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Paragon   /pˈɛrəgˌɑn/   Listen
Paragon

noun
1.
An ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept.  Synonyms: beau ideal, idol, perfection.
2.
Model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal.  Synonyms: apotheosis, ideal, nonesuch, nonpareil, nonsuch, saint.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Paragon" Quotes from Famous Books



... was slowly working for my advantage, and paving the road to my promotion. The story had got abroad, and was in every one's mouth. I was looked upon as a paragon of moderation. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... cup to one made up Of loveliness alone, A woman, of her gentle sex The seeming paragon; To whom the better elements And kindly stars have given A form so fair that, like the air, 'Tis ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... a nurse of very remarkable character—evidently a paragon—who deeply influenced him and did much to form his young mind—Alison Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo, became "Cumy," and who not only was never forgotten, but to the end was treated as his "second mother." ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... legates to preside over the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. He sat in judgment between Vienna and Arles. He fought for the independence of the Church against emperors and barbaric chieftains. He encouraged literature and missions and schools and the spread of the Bible. He was the paragon of a bishop,—a man of transcendent dignity of character, as well as a Father of the Church Universal, of whom all Christendom should ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... Paragon. Not that he is a Paragon at all, for he smokes and hunts, and does all manner of wicked things." And then she went ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... frank and simple that whoever reads it must feel that the portrait Mozart draws of his Constance is absolutely true to life. He makes no attempt to paint her as a paragon of beauty and intellect. It is a picture of the neglected member of a household—neglected because of her homely virtues, the one fair flower blooming in the dark crevice of this shiftless menage. And at the end of the letter is the one cry which, since the world ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb

... to yourself that created the first emotion in my widowed heart. Had I fallen in love with anybody else, my dearest Nina, you might have cause for anger; but I assert, to fall in love with my own wife proves me a paragon of fidelity. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... without a hand to weave with them; therefore easily overcome by the Romans, though at that time, for number, a far less considerable people. If your liberty be not a root that grows, it will be a branch that withers, which consideration brings me to the paragon, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... awakened then, or if this awakening had anything to do with her own volition. It was not probable that they would meet again after to-day, or if they did, that she would not relapse into her former self and fail to impress him as she had now. But—here she was—a paragon of feminine promptitude—already standing in the doorway, accurately gloved and booted, and wearing a demure gray hat that modestly crowned her decorously ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... around her as an evening cloud. From her black hair shone the diamond coronet. To the sensuous swing of the music she wound in and out before the king and his admiring lords, advancing, retreating, rising, swaying, a paragon of agility and grace, feet, body, hands, weaving their charm together. When at the end she fell on her knees before the king, demanding whether she had done well, the applause shook the pavilion. The king looked down on ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... of their pride in her and their loyalty, have received it with shouts of derision and disgust. The flattery of Roman emperors and Roman Popes, if as extravagant, was not so personal. Even Louis XIV. was not celebrated in his dreary old age, as a model of ideal beauty and a paragon of romantic perfection. It was no worship of a secluded and distant object of loyalty: the men who thus flattered knew perfectly well, often by painful experience, what Elizabeth was: able, indeed, high-spirited, successful, but ungrateful ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... but the reader's interest centres in three of them—the mild and estimable Harriet Byron, the impassioned Italian Clementina della Porretta, and the ingenuous ward Emily Jervois. The excuse for all this is that this paragon of manly virtue has "the most delicate of human minds," and that women are irresistibly attracted to him by his splendid perfections of character. But posterity has admitted that the portrait is insufferably overdrawn, and that Grandison is absurd. The finest scenes in this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had brought us at length to that desert coast. He it was that had extended to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of forty in the groom's luxurious employ; a polisher of brass, a holy-stoner of decks, a wage-earning paragon who was not permitted to think, was now a thinker and a strategist, a wage-taker from no man, and the obvious ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... sovereigns and politicians of the south have lived to witness the practice of the monarch who had most laid to heart the precepts of the "Prince," he would have felt that he had not written in vain, and that his great paragon of successful falsehood, Ferdinand of Arragon, had been surpassed by the great grandson. For the ideal perfection of perfidy, foreshadowed by the philosopher who died in the year of Philip's birth, was thoroughly embodied at last by this potentate. Certainly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... 'I've managed the timber on the estate myself for the last forty years.' Will Belton of course did not say a word as to the gross mismanagement which had been apparent even to him. What a cousin he was! Clara thought what a paragon among cousins! And then he was so manifestly safe against love-making! So safe, that he only cared to talk about timber, and oxen, and fences, and winter-forage! But it was all just as it ought to be; and if her father did not call him Will before long, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... was a very paragon, with a fine manly countenance, frank-hearted, blithe, and, in many points of character, very like my old friend the Lord Eaglesham, who was shot. Indeed, in some respects, he was even above his lordship; for he had ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... chestnut heavily loaded with burs. This particular tree is said to belong to a variety that is much advertised, but there is some question if it is a peculiar variety of the Paragon, because Mr. Engel, of Pennsylvania, is said to have furnished his own Paragon chestnut scions when the other people were short of stock. If the nursery firm that has put out this Paragon chestnut on the market with so much vigor and at such expense ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... in truth! For his wife Anna, who was endowed with invaluable virtues, which made her a model among wives and a paragon among mothers, had not been equally endowed physically, for, in one word, she was hideous. Her hair, which was coarse though it was thin, was the color of the national half-and-half, but of thick half-and-half which looked as if it had been already swallowed several times, and her complexion, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... the year Colonel Sober has died. Colonel Sober, as you know, was a man who had made a very great success of growing the Paragon chestnut. His was the first commercial success in nut growing in the North. Then the blight came along and wiped out his industry. The Colonel was loath to admit for a long time that he had the blight or that his trees were ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... wife, with a little contemptuous smile. "You who are such a paragon of virtue. It would not be expected of you that you should make ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... and was not to be thought of as his successor. In his place Aurelius, on his way to Syria, had nominated Lutorius Rusco, a man who impressed everyone at first sight, and more and more the better anyone knew him, as the paragon of a Pontifex. He was not lacking in ecclesiastical unction, but did not wallow in it as had Bambilio. He was pious, but did not think it necessary to advertise it day and night unremittingly. He was not lax in religious matters, but he was no stickler for minute trifles. He inspired confidence ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... him on.") "When I was with her she seemed to be a little devil, encouraging everything that was bad in me. I don't know how she did it; but she did. And yet, Kathy, whatever they may say, I don't believe she's bad. I don't swear, of course, that she's a paragon ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... During such excursions, they played practical jokes, naturally. Among their singular contests was a bet of twenty-five dollars—as forfeit if, in horse-swapping, the loser rejected the horse offered on even terms with the one he "put in." Neither was to know anything of the equine paragon until ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... fell out that Septimus heard of Mordaunt Prince, whose constant appearance in Emmy's London circle of friends Zora had viewed with plentiful lack of interest. He was a paragon of men. He acted like a Salvini and sang like an angel. He had been far too clever to take his degree at Oxford. He had just bought a thousand-guinea motor car, and—Septimus was not to whisper a word of it to Zora—she had recently been on a three-days' ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... this should not have been thy fortune, we will endeavour with our utmost skill to describe this paragon, though we are sensible that our highest abilities are ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... between the Gracchi and Sulla. The last and greatest of the three represented the ideal Roman more nearly than any other citizen of his time. The most eloquent of jurists and the most learned of orators, he was at the same time a brilliant administrator and a paragon of public and private virtue; and his murder at the altar of Vesta, in the Marian proscription, was universally thought the most dreadful event Of an age of horrors. His voluminous and exhaustive treatise on Civil Law remained a text-book for centuries, and was ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... not release her from any part of her engagement with him, that he would give her no loophole of escape from him, that he intended to hold her so firmly that if she divided herself from him, she should be accounted among women a paragon of falseness. He was ready, he said, to marry her to-morrow. That was his wish, his idea of what would be best for both of them; and after that, if not to-morrow, then on the next day, and so on till the day ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... the chronicles of the ancients that this King of the Wise, Omar Khayyam, died at Naishapur in the year of the Hegira, 517 (A.D. 1123); in science he was unrivalled,—the very paragon of his age. Khwajah Nizami of Samarcand, who was one of his pupils, relates the following story: "I often used to hold conversation with my teacher, Omar Khayyam, in a garden; and one day he said to me, 'My tomb ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... to follow in the footsteps of the mighty genius whose name he bore. But from his very infancy he developed traits widely different from those of the stern philosopher whom we had set up before him as the paragon of human excellence. I have always suspected that little Erasmus inherited his frivolous disposition from his uncle (his mother's brother), Lemuel Fothergill, who at the early age of nineteen ran away from the farm in Maine to travel with a thrashing machine, and who subsequently ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... the village?" Ringfield was curious; he thought he had met every one in the village, yet here was some paragon of female skill, virtue and strength with whom he was ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... Arcadia, several other Works; namely, A Defence of Poesie, a Book entituled Astrophel and Stella, with divers Songs and Sonnets in praise of his Lady, whom he celebrated under that bright Name; whom afterwards he married, that Paragon of Nature, Sir Francis Walsingham's Daughter, who impoverished himself to enrich the State; from whom he expected no more than what was above all Portions, a beautiful Wife, and ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... the blood of "old" Lexington, Morella, and a streak of the super-enduring Morgan, could run, walk, and work my unregistered Outlaw into the ground; and that was the very precise reason why such a paragon of a saddle animal should ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... looking for my paragon in January. I interviewed applicants of both sexes and all nationalities, but there was none perfect; no, not one. I was not exactly discouraged, but I certainly began to grow anxious as the time approached when I should need my ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... those times, and his dear mistress. That infernal God Pluto came from hell itself, to steal Proserpine; Achilles left all his friends for Polixena's sake, his enemy's daughter; and all the [4867]Graecian gods forsook their heavenly mansions for that fair lady, Philo Dioneus daughter's sake, the paragon of Greece in those days; ea enim venustate fuit, ut eam certatim omnes dii conjugem expeterent: "for she was of such surpassing beauty, that all the gods contended for her love." [4868]Formosa divis imperat puella. "The beautiful maid commands the gods." They will not only come to see, but as ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... have said quite enough about myself and a certain groom, I have not said quite enough about my wife and daughter, I will add a little more about them. Of my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives—can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of business in Eastern Anglia—of my step-daughter—for such she is, though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... enough for you both and a large family to boot?—though to be sure she made a precious bad bargain over that estate of hers. D'you want her to be snapped up under your very nose? Why, young Cludde will have her yet, if he has turned out such a paragon as ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... splendid and famous passage in "Hamlet:"—"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" There his lordship stops, and then exclaims, "Shakespeare knew nothing of the evolution of man from inferior forms." But why did he not continue the quotation? Hamlet goes on to say, "And yet, what to me is this ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... He did feel that the latter injunction to such a model of discretion as himself amounted almost to an insult. A very paragon of valets was Smithson—could be relied on to be mute as a fish concerning his master's doings, unless paid to be otherwise, when he of course held to the accepted traditions of ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart

... squandered, to say nothing of the money collected from Empson, Dudley, and the other commissioners. There is nothing to give unless it be the titles and estate of the late Duke of Suffolk. Perhaps the king will give these to your paragon, if you will paint him in as fair a light as you have drawn him for me." Then throwing back her head with ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack it and kill all the ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... or you will have me afraid to meet the Herr. After holding him up as such a paragon, is it any wonder I should feel as small ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond

... cried the Duchess, tapping her fan against her long, thin fingers and breaking out into an appreciative little cackle. "Monsieur understands our language" (they were both speaking French) "quite as well as that paragon of wit and erudition, Dr. Franklin himself. Ah! what a man," she went on, musingly; "'twas he who gave the Duchesse de Bourbon a lesson in chess! She put her king in prise and Monsieur Franklin promptly took it! 'But ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... opinion of his paragon was soon echoed by the majority of Orham's population. Charlie Phillips, although quiet and inclined to keep to himself, was liked by almost every one. In the bank and out of it he was polite, considerate and always agreeable. During these first days Jed fancied ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... what had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise, under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had gone to sea in a Canadian vessel. The victim of this calamity had undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives, can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of business in Eastern Anglia. Of my stepdaughter—for such she is, though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason, seeing that she ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... gaily dressed With charms that could the mind beguile, There rose upon the lake's fair breast A hibernating, floating isle. Devoid of life it seemed at first, Chaotic, dull, with beauty none, But rays of sunshine on it burst And changed it to a paragon. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... its hero. His Life of Franklin Pierce belongs to that class of literature which is known as the "campaign biography," and which consists of an attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Of Hawthorne's little book there is nothing particular to say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly ingenious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President qualities which rather faded in the bright light ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... dissolve, liquefy. Memory, remembrance, recollection, reminiscence, retrospection. Misrepresent, misinterpret, falsify, distort, warp. Mix, compound, amalgamate, weld, combine, blend, concoct. Model, pattern, prototype, criterion, standard, exemplar, paragon, archetype, ideal. Motive, incentive, inducement, desire, purpose. Move, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... of the inferior eunuchs, not satisfied with this servile prostration, began to sport and roll themselves on the ground, but this could not be effected without immense labour, and difficulty, and panting, and puffing, and straining; for like that paragon of knighthood Sir John Falstaff, they could not be compared to any thing so appropriately as huge hummocks of flesh. There they lay wallowing in the mire, like immense turtles floundering in the sea, till Ebo ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... "unfinished!" Hector, Troilus, Pandarus, and Thersites, skilless Shakspeare had but begun—artful Dryden made an end of them; Cressida, who was false as she was fair, yet left alive to deceive more men, became a paragon of truth, chastity, and suicide; and by an amazing stretch of invention, far beyond the Swan's, was added Andromache. Dryden proudly announces that "the scenes of Pandarus and Cressida, of Troilus and Pandarus, of Andromache with Hector and the Trojans, in the second act, are wholly new; together ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... creatures!—Here we find thee, within an hour after thy departure from thy home, on an 'errand of mercy,' embraced in the soft arms of a pretty wanton, and revelling in the delights of voluptuousness. We might have portrayed thee as a paragon of virtue and chastity; we might have described thee as rejecting with holy horror the advances of that frail but exceedingly fair young lady—we might have made a saint of thee, Frank. But we prefer to depict human nature ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... exorbitant, that could have been asked for this little paragon, Madame de N. would very gladly have paid; but, unhappily, Sylphide was not to be sold: Lady R. was very fond of her, and never seemed to understand the various hints thrown out from time to time, with the utmost tact and delicacy, but still quite intelligibly, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... the matter, sir?" said the young men. "By Jupiter," said Bellarius again, "there is an angel in the cave, or if not, an earthly paragon." So beautiful did Imogen look in her ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... 1789, at the very moment when all the resources of nature and art seemed exhausted to render the Queen a paragon of loveliness beyond anything I had ever before witnessed, even in her; when every impartial eye was eager to behold and feast on that form whose beauty warmed every heart in her favour; at that moment ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... Rosalie, I should like to put my hat on when you have done admiring me; I suppose I shall see this paragon of a Jennie on ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... to say you expect to find such a paragon of perfection in modern times?" Jack asked, pouring out some ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... called for John. This paragon of a servant would rather have cut off his tongue and hands than ask ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered attainable by Hellas, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from the Laws, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to the common life of Athens and of Hellas. So in the England of the seventeenth ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... a careless answer, and turning upon her heel; and not coming to me at my first word, I flung a book which I had in my hand, at her head. And, this fine lady of your's, this paragon of meekness and humility, in so many words, bids me, or, which is worse, tells my own daughter to bid me, never to take a book into my hands again, if I won't make a better use of it:—and yet, what better use can an offended ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... was yet another ground of misery which cut him to the quick nearly as closely as either of the others. That paragon of a clergyman whom he had bestowed upon St. Ewold's, that college friend of whom he had boasted so loudly, that ecclesiastical knight before whose lance Mr. Slope was to fall and bite the dust, that worthy bulwark of the church as it should be, that honoured representative ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... rollers, the use of a "sea-anchor" over the side to "hold her to it," whether or not a man was justified in abandoning his ship under certain given circumstances, these were debated pro and con. Always Pearson's "Uncle Jim" was held up as the final authority, the paragon of sea captains, by the visitor, and, while his host pretended to agree, with modest reservations, in this estimate of his relative, he was more and more certain that his hero was bound to become a youthful edition of Elisha Warren himself—and he thanked ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... by the 5.40 p.m. train, reaching their destination a little before eleven. There they took rooms at the George, a quiet hotel in Baker Street, close to the Paragon Station. ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts

... either make or ruin. You know my characteristics; the slightest check upon my independence, and all's up with me. The woman I marry must be perfectly reasonable, perfectly good-tempered; she must have excellent education, and every delicacy of breeding. Where am I to find this paragon?' ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... have likewise been duly pictured and exhibited; the Ribble has had its praises sung in polite literary strains; the parks have had their beauties depicted in rhyme and blank verse; nay—but this is hardly necessary—the old railway station, that walhallah of the gods and paragon of the five orders of architecture, has had its delightful peculiarities set forth; all our public places and public bodies have been thrown upon the canvas, except those of the more serious type—except ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... any profession and much less when so sacred a calling as the ministry was concerned. He would talk in this way when there were visitors in the house and when his son was in the room. He spoke so wisely and so well that his listening guests considered him a paragon of right-mindedness. He spoke, too, with such emphasis and his rosy gills and bald head looked so benevolent that it was difficult not to be carried away by his discourse. I believe two or three heads of families in the neighbourhood gave their ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... cousin, I salute you," and he removed his hat, bowing with an ironic grace. "Believe me, I have frequently desired to see that paragon of all the virtues whose dutiful respect our revered uncle rewarded with the proverbial shilling. Egad!" he went on, examining me through his glass with a great show of interest, "had you been any other than that same virtuous Cousin Peter whose graces and perfections were forever ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... "This paragon should Queen Armida wed, A goodly swain to be a princess' fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... to hop off. My favourite mare, Pearl, the pretty docile creature which draws my little phaeton, has such a talent for leaping, that she is no sooner turned out in either of our meadows, than she disappears. And Dash himself, paragon of spaniels, pet of pets, beauty of beauties, has only one shade of imperfection—would be thoroughly faultless, if it were not for a slight tendency to run away. He is regularly lost four or five times every winter, and ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford

... House of Commons and that he voted with the ministry; and further, that his vote might, when required, be forthcoming, the frigate was never sea-going, except during the recess. It must be admitted that H.M. ship Paragon did occasionally get under weigh and remain cruising in sight of land for two or three days, until the steward reported that the milk provided for the captain's table was turning sour; upon which important information the helm was immediately put up, and the frigate, in a case of such ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat

... advancement in the Army for an only son. He soon became discouraged as to obtaining any information regarding David's later years, but some gossip on his younger days he did glean. Nothing could have been better than David's record; he seemed to have been a paragon of virtue. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... Grandet," which had been given to Madame Hanska on December 24th, 1833. During the shameless pillage of the house, the vultures who ransacked it found evidence of the most reckless, the most imbecile extravagance, proof positive that the wisdom, prudence, even the principles of poor Balzac's paragon the Countess Anna, had been routed by the glitter and glamour of the holiday city. One room was filled with boxes containing hats, and in another, piles of costly silks were heaped, untouched since their arrival from the fashionable haberdasher or silk mercer.[*] Balzac's treasures, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... practised before. Of other grammars, his preface avers, "They have all overlooked what the author considers a very important object; namely, a systematick order of parsing."—Grammar, p. 9. And, in his "Hints to Teachers," presenting himself as a model, and his book as a paragon, he says: "By pursuing this system, he can, with less labour, advance a pupil farther in the practical knowledge of this abstruse science, in two months, than he could in one year, when he taught in the old way."—Grammar, p. 12. What his "old ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... nor any other time than what was appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection, that is, whilst I was eating and drinking. And indeed that is the fittest and most proper hour wherein to write these high matters and deep sciences: as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues, and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him, although a certain sneaking jobernol alleged that his verses smelled more ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... charge! By St. Edward, is not that enough?" answered the king, but in a mollified tone. "And thou, minion, thou whom we deemed the very paragon of integrity and honor, hast thou aught to say? Did not thy lips frame falsehood, and ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... started forward, and, with a low bow, extended his hand to lead to the ballroom this rose-colored paragon and cynosure of all eyes. Evelyn smiled upon him, and gave him her scarf to hold, but would not be hurried; must first speak to her old friend Mr. Haward, and tell him that her father's foot could now bear the shoe, and that he might appear before the ball was over. This done, she withdrew ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... to be impudent, even though the arrogant manner in which Mr. Graylock had patronized him, and compared him to his disadvantage with his paragon of a son, had cut him to ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster

... raising his hand. "Let not the groping man thank the lamp, nor the briar the brook. Thank the sun whence the lamp hath his light, and the ocean to whom the brook oweth his waters. Thank that incomparable paragon, that consummate swan, that pearl of all perfection, my mistress, of whose brightness I am but ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... paragon of celibacy, was of a gallant temperament, and a wheedling tongue, and unfolded before the offended eye of the insulted and vindictive executrix so interesting a picture of 'his noble young friend, the victim of circumstance, breaking his manly heart over ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... country and in Europe; and I assert that, could there be a realization of all the aspirations, all the longings after the pure, the good and noble that fill the mind and pervade the heart of a cultivated and refined man who takes to this drug, he would be indeed the paragon of animals. And I go further and say that, given a man of cultivated mind, high moral sentiment, and a keen sense of intellectual enjoyment, blended with strong imaginative powers, and just in proportion as he is so endowed will the difficulty be greater in weaning himself from ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... This paragon of valleys burst upon us as such scenes, to be witnessed with advantage, ought to do, without the slightest warning or expectation. The road by which we approached it, being completely shut in with wood, and winding considerably to aid the ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... of widows, she Resolved that Juan should be quite a paragon, And worthy of the noblest pedigree, (His Sire was of Castile, his Dam from Aragon) Then, for accomplishments of chivalry, In case our Lord the King should go to war again, He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... was sent to school, but Lucy, in charge of a governess, remained year in, year out, at Hamlyn's Purlieu with her books, her dogs, and her horses. And gradually, she knew not how, it was borne in upon her that the father who had seemed such a paragon of chivalry, was weak, unreliable, and shifty. She fought against the suspicions that poisoned her mind, charging herself bitterly with meanness of spirit, but one small incident after another brought ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham

... admirable man!—a man who would have been a remarkable personality if he had not written a note of music. His faults—and he was far from being a paragon—were never petty or contemptible: they were truly the defects of his qualities—of his honesty, his courage, his passionate and often reckless zeal in the promotion of what he believed to be sound and fine in art and in life. Mr. Philip Hale, whose long friendship ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... I assure you that I shall sinivate, as you call it, nothing of the kind about you. I have no doubt, from what you have said, that you are a very paragon of virtue—a perfect Lucretia; ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... passes across the stage of Quebec history just at this time. In 1782 the frigate Albemarle, twenty-eight guns, lay in the harbour, and her brilliant, handsome commander was Horatio Nelson. This paragon of fortune had entered His Majesty's Navy as a child of twelve; at fourteen he was captain's coxswain on the expedition of the Carcass to the North Pole; and now, with an astonishing experience crowded ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... when at rest, will stand up in dock and shift from berth to berth without ballast. There is a point of perfection in a ship as a worker when she is spoken of as being able to SAIL without ballast. I have never met that sort of paragon myself, but I have seen these paragons advertised amongst ships for sale. Such excess of virtue and good-nature on the part of a ship always provoked my mistrust. It is open to any man to say that his ship will sail without ballast; and he will say it, too, with every mark of profound conviction, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... the free atmosphere, the grander Judaism he had yearned for. The town which boasted of the far-famed Moses Mendelssohn, of the paragon of wisdom and tolerance, was as petty as the Rabbi-ridden villages whose dust he had shaken off. A fierce anger against the Jews and this Mendelssohn shook him. This then was all he had gained by leaving his wife and children that he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... secretary of yours, Sir Marmaduke," here interposed Dame Harrison in her loud, dictatorial voice, breaking in on Mistress Pyncheon's dithyrambs, "modest he appears to be, and silent too: a paragon meseems!" ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... their thankful exaltation of his name! Truly they speed the parting guest, wish well to the traveller from their latitude, and launch with shouts the ship of his fortunes from their ways! They recommend him as a paragon of genius and learning to all communities or societies who want a service in his kind. How happy both sides to this transaction are expected to feel, and how willing people are sometimes to add ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... Hebrew, not from printed books, as ordinary scholars are wont to do, but from MSS., and found it so easy a matter, it "only took two hours," and it was simply "out of curiosity" that he undertook it. Before mentally placing this paragon among the classics, we showed him our MS. Roll (exquisitely written, as many visitors are aware, in unpointed Hebrew), and asked him to read a few words. This was indeed pricking the bubble. Tell it not in Gath, but publish we will, the ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... choose one of nobler mould than I. I am not made for sacrifice, to play the missioner and snatch brands from the burning. I have enough to do to keep my own feet in the ribbon-path of right. You must look elsewhere for that guardian influence which is to make of you a paragon." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... in Bengal and the United Provinces. Krishna has set up distinctly as the Indian Christ, or as the Indian figure to be set up over against Christ. A Krishna story has been disentangled from the gross mythology, and he has become a paragon of virtue,—the work of a distinguished Bengali novelist. I mean no sarcasm. From the sermon of a Hindu preacher in a garden in Calcutta in 1898, I quote: "The same God came into the world as the Krishna of India and the Krishna of Jerusalem." These are his words. From the catalogue ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... interview. Perhaps you will understand me, Mr. Wiltshire, if I tell you that I am perfectly serious in these old wives’ tales with which you reproached me, and as anxious to do well for these islands as you can be to please and to protect your pretty wife. And you are to remember that I thought Namu a paragon, and was proud of the man as one of the first ripe fruits of the mission. And now I was informed that he had fallen in a sort of dependence upon Case. The beginning of it was not corrupt; it began, doubtless, in ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... powers really recognised were force and cunning. The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed. The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs, concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the basest plots, each for his share of the public ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde

... at the advent of such a paragon, and horrified at Edith's choice of a name, Bruce had replied at once ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson

... days which had of necessity to elapse ere the uncle came down; but he met them with that happy frankness and ease which a young gentleman exhibits at his time of life, and routed his mother's objections with infinite satisfaction to himself. Miss Costigan was a paragon of virtue and delicacy; she was as sensitive as the most timid maiden; she was as pure as the unsullied snow; she had the finest manners, the most graceful wit and genius, the most charming refinement and justness of appreciation in all matters of taste; she had the most admirable temper and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... passing Johnny would have felt a thrill; had he spoken to him he knew he would have been speechless to reply. Judge then of his utter stupefaction when he saw Uncle Ben—actually Uncle Ben!—approach this paragon of perfection, albeit with some embarrassment, and after a word or two of unintelligible conversation walk away with him! Need it be wondered that Johnny, forgetful at once of his brother, the horses, and even the collation with its possible ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... honour, I never knew her peer, and all your honour's family are of the same mind. Do you hear now? said my master.—Well, said the ladies, we will make a visit to Mrs. Jervis by and by, and hope to see this paragon. ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson

... females, and the first are constantly in the company of their father, while the latter, as we have seen, share the dull fate of the mother. The first thing a male child is taught is love, deep respect, and obedience to his governor, and in this he is, as a general rule, a paragon. If the father be ill, he will lie by his side day and night, nursing him, and giving him courage; and if any misfortune befalls him, the duty of a good son is to ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... shoes, and such a pearl and prize and paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it. I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... down and kissed his mother. "Mummy, I'm not God Almighty. But I'll do my damdest for anything you want. Show me the paragon." ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... in twenty centuries against a like number chosen from the productions of the last single century, you will show a superiority on the part of the former; but that decides nothing. The Capitoline Venus is a paragon, but there is no collection of ancient sculpture which will compare with the extensive gallery of heads by Canova alone. When benignant Time shall have done his appointed work of covering with the pall of oblivion the worse nineteen twentieths of the productions of the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... What a paragon of scientific erudition must the public prosecutor be, in whose eyes all this is not sufficient to lend a publication the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... His swift intelligence, growing more manifest each day as he grew stronger, moved her admiration. He had, too, she realized, a sunny and sensuous nature, alive to beauty—even the beauty of the trivial things in his sickroom. He had an odd, poetical trick of phrase. He was a paragon of young Greek gods. She had discovered him; and women don't discover even mortal paragons every day in the week. Also, she was a woman of forty-three, which, after all, is not wrinkled and withered eld; and she was not a ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... and I found Horikawa in the room where he had been killed. The doctors thought he must have been dead about a day. Just a day before this time Miss McLean an' I met James Cunningham comin' out of the Paragon. He was white an' shaking. He was sufferin' from nausea, an' his arm was badly strained. He explained it by sayin' he had fallen downstairs. Later, I wondered about that fall. I'm still wonderin'. Had he just come out of the apartment where Horikawa was hidin'? Had the tendons of that arm been ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... we bought some Sober Paragon chestnuts from an eastern nursery which had been advertising them widely in this State. They were all infected with the Chestnut Blight disease. Now this disease has at the present time not appeared in Michigan, except on imported ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... friend!" cried Verus, nodding to the old man. "Caesar will be far better pleased with such a paragon of charmers as that sweet creature, than with all your old writs of citizenship and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... such close kin that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"—still he was a paragon of virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author of the New Heloisa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by combining tearful erotics with high ethics, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... between young people is impossible to avoid, since during courtship both wear masks, each trying to impress the other that he or she is a paragon of all virtues. The net result is, that the truth often becomes a horrible revelation immediately after the wedding ceremony. Unhappy and mismated marriages, without means of rectification, are the curse of civilization, the living, gnawing cancer ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... "genteel" for him. He caught at the saving suggestion. Doubtless that was the trouble. It was the blatancy of the business, not any evil quality inherent in it, which had offended him. Kindest and gentlest of men and best of fathers as Dr. Surtaine was, he was not a paragon of good taste; and his business naturally reflected his personality. Even this was further than Hal had ever gone before in critical judgment. But he seized upon the theory as a defense against further thought, and, having satisfied his self-questionings with this sop, he let his ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... officers were afraid Wolfe would insist on their doing as he did. But he never preached. He only set the example, and those who had the sense could follow it. One of his captains wrote home: 'Our acting colonel here is a paragon. He neither drinks, curses, nor gambles. So we make him our pattern.' After a year with him the officers found him a 'jolly good fellow' as well as a pattern; and when he became their lieutenant-colonel at twenty-three they gave him a dinner that showed he was ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood



Words linked to "Paragon" :   gold standard, humdinger, role model, jimhickey, jimdandy, class act, model, perfection, crackerjack



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