- salt cloth, made horrible by means of shining buttons. I observed that these buttons went, in a double row, over each shoulder of the young ghost, and ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... factory-slaves against manufacturing lords, and—as President Lincoln recently intimated in his Message—the effort is there being made to formally enslave labor to capital. That is to say, the South not only adheres to the obsolete theory that labor is a foe to capital, but proposes to subdue it to the latter. The progress of free labor in the North is, however, a constantly increasing proof that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... who thought he made himself fine by being coxy to's betters." I must remind you again that Adam had the blood of the peasant in his veins, and that since he was in his prime half a century ago, you must expect some of his characteristics to be obsolete. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... only holding its own against them by dint of extraordinary excellence! Our mistuned and unplayable organs and pianofortes replaced by harmonious instruments, as manageable as barrel organs! Works of fiction superseded by interesting company and conversation, and made obsolete by the human mind outgrowing the childishness that delights in the tales told by grownup children such as novelists and their like! An end to the silly confusion, under the one name of Art, of the tomfoolery and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the public had expected too much, for they were curious to see Spontini conduct, and the prices had been raised accordingly; it may also have been that the whole style of the work, with its antiquated French plot, seemed rather obsolete in spite of the majestic beauty, of the music; or, perhaps, the very tame end left the same cold impression as Devrient's dramatic failure. In any case there was no real enthusiasm, and the only sign of approval was a rather lukewarm ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association? Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech today contains words that have been obsolete in ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... Book can be given, and if possible well illustrated, it will be very useful; and so will be a series of week-night devotional addresses on the teaching of the Prayer Book. And let not the need of plain matter-of-fact explanation of obsolete terms and technical phrases be forgotten on such occasions. Of course the Curate will carefully consult his Incumbent on the whole matter. But few of my elder Brethren will not feel with me that such "talks upon the Prayer Book," carefully considered ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... well up in local folk-lore, and had mastered the history of Whitby and St. Hilda, and Sylvia Robson; and of the old obsolete whaling-trade, in which she took a passionate interest; and fixed poor little Chips's mind with a passion for the Polar regions (he is now on the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the hands of Professor Owen? In such a condition of undisciplined thinking, the ablest man thinks to no purpose. He lingers upon parts of the inquiry that have lost the importance which once they had, under imperfect charts of the subject; he wastes his strength upon problems that have become obsolete; he loses his way in paths that are not in the line of direction upon which the improved speculation is moving; or he gives narrow conjectural solutions of difficulties that have long since received sure and comprehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these days attempt to colonize, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... its horror, the right of might: to eat one's like and take away their goods. Man did the same in days of old: he stripped and ate his fellows. We continue to rob one another, both as nations and as individuals; but we no longer eat one another: the custom has grown obsolete since we discovered an ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... is an allusion to a custom, nearly obsolete, originating in the feast of tabernacles, of sacrificing to Vacina at the harvest home. The Papists substituted St. Bartholomew for the heathen goddess. Upon his day, the harvest being completed, an image of straw was carried about, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dipping first into this work and then into that, I light upon a very curious and interesting edition of Froissart—an edition full of quaint engravings, and printed in the obsolete spelling of two hundred years ago. The book is both a treasure and a bargain, being marked up at five and twenty francs. Only those who haunt book-stalls and luxuriate in old editions can appreciate the satisfaction with which ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards |
