"Rusticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human race has been rendered illustrious and the Church Militant extended. For these new nations are as a tabula rasa; they easily accept the beliefs of our religion and discard their barbarous and primitive rusticity after contact with our compatriots. I have deemed it well to yield to the insistence of wise men who enjoyed the favour of Your Holiness; indeed, had I not immediately obeyed an invitation in the name of Your Beatitude, I should have committed an inexpiable crime. I shall now summarise ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works; those highly magnify Him, whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... Stainer's[33]{37} are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably delightful airs, and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and rusticity, but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the mediaeval |78| things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes found amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased to be poetry. Here, for instance, are five stanzas ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his. How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock, have contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... mosquitoes, and we had an ice-house that never failed. Beside all this, we had the pleasure of gathering our tomatoes from our own garden, and receiving our milk from our own cow. Our manner of life was infinitely more to my taste than before; it gave us all the privileges of rusticity, which are fully as incompatible with a residence in a little town of Western America as with a residence in London. We lived on terms of primaeval intimacy with our cow, for if we lay down on our lawn she did not scruple to take a sniff at the book we were reading, but then ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... town dames to an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manner was not prepossessing - scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or LANDERTNESS, so that when he said the music was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had always "a turn either to the pathetic or ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet. Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such themes.[264] He recognized the distinction between simplicity and vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind of English that is always appropriate and never ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... century Gothic, with a series of Romanesque windows in the apse. Here, too, the country immediately environing Auvers and Mery is of the order made familiar by Daubigny and his school. French farmyards, stubble-thatched cottages, and all the rusticity which is so charming in nature draws continually group after group of artists from Paris to this particular spot at all seasons of the year. The homely side of country life has ever had a charm for city dwellers. Auvers is somewhat doubtfully stated as being the birthplace ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... still proceeding at the Meeting House. The valley was quiet. Scarcely a sound broke the perfect peace of the Sabbath morning. The sun blazed down, a blistering fragrant heat, and the laden atmosphere of the valley suggested only the rusticity, the simple innocence of a ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... to hint that the success of the peroration depends much on the manner of the parties in conforming themselves to the emotions and action of their advocates. Stupidity, rusticity, and a want of sensibility and attention, as it is said, throw cold water on a cause against which the orator can not be too well provided. I have, indeed, often seen them act quite contrary to their advocate's instructions. ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... sport and earnest, that Hal was so enamoured of his fair bride, that anon the conquest of France would be left to himself and his brother, Tom of Clarence; while James retorted by thrusts at Bedford's own rusticity of garb, and by endeavouring to force on him a pair of shoes with points like ram's horns, as a special passport to the favour of Dame Jac—a lady who seemed to be the object of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... confusing but still intelligible route. It is not in truth a chapel at all, but a consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands, or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they were ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... of a fatalist impossibility, for the laws of arithmetic have preceded her, and there still remains, as it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity. Melancholy or passionate she preserves the reflected lines of a primitive rusticity, which clings to the homotones in despite of their artificial origin." But all this will be in the days to come when the flat keyboard will be superseded by a Janko many-banked clavier contrivance, when Mr. Krehbiel's oriental srootis are ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... throw into this lovely picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external, which in the living prototype we should term countenance; as if a chastened consciousness of her high destiny and exalted character shone through the natural rusticity of her features, and touched them with a certain grace and dignity, emanating from the mind alone, which only mind could give, and mind perceive. I have seen within the last few days, three copies of this picture, in all of them the charming simplicity and rusticity, but in none the exquisite ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... no more folly. I was too good-natured to allow it. I am vexed beyond measure that he should have seen such rusticity." ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... certain circumstances, one may glide into habits of seclusion, and in a kind of undress, slipshod hardihood, with a pipe and a proof-sheet, defy the world. Into this state scholars have too often fallen; thus giving some ground for the prevalent opinion, that scholarship and rusticity are inseparable. To me, I confess, it is painful to see the scholar and the world assume so often a hostile attitude, and set each other at defiance. Surely, it is a characteristic trait of a great and liberal mind, that ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... autumn leaves displayed their different hues over the hills and fields. The scene was in every way pleasing to the eyes of the spectators. The number of the carriages of Hitachi's party was about ten in all, and the style and appearance of the party showed no traces of rusticity of taste. It might have been imagined that the party of the Saigu journeying towards or from Ise, might be something similar ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... and that he, the cynical philosopher, the reserved English gentleman, the gay man of the world, you are all of 'em by turns, aren't you, Carleton? he! has gone and made a very cavaliero servente of himself to a piece of rusticity, and spent all to- day in helping a little girl ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... has the spirit of Cambridge been more truly caught than in Milton's Penseroso; for this poem obviously reflects the seat of learning which the poet had lately left, just as the Allegro depicts the cheerful rusticity of the Buckinghamshire village which was his now home. And thus the Penseroso was understood by Gray, who, in his Installation Ode, introduces Milton among the bards and sages ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... poems passed rapidly through three editions, and a fourth was printed. Several of Clare's influential friends took exception to a few passages in the first issue on the ground that they were rather too outspoken in their rusticity, and Lord Radstock strongly urged the omission in subsequent editions of several lines which he characterized as "Radical slang." Mr. Taylor contested both points for some time, but Lord Radstock threatened to disown Clare if he declined to oblige ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... much neatness in Pastoral is not to be allow'd, so rusticity (I do not mean that which Plato, in his Third Book of a Commonwealth, mentions which is but a part of a down right honesty) but Clownish stupidity, such as Theophrastus, in his Character of a Rustick, ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... right in doing this; or how far the moderns are right in carrying the principle to greater excess, and seeking always for poverty-stricken rusticity or pensive ruin, we ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... tinctured by something much stronger. They were getting up their energies for their nightly prowls about the city, and thought it no bad start to bait young Tom first. Of course he had betrayed his ignorance and rusticity in a hundred little ways. Although he began to understand a little of what passed around him in the interlarded speech of the day, he could not frame his tongue to any adequate imitation of it yet. He had learnt, alas, to swear in his ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Amina was the occasion of keen controversy among the critics of the time. Entirely averse to the conventional method of idealizing the character of the country girl out of all semblance to nature, Malibran was essentially realistic in preserving the rusticity, awkwardness, and naivete of peasant-life. One critic argued: "It is by no means rare to discover in the humblest walk of life an inborn grace and delicacy of Nature's own implanting; and such assuredly is the model from which characters like Ninetta and Zerlina ought to be copied." ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... monsieur," said she, rising as she spoke, and gathering her cloak about her; and Garnache remarked that her voice had the southern drawl, her words the faintest suggestion of a patois. It was amazing how a lady born and bred could degenerate in the rusticity of Dauphiny. Pigs and cows, he made no doubt, had been her chief objectives. Yet, even so, he thought he might have expected that she would have had more to say to him than just those five words expressing her readiness ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... me for informing her, that she must certainly come of the Setons of Windygoul. I wish you could have seen how prettily she blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... piete—engravings, lithographs, statuettes, crucifixes, crosses worked in wool, stables of Bethlehem, little holy-water stoops, and the faded photographs belonging to the early period of the art (portraits, no doubt, of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, all revealing that air of rusticity in Sunday clothes which is not to be mistaken)—I have before me the whole story of a simple life, surrounding itself year after year with fresh emblems and tokens of the hope that reaches beyond the grave, and the affections of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... twelve and half-past two, wind and weather permitting. There I saw Rupert, in his country guise, nothing remarkable, of a certainty, strutting about with the best of them, and looking handsome in spite of his rusticity. It was getting late, and he left the street just as I saw him. I followed, waiting until we got to a private place before I would speak to him, however, as I knew he would be mortified to be taken for the friend of a Jack-tar, in such ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... ashamed of it. In it were a pair of brand new tennis shoes (at ninety cents reduced to seventy-five) and a white dress of the kind that is called "almost evening," and such few other things as poor relations might bring with fear and trembling to join in the simple rusticity of the rich. ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty young men,—the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the shop-keeper,—all looking rather suburban than rural. In these days, there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the soil leaves its earth-mould on the person. There was likewise a considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them stern in feature, with marked foreheads, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but of this perversion he has made very little use. The irregularities in sir Roger's conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity, and that negligence ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... other place in which one may so readily learn the meaning of that misused word "urbanity." Urbanity is the state of mind adapted to a city, as rusticity is adapted to the country. In each case the perfection of the adaptation is evidenced by a certain ease of manner in the presence of the environment. There is an absence of fret and worry over what is involved in the situation. A countryman does not fret over dust or mud; he knows that ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Prevost, [5] Augustine James Frederic Prevost, is a most amiable and honourable man. Under the garb of coarse rusticity you will find, if you know him, refinement, wit, a delicate sense of propriety, the most inflexible intrepidity, incorruptible integrity, and disinterestedness. I wish you could know him; but it would be difficult, by reason of his diffidence and great ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... and rather plentifully; yet the valetudinarian (excuse my rusticity, for I rejoice at seeing it) appears to equal the traveller in appetite, and to ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... enlargement of mind acquired by long intercourse among foreign nations, and with the polish of a courtier, places himself between the contending parties, and with a manly disdain of every species of affectation, but especially that of rusticity and barbarism, avails himself, without scruple as without excess, of the copiousness of other languages to supply the remaining deficiencies of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... rurality—the characteristic, even when it be not the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great potager, without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long, low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... shown free from sin from her birth. The same motive gives us a clue to the character of Joseph. That nothing may be wanting to give whiteness to the purity of Mary, she is implicitly contrasted with the crude rusticity and gaffer-like obstinacy of her aged husband. He is just such an old hobbling wiseacre as may be found supporting his rheumatic joints with a thick stick in any Dorsetshire village. He is an old man before ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in "Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white orchards, and golden harvests—the prettiest though ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... a country gentleman appears a little curious in observing the edifices, signs, clocks, coaches, and dials, {358} it is not to be imagined how the polite rabble of this town, who are acquainted with these objects, ridicule his rusticity. I have known a fellow with a burden on his head steal a hand down from his load, and slily twirl the cock of a squire's hat behind him; and while the offended person is swearing or out of countenance, all the wag-wits in the highway are ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... no means unpleasing contrast and introduction to the trim trees and smoothly undulating lawns, and curved walks, and gay parterres, and fine ladies and well dressed and graceful children on some old ancestral estate. We look for rusticity in the village, and for elegance in the park. The sleek and noble air of patrician trees, standing proudly on the rich velvet sward, the order and grace and beauty of all that meets the eye, lead us, as I have said already, to form a high opinion of the owner. In this we may of ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... the present day can scarcely be contented with tall, waving timothy in the front door-yard, and the rickety board-fence that enclosed a scene of almost primitive rusticity—the state of ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... of rusticity—domestic Arcadia on a small scale," said John; "I should like to invite myself to tea with them. Who can ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... at a distance from the country town delightful in its effects upon the rusticity of the neighbourhood, but appalling when considered in connection with fish. One could not dine Without fish; the town was small and barren of resources, and the one fishmonger of weak ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the other. The true reason of this mixture is to be sought for in the manners which are prevalent amongst a people. It has become very fashionable to affect delicacy, tenderness of heart, and fine feeling, and to shun all imputation of rusticity. Much mirth is very foreign to this character; they have introduced, therefore, a sort of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... have fled from a danger unmeasured into a situation that abounded with difficulties. She blamed herself, she blamed her father, she blamed Gilian for his inability to be otherwise than God had made him. In contrast to his gawky shyness—the rusticity of the farm and hill, rose up constant in her remembrance the confident young gentleman she had run away from without so much as a knowledge of his name. She cried, and the afternoon came, a blush of fire and flowing gold upon the hills, the purple of the steeps behind her darkened; upon Big ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... place we lay at last night, to meet with a gentleman that had accoutred himself in a night-cap wig, a coat with long pockets and slit sleeves, and a pair of shoes with high scollop tops; but we soon found by his conversation that he was a person who laughed at the ignorance and rusticity of the country people, and was resolved to live and die in ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... mumbled the wretched victims, reddening as they remembered, in Adrian's slightly drawled rusticity of tone, Farmer Blaize's first ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the famous bronzes of Corinth, and they heaped these up in their houses. Thus Verres possessed a whole gallery of objects of art which he had stolen in Sicily. Gradually the Romans assumed a gloss of Greek art and literature. This new culture was called "humanity," as opposed to the "rusticity" of the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... Lilloise was occupied as a house of light refreshment; its exterior bore a look of poverty that was part of the mise en scene and it stood on the fragments, artistically imitated, of a fallen tower, so as to unite with the charm of rusticity the melancholy appeal of a ruined castle. Moreover, as though a peasant's cot and a shattered donjon were not enough to stir the sensibilities of his customers, the owner had raised a tomb beneath a weeping-willow,—a ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... treacherous, deceitful, and inconsistent system of politics prevailed; and even those small remains of fidelity and honor, which were preserved in the councils of the other European princes, were ridiculed in Italy, as proofs of ignorance and rusticity. Ludovico, duke of Milan, who invited the French to invade Naples, had never desired or expected their success; and was the first that felt terror from the prosperous issue of those projects which he himself had concerted. By his intrigues, a league was formed among several potentates, to oppose ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... left by the wayside for the history, not to be altogether despised because of its rusticity, of the unstable ways of one of the ancient peoples of the world, now few in numbers, forgetful of the past, estranged from the customs of their fathers, and dying without mourners and without records? Search the sites of camps the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... as Miss Rosey's compliment was, it had its full effect upon her father, who was at times dimly conscious of his hopeless rusticity and its incongruity with his surroundings. "Yes," he said awkwardly, with a slight relaxation of his aggressive attitude; "yes, in course it's more bang-up style, but it don't pay—Rosey—it don't pay. Yer's the ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... to your goodness, I do not approach you, my Lords and Gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, to thank you for past favours: that path is so hackneyed by prostituted learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. Nor do I present this address with the venal soul of a servile author, looking for a continuation of those favours: I was bred to the plough, and am independent. I come to claim the common Scottish name with ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and greeted her friend with much cordiality, while Peggy was agreeably surprised to note the easy self-possession with which Esther sustained her part in the conversation. Contact with the world had rubbed away the rusticity of manner which still characterised Mellicent, and though by no possibility could Esther be called pretty, there was an undeniable attractiveness about the tall, neat figure and intellectual face. Peggy knew that her father was agreeably impressed, for the colonel had a tell-tale expression, and ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... characters in these novels are of the same unpromising quality. Most of them are ignorant, uncouth and simple-minded; yet George Eliot gives them a warm place in our hearts, and we rejoice to have known them all. This ignorant rusticity is discovered to have charms and attractions of its own. Especially does the reader learn that what is most human and what is most lovely in personal character may be found within these rough exteriors and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... instance we shall mention is that of Battista Mantovano, whose eclogues, once much read and still worth reading, appeared among his earliest works about 1480. They are a mixture of real and conventional rusticity, but the former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of thought of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain leaning to liberal ideas. As Carmelite monk, the writer may have had occasion to mix freely with ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... columns of the temple of Concord; and the solitary column of Phocas. At a short distance the temple of Castor and Pollux and that of Romulus and Remus, which is a round building of great antiquity, whose rusticity forms a striking contrast with the elegance of the colonnaded temples, and which was evidently built before the conquest of Greece by the Romans and the consequent introduction of the fine arts and of the Grecian orders ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... of life that lends charm to it. What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows weaker. To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely. It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation. Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot. Nominally ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... West Point, in July, 1839, he was not a prepossessing figure of a young gentleman. The rusticity of his previous occupation and breeding was upon him. Seventeen years old, hardly more than five feet tall, but solid and muscular, with no particular charm of face or manner, no special dignity of carriage, he was only a common sort of pleb, modest, good-natured, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... to which so many travellers resort, (thanks now to his Grace of Beaufort for a better road than ours) the first inquiry that hunger taught us to make of a countryman, was for the hotel. "Hotel! Hotel! Sir? Oh, the sign of the Tobacco Pipe! There it is over the way." Rusticity and comfort often go together. We entered the inn, homely as it was, quite certain that any transition must be paradisaical, compared with ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... fear of parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from Connecticut—which State in general, with the city of Hartford in particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... like Frederick, who happens to please him, he turns criticism into eulogy; and for a living poet like Wordsworth he tempers praise by spiteful criticism. [Footnote: Carlyle's praise of Wordsworth's "fine, wholesome rusticity" is often quoted, but only in part. If you read the whole passage (in Reminiscences) you will find the effect of Carlyle's praise wholly spoiled by a heartless dissection of a poet, with whom, as Carlyle confessed, he had very slight acquaintance.] ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... in American humour, as it is shown in the great body of comic writers who are represented by Mark Twain and the "Genial Showman," are its rusticity and its puritanism. The fun is the fun of rough villagers, who use quaint, straightforward words, and have developed, or carried over in the Mayflower, a slang of their own. They do not want anything too refined; they are not in ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Her father had worked with her at Horace. She knew most of the Odes and some of the Satires and Epistles of the poet. They reflected benevolent beams on the gentleman of the poet's name. He too was vivacious, had fun, common sense, elegance; loved rusticity, he said, sighed for a country life, fancied retiring to Canada to cultivate his own domain; "modus agri non ita magnus:" a delight. And he, too, when in the country, sighed for town. There were strong features of resemblance. He had hinted in fun at not being rich. "Quae virtus et quanta sit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a warm Coat the Bearer had on, that he walked all the Way to bring it me, tho dated from York. My Misfortune is that I cannot talk, and I found the Messenger had so much of me, that he could think better than speak. He had, I observed, a polite Discerning hid under a shrewd Rusticity: He delivered the Paper with a Yorkshire Tone ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the Abbot, "You are welcome; what is mine We give you freely, since that you believe With us in Mary Mother's Son divine; And that you may not, Cavalier, conceive The cause of our delay to let you in To be rusticity, you shall receive The reason why our gate was barred to you: Thus those who ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... over again by Millet, Corot, Daubigny, and in this very simplicity often lies their charm. No costume or grandiose outline is here as in Brittany, no picturesque poverty, no poetic archaisms; all is rustic and pastoral, but with the rusticity and pastoralness of ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... brick houses; tired of the loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity; and, perhaps, a little swayed by a desire to be near an old friend and correspondent of the mother, to whose memory she was so strongly attached, came in the budding spring time, the showery, flowery month of April, to spend the ensuing summer ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... consisted of his wife Misia Petrona (whom he always called the China) and two grown daughters who had gone to school in Buenos Aires, but on returning to the ranch had reverted somewhat to their original rusticity. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... repetitions, till the inevitable "glory, glory hallelujah" had the voice of every soldier in the fort. The song "took," and the marching chorus of the Federal armies of the Civil War was started on its way. Mrs. Howe gave it a poem that made its rusticity sublime, and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" began a career that promises to run till battle hymns cease ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... her uncommon figure, could hardly find anything ready-made to suit her. I had to hunt about and to contrive with thought, for I would not wait a single day. I was careful to select the quietest and most usual things for her, so as to conceal her rusticity as far as possible. The neat dark-velvet toque could have its position altered on her head without much harm. The black veil would tone down the vividness of a complexion too long exposed to the open air; and its fine plain net would set off the admirable regularity of her features. Lastly, the ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... commonalty of the boiler deck. In a state of society which he, as "a type," reflected they saw themselves; saw their own spiritual image; their unqualified straightforwardness, their transparent simplicity of mind and heart, their fearlessness, their complacent rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards, their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... edges, rounded or clipped corners, tinted surfaces or any oddity of lettering, such as German or Old English text, are to be avoided. A photograph or any ornamentation whatever upon a card savors of ill-breeding or rusticity. Have the script engraved always, never printed. The engraved autograph is no longer considered in good taste, neither are written cards as elegant as those ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... Rhine—but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting country—unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe—lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Duke of Argyle. We were shewn through the house; and I never shall forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought, for the moment, I could have been a knight-errant for them. [Footnote: On reflection, at the distance of several years, I wonder that my venerable fellow-traveller should ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... as handsome as they say? I have a huge cur'osity to see her," said Wright, feigning more rusticity of manner and more simplicity than was natural to him. "I have, truly, a woundy cur'osity to see her, I've heard so much of her, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... expression in absurdities of costume. Women dared to wear such things, because, being aristocrats, they felt sure of themselves: and they professed to admire them, because, being engulfed in sentiment, they had lost all sense of proportion. A miller and his donkey were rustic (Marie Antoinette adored rusticity); an abbe flirting with a miller's wife was as obviously artificial as Watteau. It would have been hard to find a happier or more expressive combination. And when Rousseau and republicanism had won the race, we find the ladies of the Directoire illustrating ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... through the eyes of susceptible young manhood, would by no means be pronounced formidable. She was country-bred and quite rustic; but there are refinements of rusticity; and for Beacon Hargate, Bertha was a lady. She would have been a lady anywhere according to her chances; for she was naturally sensitive to refining influences, and of a nature which, remembering how strong ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... harden the body, and speculative sciences, which are apt to render us unsociable and sour. . . . Let us suppose, for example, a society of men so passionately devoted to hunting as to make it their sole employment; they would doubtless contract thereby a kind of rusticity and fierceness. But if they happened to imbibe a taste for music, we should quickly perceive a sensible difference in their customs and manners. In short, the exercises used by the Greeks could raise but one kind of passions, namely, fierceness, indignation, and cruelty. But music ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... derive from social life much more convenience than injury. Let satirists then laugh their fill at human affairs, let theologians rail, and let misanthropes praise to their utmost the life of untutored rusticity, let them heap contempt on men and praises on beasts; when all is said, they will find that men can provide for their wants much more easily by mutual help, and that only by uniting their forces can they escape from the dangers that on every side beset them: not to say how much more ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... itself to pleasing effect, since its dull-brown hue composed well with the red and russet glow of the leaves about her, and its short waist, close sleeves, and scant skirt, reaching to the instep, the immemorial fashion of the hills, were less of a grotesque rusticity since there was prevalent elsewhere a vogue of quasi-Empire modes, of which the cut of her garb was reminiscent. A saffron kerchief about her throat had in its folds a necklace of over-cup acorns in three ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... three young men—ostensibly there was only one—were doing a rushing business. They were playing very successfully on that trait of human nature which feels itself glorified and exalted when it has got something for nothing. The rustics, black and white, and some who had not the excuse of rusticity, were falling readily into the trap and losing their hard-earned money. Every now and then a man—one of their confederates, of course, would make a striking winning, and this served as a bait for the rest of the spectators. Schwalliger ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... between rusticity and scurrility, two extremes, as affability is between flattery and contention, it must not exceed; but be still accompanied with that [2181][Greek: ablabeia] or innocency, quae nemini nocet, omnem injuriae, oblationem abhorrens, hurts no man, abhors all offer of injury. Though ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was no longer able to laugh at his rusticity, but, on the other hand, was forced to admit to himself, with a twinge of jealousy, that the rough, uncultured boy of former days had wholly eclipsed him in every desirable accomplishment, as well as in the solid branches. For Maurice spent his evenings in quite a different way from our hero—at ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... admits nor denies the charge. He is convinced, however, that those who do him the honour to read these Studies, might justly complain if he failed to include in them an example of the work of a Poet who has shown our generation how rusticity and rhymes, cattle and Conservative convictions, peasants and patriotism, may be combined in verse. It is scarcely necessary to add that the author of the following magnificent piece is Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... labors of government, Diocletian, in a time of public danger, provided for the defence both of the East and of the West. Maximian was born a peasant, and, like Aurelian, in the territory of Sirmium. Ignorant of letters, [7] careless of laws, the rusticity of his appearance and manners still betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction. War was the only art which he professed. In a long course of service, he had distinguished himself ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the vegetables and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. The dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a cranny of the rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless bit of workmanship. A simple and kindly nature lay round about it; its rusticity was genuine, but there was a charm like that of poetry in it; for it grew and throve at a thousand miles' distance from our elaborate and conventional poetry. It was like none of our conceptions; it was a spontaneous growth, a masterpiece ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... between the frozen circles, the railway and the new roads will spread, the net-work of communication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the daily paper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered, will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islands and inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that wider network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of the land—will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... years; and we perceive its merits feelingly in declining age. If it is not a well of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English, the vernacular of his age—sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... not understand his diction in agriculture; but he made a Roman courtier Understand farming, the farming of that age, and could captivate a lord of Augustus's bedchamber, and tempt him to listen to themes of rusticity. On the contrary, Statius and Claudian, though talking of war, would make a soldier despise them as bullies. That graceful manner of thinking in Virgil seems to me to be more than style, if I do not refine too much; and I admire, I confess, Mr. Addison's phrase, that ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... me at once beautifully new and beautifully old. To land at Dover is the right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed are right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with whom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though for another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... than justice, and more of insolence than courage, in some of their most celebrated actions. However that be, this is certain, that they were at first a nation of soldiers and husbandmen: roughness was long an applauded character among them; and a sort of rusticity reigned, even in ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... so overcome by grief and indignation at her perfidious duplicity (since she had frequently encouraged me in my mockeries of her admirer's uncouthness and rusticity), that I stuck in the throat, and then flung the salmon violently across a boundary hedge into ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... slight, graceful figure as that of Dorothy. He hastened forward, and soon got near enough to distinguish the faces of the four, and to perceive that the ladies were being annoyed by the unwelcome attentions of the two fops, who, attracted doubtless by Dolly's beauty and apparent rusticity, were endeavouring to force acquaintance upon the buxom hostess of the "Swanne." Johnnie seized both the situation and the offenders in a moment. Grasping the youths by the nape of the neck, he cracked their curled heads together until ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might have the atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore, unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after entred a faire ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white asse, with a dwarfe behind her leading a warlike steed, that bore the armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes hand. Shee, falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned that her father ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... shows a spacious room, fitted with luxurious rusticity. To the right of centre are a couple of broad windows, leading to a veranda. In the corner, right is a table, with a telephone. In the centre of the room is a large table, with a lamp and books, and a leather arm-chair at each side. To the left of centre is a spacious ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... limpid purity; the clear crystal of the drink was mixed with flavours and perfumes to fit the palate of a patron or an emperor. The example of adulteration being once set, the implied contrast of civilization and rusticity was replaced by direct satire on the former, and later by the discussion under the pastoral mask of questions of religious and political controversy. Proving itself but a left-handed weapon in such debate, it became a court plaything, in which princes and great ladies, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... insouciance in social intercourse and light, cynical banter in the interchange of his ideas on every subject, trifling or serious. In such a society all free, spontaneous expression of emotions or opinions was a mark of rusticity, as Goethe was not long in discovering. The true Leipziger was, of course, a Gallio in religion, and Goethe, who, on leaving his father's house, had resolved to cut all connection with the Church, found no difficulty in carrying out his intention during his residence in the little Paris. But, so ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... especially for the early morning, was simplicity itself—rusticity, even. It was a Dresden shepherdess gown, made of a soft flowered stuff, with roses and forget-me-nots on a creamy ground. There was a great deal of creamy lace, and innumerable yards of palest azure and palest rose ribbon in the confection, and there was a coquettish ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... except, perhaps, at a London railway station at midnight. She was unused to her surroundings and she was not a city product. So much was obvious, though her clear pale face and slim young figure did not suggest rusticity. Her dark eyes glanced quickly and nervously around her, and then she started to walk slowly towards one ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... moment, I will break my rule and tell you a story. Some years ago a queer fellow from the country went to New York, and, among the sights and experiences he had planned for, he went to Barnum's Museum. Mr. Greenwood was then its manager, and noticed with some interest his patron's rusticity when he called for a ticket. He asked Mr. Greenwood, after having paid for the card of admittance, 'Where is Barnum?' As Mr. Barnum happened to be in sight on the entrance floor, Mr. Greenwood, pointing to him ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... of breeding up their sons to the liberal professions: and they are conscious that the company, the language, and the style of life, which their children would be accustomed to at home, are beneath what would be suited to their future professions. Public schools efface this rusticity, and correct the faults of provincial dialect: in this point of view they are highly advantageous. We strongly recommend it to such parents to send their children to large public schools, to Rugby, Eton, or Westminster; ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... felt bewildered, Jean had the trick of appearing merely reserved; and that is what saved her from the charge of rusticity when Robert Grant Burns led her through the station gateway and into a small reception. No less a man than Dewitt, President of the Great Western Film Company, clasped her hand and held it, while he said how glad he was to welcome her. Jean, unawed by his greatness ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... purpose," said the taller of the two sneeringly, "does your most rustic gravity, or your most grave rusticity, require of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Merton appeared rather late at breakfast, late and pallid. After a snatch of disturbed slumber, he had wakened, or seemed to waken, fretting a good deal over the rusticity of his bearing towards Blake, and over his hopeless affair of the heart. He had vexed his lady. 'If he is good enough for his hosts, he ought to be good enough for their guests,' thought Merton. 'What a brute, what a fool I am; I ought to go. I will go! I ought not to take ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... cliff' came down nearly to the river bank; beyond the 'Lime-house'; beyond the 'Poplar' Grove. The whole of that great city of a million souls, now called East London, consisted, until the end of the last century, of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, still preserving something of the old rusticity; of Mile End, Stepney and Bow, and West Ham, hamlets set among fields, and market-gardens, and of that long fringe of riverside streets and houses. In these rural hamlets great merchants had their country-houses; the place was fertile; the air was wholesome; nowhere could one see ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... to you, and thank you, sir," said the young man, with some haughtiness of manner, which hardly corresponded with his rusticity; "and I wuss your health in ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... her till she had passed out of sight, recognizing her as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unable to identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he had seen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity; the contrast offered by this suggested ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy |
