"Third-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... position as a sort of 'Benthamee Lycurgus,' and sets forth the problem which he is trying to solve in an official document then in course of preparation: 'Given corrupt natives, incompetent civilians, and a sprinkling of third-rate barristers, how to get perfect judges.' His estimate, indeed, of the merits of the Indian services, considered collectively, was the highest possible. He speaks of them not merely with appreciation but with an enthusiasm such ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... against overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet of the "madman of the North." The alliance of 1699 precipitated the Great Northern War which was to last until 1721 and slowly, but no less inevitably, lower Sweden to the position of a third-rate power. It was amid the most spectacular exploits of the boy-king that the ruin of Sweden was accomplished. It was a grander but more tragic fate than in the same ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... them at the same relative prices, as ordinary silks and shawls are now to be had. At present it must be confessed that our shops make but indifferent figures compared with those of London and Paris. I question if the best of them would pass for more than fourth-rate in London, or for more than third-rate here; though the silk-mercers at home might possibly be an ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the mighty controversy. Ability, adroitness, vigour, and character were for once all on one side. Palissot was perhaps, after all, the best of the writers on the conservative side.[192] With all his faults, he had the literary sense. Some of what he said was true, and some of the third-rate people whom he assailed deserved the assault. His criticism on Diderot's drama, The Natural Son, was not a whit more severe than that bad play demanded.[193] Not seldom in the course of this work we have wished with ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... chess, but very seldom, because he was only a third-rate player, and he did not like to be beaten at that game, which, I know not why, is said to bear a resemblance to the grand game of war. At this latter game Bonaparte certainly feared no adversary. This reminds me that when we were leaving Passeriano ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were mostly Puritans in religion ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... School; or Mr. Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from "Rena, the Snow-bird" at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O'Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... comments not interesting in themselves and leading to nothing. Mr Hardy possesses the power of being able to shape events; he can mould them to a certain form; that he cannot breathe into them the spirit of life I have already said, but "Lorna Doone" reminds me of a third-rate Italian opera, La Fille du Régiment or Ernani; it is corrupt with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a single passage of real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent defects of the art ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... which was in a sense indicative of the methods and character of the young man himself; a pale, characterless face, a straggling, sandy moustache, and an earnest, not to say convincing, manner. He was dressed in such garments as the head-clerk of Messrs. Waddington & Forbes, third-rate auctioneers and house agents, might have been expected to select. He dangled a bunch of keys in ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... verse. "Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, and his importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but mischief.[54] He never compassed even a smoothness approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... many pictures in the studios of modern Madrid that are inspired directly by the Italians, for nowadays Spanish artists flock to Italy, where they learn to imitate the Venetian colour schemes, and to become third-rate echoes of old masters. There are a few men who paint interesting pictures in Spain to-day—Pradilla and Carbonero are among the best; but Spain does not hold a great artist. The last of all died in exile in Bordeaux ...
— Velazquez • S. L. Bensusan
... here now, with scarcely enough resources to pay the rent of his bungalow and the expenses of living. A little dabbling in real estate, some third-rate work for the magazines, a passing notoriety as a guesser of crime riddles—it was not a record that promised ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... noble Company in whose service you command (and whose fleet alone makes them a third-rate maritime power in Europe) should appoint a few admirals in their navy, I hope to hear that your flag is hoisted on board one of the grandest of their steamers. But, I trust, even there you will not forget the "Iberia," and the delightful Mediterranean cruise we had in her ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I must deliver to the secretary of the Board, who would open it in my presence, and read the contents; after which I must employ my interest to be provided for as soon as possible. That the expense of his qualification for second mate of a third-rate, amounted to thirteen shillings, exclusive of the warrant, which cost him half-a-guinea and half-a-crown, besides a present to the secretary, which consisted of a three-pound twelve piece. This calculation was like a thunderbolt to me, whose whole fortune did not amount to twelve shillings. ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... business houses, and all the legations save only the American, are clustered on or near the river in a low-lying and unattractive quarter of the town. But follow the long, dingy, squalid highway known as the New Road, a thoroughfare lined with third-rate Chinese shops and thronged with rickshaws, carriages, bicycles, motors, street-cars, and Asiatics of every religion and complexion, and you will come at length into a portion of the city as different from the mercantile district as Riverside Drive is ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... characteristic of our rapidly expanding American cities. There were rows of dwelling houses, once ultra-respectable, now slatternly, and lawns gone grey; some of these houses had been remodelled into third-rate shops, or thrown together to make manufacturing establishments: saloons occupied all the favourable corners. Flaming posters on vacant lots announced, pictorially, dubious attractions at the theatres. It was a wonderful Indian summer day, the sunlight soft and melting; and the smoke ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on their thin bare shanks, their glittering eyes and hooked noses shaded within its hood, many adult Arabs assume a strangely bird-like appearance; while the smooth-faced youths, peering from under its coquettish folds, remind one of third-rate actresses out for a spree. In motion, when some half-naked boy sits merrily upon a galloping stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age, crouching at ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... quick that lessons are no trouble at all, and another wearily plods over them till ready to give up in despair. Evidences of this unevenness of distribution meet us everywhere. One man will make a fortune where another would not suspect a chance. One remains a third-rate salesman all his days, and would spend even his holidays in looking into shop windows, for his soul does not rise beyond them; while his comrade is brimful of talent, and the world will ring at last with his name and fame. We say "it ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the place at all. That donkey of a driver has brought us to the Metropole and not the Metropolitan. I might have known Dad wouldn't put up at such a third-rate tavern as this! Now, you idiot, we'll get in again and you take us where you were bid! and there, it's likely, you'll make the acquaintance of Mr. Daniel Ford in a way you don't like! Get in, Dorothy—Alfy! We can't ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... Marguerite de Lorraine, Gaston de France had three daughters, and being devoid of energy, ability, or greatness of character, they did not object when the King married them to sovereigns of the third-rate order. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George: 'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn't I fry eggs in butter—now? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed to put a guest ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... former is indeed brutal, but the latter is devilish, and far more effectually destroys the souls of men than the former. Nevertheless in our poor money-grubbing land, the creeping paralysis of tricks of trade, &c., is thought little of; and the shopman who has just sold a third-rate article for a first-class price goes home with respectable self-complacency and glances with holy horror at the man who reels ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of men belonging to these soul-forsaken years: Third-rate canvassers, collectors, journalists and auctioneers. They are never very shabby, they are never very spruce — Going cheerfully and carelessly and smoothly to the deuce. Some are wanderers by profession, 'turning up' and gone as soon, Travelling second-class, or steerage (when it's cheap ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... object he possessed, as well as of the broad lands and the accumulated money. He would lose all, but in whose favour? Rex did not know. Perhaps the lawful heir of Greifenstein was a poor officer of foot in a third-rate garrison town, eking out his pay with the remains of a meagre inheritance, desperately poor, and as desperately honourable. Possibly there was a connexion with some great and powerful family, into his full hands everything would go, if the truth were known. Possibly—Rex stopped short in his train ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... risking our necks," Nelsen chuckled. "And maybe, even if we make it, we'll be just a third-rate group, lost in the crowd that's following the explorers... Just the same, I wish you could plan to go, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Pisano had a God and a character. All artists who have attempted to assume, or in their weakness have been affected by, the national peculiarities of other times and countries, have instantly, whatever their original power, fallen to third-rate rank, or fallen altogether, and have invariably lost their birthright and blessing, lost their power over the human heart, lost all capability of teaching or benefiting others. Compare the hybrid classification of Wilson with the rich English purity of Gainsborough; compare the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares—so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness—that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... regarding the minister, mentioned in my last note, was from a talk with him while he was, it seems, under the influence of fever. In later conversations he has been more lucid; but he is a third-rate man, and quite unequal to the burthen that the favour of the King has placed upon him. That favour will, however, be but of short duration, for the King is said to have expressed great distrust in his capacity to do any of the things he promised, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... principal customers were wharf-rats, and his principal business the traffic in old cordage and copper, he had hung out as a sign an old tavern-sign of a ship that had come to him. His place still went by the name of "The Ship," though it was really, as I say, a mere wreck, a rambling, third-rate old furniture shop of ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... BULGER, and even Professors gave him a wide berth in making up a match. But by steady perseverance, reading Sir WALTER SIMPSON, taking out a professional, and practising his iron in an adjacent field, BULGER soon developed to such an extent that few third-rate players could give him a stroke a hole. He had been in considerable danger of "a stroke" of quite a different character before he left London, and the delights of the Bar. But he returned to the Capital in rude health, and may now often be seen and heard, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... phase of a suppressed form of religion the matter might never have assumed any significance. Had not a third-rate Puritan clergyman, John Darrel, almost by accident hit upon the use of exorcism, the story of its use would be hardly worth telling.[3] When this young minister was not more than twenty, but already, as ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... undergoes an examination far from rigorous. We mount several flights of steps, leading from one narrow street to another in this old quarter of the town, and are led to an hotel, which had much the air of a second or third-rate Italian locanda—lofty and spacious apartments, neither clean nor well arranged; and the déjeûner was a sorry affair. N'importe; we shall not stay longer in Bastia than is necessary, and we may go further ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... chair while he waited and thumbed through a fan magazine. From time to time he found his own face in such publications. He was a third-rate celebrity, really. Luck hadn't been with him so far as the buffs were concerned. They wanted spectacular victories, murderous situations in which they could lose themselves in vicarious sadistic thrills. Joe had reached most of his peaks while in retreat, or commanding a holding action. ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... it is not known that he edited or authorized the publication of a single one of them—and the dates at which they respectively appeared, are mere matters of conjecture. His appearance in his own plays in second and even third-rate parts—his indifference to reputation, and even his apparent aversion to be held in repute by his contemporaries—his disappearance from London [18the seat and centre of English histrionic art] so soon as he had realised a moderate competency—and his retirement about ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the north side, down to the feet of the horizontal line of sitting figures, were originally third-rate work of the school of Giotto; the rest of the chapel was originally, and most of it is still, magnificent work of the school of Siena. The roof and north side have been heavily repainted in, many places; the rest is ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... the superior numbers of the enemy, have utterly destroyed the latter, and obtained full command of the sea. Japan would have been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave seamen who unavailingly ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... English brig, which was ransomed for 200 pounds. This was Cook's first experience of an important naval action, and Pallisser was complimented by the Lords of the Admiralty for his gallant conduct. The Duc d'Aquitaine was purchased for the Navy, and was entered under her own name as a third-rate, 64 gun ship, with a complement of ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... been unusually gay and the opera most stupidly brilliant; stocks continue to fluctuate; another old woman was tossed and gored by a mad motor this morning. . . . More time, Alixe? . . . With pleasure; Mrs. Vendenning has bought a third-rate castle in Wales; a man was found dead with a copy of the Tribune in his pocket—the verdict being in accordance with fact; the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... capable of living at all by the things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,' the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!—I will now quit this of the organisation ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... same family in one of the most admired artists of the day. They visited Jocelyn's studio together—a vast, bare place, wholly unadorned by the tawdry paraphernalia which is sometimes affected by third-rate men to create an "art" impression on the minds of the uninstructed—and they had stood lost in wonder and admiration before a great picture he was painting on commission, entitled "Wild Weather." It was what is ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep—by a certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights—a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next—a kind of national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... was the definition Cospatric clapped on to that culminating episode of his Cambridge life; "but," he added, with a chuckle, "I did enjoy myself whilst the fun lasted. That's just typical of the particular fool I am. Nature intended me for clown in a third-rate travelling circus. The father made up his mind I was to be a big thing in the lawyering way. The two clashed, and the present state of affairs is the result. If some far-seeing guardian could only have averaged matters, I might have turned out very differently. ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... spirit for all that. The misery of it is that the work of the specialist in all these regions tends to set a hedge about the law; it tends to accumulate and perpetuate a vast amount of inferior work. The result of it is, in literature, for instance, that an immense amount of second-rate and third-rate books go on being reprinted; and instead of the principle of selection being applied to great authors, and their inferior writings being allowed to lapse into oblivion, they go on being re-issued, not because they have any ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you feel to be wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because "the lads have nothing else to do, and at all events it keeps them out of the billiard-room;" and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless RECHAUFFE of third-rate London frivolity: this is the life-in-death in which thousands spend the golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh that you ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... respect) could not bring himself to write Monsieur mon Frere to Louis Philippe, and for that reason would never compliment him but through his ambassador; au reste, that the Duke of Orleans would find a wife among the German princesses. It is, however, very ridiculous that second and third-rate royalties should give themselves all sorts of airs, and affect to hold cheap the King of France's eldest son, and talk of his alliance as a degradation. There are two Wuertemberg princesses, daughters of the Duchess of Oldenburg, who talk ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... of all forms of literary expression the least likely to bring a man credit or cash. Most intelligent people with a little gift of writing have a fair prospect of getting prose articles published. But no one wants third-rate poetry; editors fight shy of it, and volumes ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of friends." The fact is, in our original steam-packet there were some agreeable fellows, officers, whom I believe I never mentioned to you. They have been long expecting your worship's offspring, and have gained great fame in repeating his third-rate stories at second hand; so in consequence of these messengers I am received with branches of palm. Here the younkers do nothing but play rackets, billiards, and cards, race and smoke. To govern men, you must ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... miles south of London, and within two miles of our ancient and respectable hamlet. Here she belonged to several clubs, bridge, tennis and croquet; enjoyed being a Triton among minnows; entertained a third-rate set at "Littlecote," and joined gay little theatre parties to London to "do a play," and return home ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... you draw the line, and where would you begin to leave out?—I would only draw the line when I was purchasing a picture. I think that a person might always spend his money better by making an effort to get one noble picture than five or six second or third-rate pictures, provided only, that you had examples of the best kind of work produced at that time. I would not have second-rate pictures. Multitudes of masters among the disciples of Giotto might be named; you might have one or two pictures of Giotto, and one or two pictures of the disciples ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dispensed here, and the stately drawing rooms often welcomed brilliant assemblages. Now a profusion of signs announce that hospitality is to be had at a stated price, and the old mansions are put to the viler uses of third-rate boarding ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Walter, Cooper seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his children of nature. Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere artistic instinct, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Toni, who had only played occasionally at a third-rate suburban club, was at first no match for them; but the two Tobies, who were the essence of good nature, coached her so well and so vigorously that before long she was a capital player; and when once Toni realized that Owen wished her to be as hospitable as she ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... champagne breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I, nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... infantry, 40 guns, and 4000 magnificent cavalry, commanded by Latour Maubourg, one of the most brilliant of French cavalry generals. Beresford, the British commander, had the dogged fighting courage, half Dutch and half English, of his name and blood; but as a commander he was scarcely third-rate. Of his army of 30,000, 15,000 were Spanish, half drilled, and more than half starved—they had lived for days on horse-flesh—under Blake, a general who had lost all the good qualities of Irish character, and acquired all the bad ones peculiar to Spanish temper. Of Beresford's remaining ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... poets, great writers, and statesmen were honoured in the Abbey, and laid among the old historic dead. From the beginning our sculptors resorted to pagan emblems and pagan allegorical figures; the result is that St. Paul's resembles a Pantheon of the Lower Empire, and is a hospital of third-rate art. The first naval conqueror so honoured was Rodney; Rossi received L6,000 for his cold and clumsy design; Lord Howe's statue followed; and next that of Lord Duncan, the hero of Camperdown. It is a simple statue by Westmacott, with a seaman and his wife and child ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... politician, the saloon-keeper, and the policeman, there are others who take an interest in the breadwinner. If he is injured, or his property is injured, there are third-rate lawyers ready to bring suit for half the proceeds—an unduly expensive arrangement for the man that has a good claim. If he would save, there are agents of unsound financial schemes ready to take advantage ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... few men whom the count could not interpret; one stood before him. He could not comprehend why England had sent so astute a diplomat and politician to a third-rate kingdom. Of that which we can not understand we are suspicious, and the guilty are distrustful. Neither the minister of police nor his subordinates could fathom the purpose of this calm, dignified old man ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... hear a poem called third-rate Not as ill written, but as written late; To hear your critics for their ancients claim Not charity, but honour and high fame. Suppose I doubt if Atta's humorous show Moves o'er the boards with best leg first or no, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... days besides fever. He's getting soft—that's what he is. If you'd only know the man that he was—before—while we was up there in the Ice! That's his work, that's what he's cut out for. There ain't nobody can do it but him, and to see him quit, to see him chuck up his chance to a third-rate ice-pilot like Duane—a coastwise college professor that don't know no more about Ice than—than you do—it regularly makes me sick. Why, what will become of the captain now if he quits? He'll just settle down to an ordinary ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... living for myself and my small family, and we do not hanker after riches. A larger business would make me a human machine, and I'd rather just drift along and be an ordinary good husband and father. I'd rather be running a little, third-rate detective agency as I am, making just enough to get along, and have a lot of friends. I wouldn't throw down a friend for a million dollars! I suppose I'm the only man in town that thinks this way, but I'm ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... neighbors who kept their doors shut had to "consider" themselves such. It was only an assumption at best. So the aspiring lady received what she called select company on a Tuesday, and entertained generally on Thursday evenings. But her neighbors tossed their heads, and said they were only third-rate people who went there. ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... only way. The old Bellini finds in it his last and fullest ideal; Catena, Basaiti, Cariani do their best to acquire it, and so successfully was it acquired, so congenial was it to Venetian art, that even second- and third-rate Venetian painters have usually something attractive which triumphs over superficial and doubtful drawing and grouping. It is easy to see how much to their taste was this fused and golden manner, this disregard of ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... sunken day. Such was Helena's longed-for night. The tramcar was crowded. In one corner Olive, the third friend, rose excitedly to greet them. Helena sat mute, while the car swung through the yellow, stale lights of a third-rate street of shops. She heard Olive remarking on her sunburned face and arms; she became aware of the renewed inflammation in her blistered arms; she heard her own curious voice answering. Everything was in a maze. To the beat of ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... not done much in Latin. I have been employed in turning over several third-rate and fourth-rate writers. After finishing Cicero, I read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son. There is a great deal in the Controversiae both of curious information, and of judicious criticism. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... here are new subjects." One of these days somebody will come along who can write about them. I have started out without a writer. Fiske is under contract, James would give nothing more to the Atlantic, you were ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers. Beyond these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women. I can (soon) get all that I could ever have ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... to anybody, but I just made myself into a committee of welcome; an', when the train pulled in, there I was, extendin' the glad hand of the burg—likewise the glad hand of a guy you used to know in Oakland once, a third-rate dub prizefighter by the name of—lemme see—yep, I got it right—Big Bill Roberts was the name he used to sport, but now he's known as William Roberts, E. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... part in the Miser of "Furnish, an Upholsterer," was taken by a third-rate actor, whose surname has been productive of no little misconception among Henry Fielding's biographers. This was Timothy Fielding, sometime member of the Haymarket and Drury Lane companies, and proprietor, for several ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... There was a nicely fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled. The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this luxury was commonplace. Art, and the distinction ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... last thing was done that required her personal attention, Kate went to a nearby hotel recommended by one of the employees of the stockyard. It was third-rate and shabby, unpretentious even in its prime, but it looked imposing to Kate, who never had seen anything better ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... also on the Wear, where the largest bulk of the household coal lies. The collieries of the Tees possess but six square miles out of the 96, as far as we at present know. Turning, however, to that part of the coal-field regarded as precarious, and consisting of first, second, and third-rate household coal, we have for future use 300 square miles. London was formerly supplied from the pits east of Tyne Bridge, where is the famous Wallsend Colliery, which gave the name to the best coal. That mine is now drowned out, and, like the great Roman Wall, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... ideal man-in-the-street. We do not mean that he was typical; but if there are men-in-the-street in heaven, they will resemble Montaigne. And though we rank a third-rate saint or artist a great deal higher than a first-rate good fellow, we recognize that there is something about any kind of perfection that dazzles even those who are most alive to its essential inferiority. Montaigne is the exemplar ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... a fellow because he holds a first-class place as a practitioner of medicine as the Royal Society has done since I have known it, let us abolish the practice. But then let us also in justice refuse to recognise the half-and-half claims, those of the people who are third-rate as practitioners, and hang on to the skirts of science without ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... dictionary that should embrace every unusual word, every new compound, every metaphorical turn of meaning, to be found in our great writers, would be a compendium of the genius of our authors rather than of our language; and a lexicographer who rakes the books of second and third-rate men for out-of-the-way phrases is doing us no favor. A dictionary is not a drag-net to bring up for us the broken pots and dead kittens, the sewerage of speech, as well as its living fishes. Nor do we think it a fair test of such a work, that one should seek in it for every odd word that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... Madame Galopin— mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I'm so sick of that expression; I have heard it since I was six years old. Who is Madame Galopin—who thinks anything of her here? She is nobody; she is perfectly third-rate. If I like America better than mamma, ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... myself becoming a perfect Young—Hervey—Sturm—what you will, in the way of meditation. I could not choose but wonder at myself when I looked back to this time last year, and remembered my idle evenings in third-rate cafes, on the rive gauche, playing dominoes, talking the foul slang of Parisian bohemia, and poisoning my system with adulterated absinthe. And now I feast upon sweet cakes and honey, and think it paradisiac enjoyment to play whist—for love—in a farm-house parlour. I am ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... assisted by two practical men, the brothers Robert, threw himself ardently into the investigation of the modes of inflating balloons with this gas, which was then called INFLAMMABLE AIR. Guessing that it was much lighter than that which Montgolfier had been obliged to make use of in his third-rate provincial town, Charles leagued himself with his two assistants to constrict a balloon of taffeta, twelve feet in diameter, covered with india-rubber, and to inflate ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... With another type of man I might have thought it thrillingly romantic that he should fall in love at first sight and resolve to save the girl's father. But with Ed Caspian it was different—somehow. You see, he used to pose as a saint, a sort of third-rate St. George, with Society for the Dragon: he was all for the poor and oppressed. I remember reading speeches of his, in rather prim language. He was supposed to live like an anchorite. Now, here was St. George turned into his own Dragon. What an unnatural transformation! He, ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... disquietude the situation of which the gay flags were the outward and visible sign. For in these latter days of April, 1898, a first-class Republic had, from purely philanthropic motives, announced its intention of licking a third-rate Monarchy into the way it should go. Whereat the good citizens had flung broadcast their national emblem to express a patriotic enthusiasm they did not feel, while the wiser heads among them were already whispering that the war was not merely ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... generous old soldier. To render the play as acceptable to the public as possible, Wilkes took the trifling part of Dolabella, nor did Colley Cibber disdain to appear in Alexas. These parts would scarcely be accepted now by third-rate actors. Still to add more weight to the performance, Octavia was a short character of a scene or two, in which Mrs Porter drew not only respect, but the more affecting approbation of tears from the audience. Since that time, "All for Love" has ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... again over the book; but she said little till, pausing before a small, black-looking print in a sheet full of rather coarse coloured caricatures, cuttings from illustrated papers and old-fashioned books, second-rate lithographs, and third-rate original sketches, fitted into a close patchwork, she gave a sort ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... said. "Try the south, Mr. Newbold,—try Bermuda, for instance. The sea air and the warmth there might set your mother up marvellously." And as the young man stared at him unresponsively he gave a grasp to the hand he held, and turning, found his way out alone. He stumbled down the dark steps of the third-rate apartment-house and into his brougham, and as the rubber tires bowled him over the asphalt ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... listened in much the same way to another man playing the violin, and the comparison is not so far-fetched as it seems, for although the blind fiddler of the sunny day in Normandy had been only a third-rate scraper of the bow, and Joyselle one of the world's very greatest artists, yet in one thing they joined issue. Each of them gave to the listening child before him ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Not nearly as bad as he had expected from the girl's description. In fact, once upon a time it must have been rather a palatial residence, but all the windows now were boxed up with cheap, starchy-looking curtains, and there was a sort of third-rate atmosphere about the basement and the cheap knocker ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... and the house were disappointing. After the grandeur of the promenade, the street appeared shabby and third-rate; it had the characteristics of a side street; it was the retreat of those who could not afford anything better, and its base inhabitants walked out on to the promenade and swaggeringly feigned to be the equals of their superiors. The house also was shabby and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... such men now. Bernardo Tasso, to whom I gave employment when he was exiled from Naples, and who wandered freely in this garden, felt not its charm, for he was but a third-rate poet, and even he is dead. Who in our day can interpret the poetry which I feel here but cannot express? And with but so little more of endowment I might have done it, for after all is not the inner ear, the second sight, the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about politics and business; the company flout him or give him the cold shoulder, or perhaps complain to the landlord, who comes and asks him ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... as sad and confidential as if he were breaking her mother's death to her, or preluding a declaration of love. He trampled over all the young bucks of his father's circle, and was the hero among those third-rate men. Some few sneered at him and hated him. Some, like Dobbin, fanatically admired him. And his whiskers had begun to do their work, and to curl themselves round ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... relief of outraged propriety, expressed in the Supplement, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little improper at times. Very spirit of the Salvation Army, when some third-rate scientist comes out with an explanation of the vermiform appendix or the os coccygis that would have been acceptable to Moses. To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political grounds. But throughout the four years' controversy Government never betrayed an inkling of the appalling extent to which inferior secondary education had been allowed to degenerate in second-and third-rate schools with second-and third-rate masters into a mere teaching machine, clumsy and imperfect at that, for the passing of examinations that tested memory rather than intelligence, and character least of all. The ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... Exposition was its first creation in the twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital — without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored — but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk from attempting. This new social ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... and hence of course they derived their names. But now, since Patrick Street, and Grand Parade, and the South Mall have grown up, Main Street has but little honour. It is crowded with second-rate tobacconists and third-rate grocers; the houses are dirty, and the street is narrow; fashionable ladies never visit it for their shopping, nor would any respectable commercial gent stop at an inn within ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... strictly relevant to the subject has been avoided. The salient points once perceived and connected with the more important painters, the reader will find no difficulty in seeing the proper place of any given work by a great master, or the relative importance of those second-and third-rate painters of whom no special mention has been made because they are comprised within what has been said ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... Dom Ferlus, the college passed into the hands of his brother Raymond Ferlus, a former Oration, now married, a third-rate poet and man of little capacity. The college went into decline when the restoration of 1814 allowed back the Jesuits, who were determined to wreak revenge on the Benedictines by destroying the edifice which the latter had erected on the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... especially vulgar. That sort of thing would be naturally toned down by her association with your brother. But she has an unmistakable air of Bohemianism; looks like a third-rate actress, or dancer, in short; or perhaps an artist's model. I should not wonder if that were her position, by the way, when your brother fell in love with her. She is handsome still, though a little faded and worn by her troubles, poor soul and ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... these are the only times I go into public. In the evening, I visit my sweetheart; when the night is fine, we pass it on her balcony.' I don't know whether you have a sweetheart, or whether she has a balcony. But if you are so happy, it's certainly better than trying to find a charm in a third-rate prima donna." ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... that one has to go back to the battle of Sedgemoor for the last occasion when in anything dignified by a higher name than riot, blood has been shed in England; the fact that when a retiring English Attorney-General appointed his son to a third-rate position in the legal profession an outcry arose in which the salient feature was surprise that so flagrant a job should have been perpetrated, are indications of what I mean when I say that English ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... bringing Greek thought into a form of language in which it could be thus made useful. There was no value for the words, but only for the thing to be found in it. Thence it has come that no acknowledgment is made. We moderns confess that we are translating, and hardly assume for ourselves a third-rate literary place. When, on the other hand, we find the unexpressed thought floating about the world, we take it, and we make it our own when we put it into a book. The originality is regarded as being in the language, not in the thought. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction, Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that incomparable verve and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... it leaves me to know that very clever people despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... are obstinate, Nicholas," he said, and added: "Now, what do you want me to do for you? I can't make you a judge. It took me fifty years to make myself one—a third-rate one at that—" ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... henceforth; even Spain will know us better; and this knowledge should tend powerfully hereafter to keep the peace of the world. The war should abate the swaggering, swash-buckler tendency of many of our public men, since it has shown our incredible unreadiness at the outset for meeting even a third-rate Power; and it must secure us henceforth an army and navy less ridiculously inadequate to our exposure. It insures us a mercantile marine. It insures the Nicaragua Canal, a Pacific cable, great development on our Pacific coast, and the mercantile control of the ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture, which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by men of genius;—nor does it in the least require men of genius to produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... carriages, with horses to match, and would drive to some Highland town, and dine and dress at its inn, under assumed names. It was no doubt great fun to Her Majesty to put up with the accommodation of a third-rate provincial inn, where 'a ringleted woman did everything' in the way of waiting at table, and where in place of soup there was mutton-broth with vegetables, 'which I ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... the other to the brasserie in the basement. I liked to spend an hour or so there occasionally, smoking and watching the crowd. Every sixth visit on an average I would happen upon somebody interesting among the ordinary throng of medical students and third-rate clerks—watery-eyed old fellows who remembered Cremorne, a mahogany derelict who had spent his youth on the sea when liners were sailing-ships, and the apprentices, terrorised by bullying mates and the rollers of the Bay, lay howling in the scuppers and prayed to be thrown ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... enjoy so much—such dashes of color, such great slaps of light! I was the first to buy—they call it a Savoldo, but I think no third-rate man could be capable of so much—such reaching out after infinity. However, that makes little difference. I would not part with it, now that I have lived these weeks with so fine a thing. Maud won a prize in her Bonifazio, which she bought under my advice. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... into that faint glimmer of miserable fire. He was conscious of a curious feeling in his throat. How little he knew of life! The pathos of what she had told him, the thought of her bravely traveling the country and singing at third-rate music-halls, never taking any credit to herself, simply that her father might still believe himself a man of talent, appealed to him irresistibly. He suddenly ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality—he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the fact that very simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him—several girls, and a man here and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for works of profound research on any subject, and, above all, in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our vast and ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... He maintained a surprising cheerfulness to the last; nor did he, from his condemnation to his execution, exhibit the least sign of impatience or apprehension. During that interval he had remained on board of the Monarque, a third-rate ship of war, anchored in the harbour of Portsmouth, under a strong guard, in custody of the marshal of the admiralty. On the fourteenth of March, the day fixed for his execution, the boats belonging to the squadron ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... these wishes the case has been growing worse year by year, until we are at last compelled to move in the matter, or lose our commerce, our ocean prestige, and sink down contented with a second or third-rate position among commercial nations, and acknowledge ourselves tributary to the far-seeing and far-reaching, and superior policy ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... third-rate Bleecker Street hotel, the brooding Hurstwood read the dramatic item covering Carrie's success, without at first realising who was meant. Then suddenly it came to him and he read ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the sacristan's reed, far more distinctly than I see it to-day with bodily eyes in the National Gallery. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that where it hangs in that gallery it has not once given me one half-second of real pleasure. It is a third-rate picture now; but even the masterpieces, Perugino's big fresco, Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," Pier della Francesca's "Baptism"; have they ever given me the complete and steady delight which that mediocre Sienese gave me at the end of the wintry ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... therefore, that Cato was finally assigned, the other masculine parts being handed over to Cibber, Mills, Wilks, Powell, Ryan, Bowman, and Keen. The latter was a popular actor of majestic mould who used to play the King in "Hamlet" (a role too often left to the mercies of third-rate mouthers) in a fashion which would have justified the loyal and historic gentleman who preferred that character to all others in the play. As already mentioned, Marcia was to be acted by Oldfield, and to Mistress Porter, who usually revelled ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue—where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street—a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... wood, there was comfort and cleanliness and quiet. The front room, with its stiff cane rocker and chairs, its round table and well-adorned mantelpiece, its cretonne-covered lounge and tapestry carpet, was not a bad sample at all, of a drawing-room in a third-rate boarding house. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... sprang directly from unpreparedness. This burned indelibly into his memory. It stimulated all his subsequent appeals to make the Army and Navy large enough for any probable sudden demand upon them. "America the Unready" had won the war against a decrepit, impoverished, third-rate power, but had paid for her victory hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives; what would the count have mounted to had she been pitted against a really formidable foe? Would she have won at all against any enemy fully prepared ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... indeed a desperate one. Sir William Berkley and his ship, the Swiftsure, a second-rate, was taken, as was the Essex, a third-rate. ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... of the Hotel Casa Bellini, by the dear old shores of Lake Maggiore, which, as the programme advised me, is in Italy. It seemed, too, the most natural thing in the world that the author, Miss LAURA WILDIG, should have collected Priscilla and Cynthia (the latter in tow of a third-rate millionaire husband whom she loathed) at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... you knew you would not judge me harshly. If only you could know what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned in a third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat, with associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, pickpockets, Apaches, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance |
