"Victorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rediscovered a pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... him, at any rate by repute, precisely as the least among us knows Mr. Carnegie, though perhaps more intimately. The tales of his orgies, of his ladies, of that divorce case and of the yacht scandal which burst like a starball, tales Victorian and now legendary, have, in their mere recital, made many an old reprobate's mouth champagne. But latterly, during the present generation that is, the ineffable Paliser—M. P. for short—who, with claret liveries and a yard of brass behind him had tooled ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is absolutely independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity "set," as it is called, "to music." So far as the latter is in itself successful, it stultifies the former; and we admit at last ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... by a thin man of middle age, if possible. Gray hair. Shabby dark suit. Face lined. No jewelry or colors. If desired to costume the play in the middle Victorian period, Scrooge should wear very tight dark trousers, brown low cut vest, shabby black full-dress coat, soft white shirt, black stock tie, high collar made by taking an ordinary turn-over ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the immense Victorian mahogany ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... duly signed by herself, and witnessed by the grammar-school teacher and the secretary of the organization. On this certificate (which was decorated by many presentations in dim black and white of mid-Victorian domestic life, and surmounted by a collection of scalloped clouds in which drifted three amateur looking angels amid a crowd of more professional cherubim) Eleanor had pledged herself to abstain from the use as a beverage of all intoxicating drinks, and from the manufacture or traffic in them. She ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... eats at half-past one or at a quarter to two? I really am very fond of Aunt Charlotte, you know, though I find it awfully difficult to educate her. I sometimes despair of ever being able to bring her up properly at all, she is so hopelessly Early Victorian, poor thing. But, then, so many people are, aren't they? Now animals are never Early Victorian; that's why I respect them so. If you weren't a human being, Lubin—and a very nice one, as you are—what sort of an animal would ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... generally accorded it a place by itself in the arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the "Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of literary commodities, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... embark for Amalfi;—that is, unless they attempted the expedition by way of the mountain roads leading thither from Castellamare or La Cava. It raises a smile in these days of swift and luxurious travelling to learn from an early Victorian guide-book that "the most elegible mode of going from Sorrento to Amalfi is either to ride or to be carried in a chaise a porteurs to that part of the Colli where begins a rapid descent, and thence descending on foot to the Marinella of the Scaricotojo on the Gulf ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... "but you must remember that Mr. Ledsam is my only alternative, and I am not at all sure that he likes me. I am not sufficiently Victorian for his taste." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unexpected. He sets out "to direct the attention of the public towards the Gypsies; but he hopes to be able to do so without any romantic appeals on their behalf." He is far from having a romantic tone. He wields, as a rule, with any amount of dignity the massive style of the early Victorian "Quarterly Review" and Lane's so-called "Arabian Nights." Thus, speaking of Gypsy fortune- tellers, he says: "Their practice chiefly lies among females, the portion of the human race most given to curiosity and credulity." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... was continuing: "I don't mind the bad taste a bit, but I was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea. If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance's you could stand even sticky kitties—in a picture. I don't care about the interior decoration as long as Marky's little interior gets decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why, even Miss Severance's horrid Ceylon is better than ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... Victorian firms have almost the entire control of the tea and silk trade, and Victoria is the centre of the trade in opium, sugar, flour, salt, earthenware, oil, amber, cotton, and cotton goods, sandal-wood, ivory, betel, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Hall, attributed to barristers of the Georgian and Victorian periods, are traceable to a much earlier date. There is the story of Serjeant Wilkins, whose excuse for drinking a pot of stout at mid-day was, that he wanted to fuddle his brain down to the intellectual standard of a ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... car slowed down and entered the gates of a solid mid-Victorian house, isolated from similar houses by two or three acres of treeful grounds. The front door was opened by two men-servants of none too prepossessing appearance, who came down the steps as the car pulled up. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... snobs any more than democracy'; but this 'Thackeray was too restrained and early Victorian to see.' There are at the present day a great number of people who will not see that Bolshevism is as snobbish as Suburbia, that the poor man in the Park Lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks. Snobbery is not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... we have been teaching the people to play games and go in for healthy sports. At the same time there has been considerable aesthetic progress. England is no longer the stupidly inartistic country of early Victorian times; there's a true delight in music and painting, and a much more general appreciation of the good in literature. With all this we have been so busy that politics have fallen into the background—politics in the proper ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... and Jurisdictions.*—Throughout the earlier and middle portions of the Victorian period legislation respecting local government was abundant, but it was special rather than general. It pertained principally to the care of highways and burial grounds, the laying out and organization of districts ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... had all been arranged, and the garrison was fully occupied, the mine was opened, and Exsuperius, a soldier of the Victorian legion, sprung out, followed by a tribune named Magnus, and Jovianus, a secretary, and an intrepid body of common soldiers, who, after slaughtering all the men found in the temple into which the mine opened, went cautiously forward and slew the sentinels, who were occupying themselves ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... possible ignoring of all dull boundaries. This being the case a superhuman charity alone could have forborne to believe that his opportunities had been neglected in the heyday of his youth. Wealth and lady of limitations in themselves would have been quite enough to cause the Nonconformist Victorian mind to regard a young—or middle-aged—male as likely to represent a fearsome moral example, but these three temptations combined with good looks and a certain mental brilliance were so inevitably the concomitants of elegant ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her coffin was set down on its way from Lincoln to its final restingplace in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret their lack after you have seen such an original cross as that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was faithful and earnest, it was not somehow the art of 1291. One feels no greater hardness in the Parliamentary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern work, and refuses ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... GEORGE HOWARD was quite admirable as a Scots bank manager; Miss BLANCHE STANLEY, a really sound combination of essential good-nature and wounded dignity as a cook on the verge of giving notice. Miss GERTRUDE STERROLL tackled a vicaress of the Mid-Victorian era (authors' responsibility this) with a courage which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... remains to be detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of these affected the Victorian era. It was pure—though tainted with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... a Spinster Lady (CASSELL) is smallish talk about biggish wigs of the Victorian era, but not on that sole account to be condemned. Perhaps rather wholesome as showing how little distant we are from an age of government of the people by superior people for superior people. The notebooks cover the years 1878-1903, but the anecdotes have a much wider ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... the Metaphysical Society in 1869 was not without interest as a sign of the times. As in the new birth of thought which put a period to the Middle Ages, so in the Victorian Renaissance, a vast intellectual ferment had taken immediate shape in a fierce struggle with long established orthodoxy. But whereas Luther displaced Erasmus, and the earlier reformers fought out the quarrel ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... course it is stupid of them to get fat. Naturally it makes them look bourgeoise. But this is a lazy climate. As to that woman: there is something about her I do not like. She is aggressively not massaged, not made up. Only a woman of assured position can afford to be mid-Victorian. It is now quite the ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... know that awful painting of a mid-Victorian ancestor of Vera's—a horrible old man with bushy eyebrows and a ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... came about the middle of the Victorian era as a reaction against romanticism. It was born of the scientific spirit, which rendered the public dissatisfied with fanciful pictures of past ages and with the impossibilities of wild romance. Realism, as the word indicates, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... post the article in the Victorian Institute with respect to frogs' spawn. If you remember in your boyhood having ever tried to take a small portion out of the water, you will remember that it is most difficult. I believe all the birds in the world might alight every ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a poorly lighted, almost empty room. There was a table and some chairs but not much other furniture and no ornaments save an old-fashioned wax flower piece under a glass shell on a shelf. Where that, once a cherished parlor ornament of the mid-Victorian era, could have come from down here ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... would encounter horse-hair chairs, frayed carpet, and more early Victorian prints; in the back sitting-room more frayed carpet, more prints, ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... and clutched Nick's coat sleeve, like a girl of early Victorian days. But, after all, women have not changed in essentials. They are much the same now in the dark, when pale things stir or shine unexpectedly; and they are still glad to have with them at such times a man, preferably ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... pieces, made by the village cabinet-maker or, sometimes, by an ingenious farmer in his leisure hours; Windsor and slat-back chairs; low four-post beds; trestle or tuckaway tables; even an occasional Victorian piece; all, if on simple lines, fit into such a house as though ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... in selecting 100 or 1,000 events of the Victorian Era, would doubtless make a list interesting to lawyers, the physician would make one of interest mostly or mainly to doctors, and similarly with educators, statesmen, editors, &c., &c. But I have selected events with a view to find the most difficult cases ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... delicious, and I'm sure every word of it is true,' she cried. 'I'm enchanted with the mysterious meeting at Westminster Abbey in the Mid-Victorian era. Can't you see the elderly lady in a huge crinoline and a black poke bonnet, and the wizard in a ridiculous hat, a bottle-green frock-coat, and a flowing ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as "Hades—Your Opportunity," ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that one does get such an impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Puritan Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... The Victorian Parliament has voted an annual grant to our funds, not as a religious endowment, but in recognition of the service which we render in the reclamation of criminals, and what may be called, if I may use a word which has been ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... profession for big fees appear in every Assize court in the world. And some of them are, alas! experts. True it is that every man has his price, and the more so in these hard, post-war days of riot and ruin. Justice and brotherly love departed with the Victorian era. The old game of "Beat-your-neighbour-out-of-doors," played by our grandfathers, seems to be the only one practised ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... eldest of John Tosswill's three daughters, was sitting at a big mid-Victorian writing-table, examining the house-books. She had just discovered two "mistakes" in the milkman's account, and she felt perhaps unreasonably sorry and annoyed. Betty had a generous, unsuspicious outlook on human nature, and a meeting ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... an outsider. I saw the American's quick eye dart from one to the other, and hoped he was not classifying the company as typical English wits! The dinner itself was long, heavy, and unenterprising; a Victorian feast, even to the "specimen glass" decorations. One rose and one spray of maidenhair, in a tall thin glass, before each separate diner. Charmion and the Squire talked and laughed together, and seemed quite ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... enough to have a XII century palace. The palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or "restored" by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the place, ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... club thought nothing of disposing of the works of the Victorian poets in one afternoon; the Italian Renaissance was "fully treated and most ably discussed," according to one programme, at a single meeting; Rembrandt and his school were likewise disposed of in one afternoon, and German literature was ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... mankind. The last vestige of the eighteenth century had disappeared; cynicism and subtlety were shrivelled into powder; and duty, industry, morality, and domesticity triumphed over them. Even the very chairs and tables had assumed, with a singular responsiveness, the forms of prim solidity. The Victorian Age was ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society excited a 'burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days'; what matter if another 'scribbling woman,' as Carlyle called such strident female writers as were in vogue in mid-Victorian days—Frances Power Cobbe—thought him 'insincere'; these were unable to comprehend the abnormal heart of Borrow, so entirely at one with Goethe in ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... said Mark, "not he! He didn't care a bit for that kind of thing. You can see in the drawing-room the sort of horrors he used to buy. He was thoroughly early Victorian in his tastes, and ought to have been born fifty years sooner ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained force and volume.[55] During the long Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... growths to some sea-defying rock. Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, too, were tapestries of many colours, beautiful as seaweed; no modern flotsam ever drifted hither, no early Victorian furniture, no electric light. The great trade routes that littered the years with empty meat tins and cheap novels were far from here. Well, well, the centuries will shatter it and drive its fragments on to distant shores. Meanwhile, while it yet stood, I went on a visit ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... generally known to her intimates as "Aunt Eliza," was a connection of Nan's on the paternal side. She was a lady of Scottish antecedents and Early Victorian tendencies, to whom the modern woman and her methods were altogether anathema. She regarded her niece as walking—or, more truly, pirouetting aggressively—along the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... settled in 1609 by shipwrecked English colonists headed for Virginia. Tourism to the island to escape North American winters first developed in Victorian times. Tourism continues to be important to the island's economy, although international business has overtaken it in recent years. Bermuda has developed into a highly successful offshore financial center. A referendum on independence ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... may be obtained from any theatrical supply house. They must be of the style prevalent at the date of the play; Colonial clothes in a Mid-Victorian setting foredoom the play to failure. A curtain may also be hired from a theatrical supply house, but it is very simple to adjust one made at home by means of brass rings such as are used in hanging portieres. There should be a separation in the ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... on the same floor, the room whence those woman's screams had emanated. It was a big bare drawing-room, furnished in the ugly Early Victorian style, musty-smelling and moth-eaten. The dirty holland blinds fitted badly and had holes in them; therefore sufficient light was admitted to afford me a good ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... she exclaimed. "You think you know such a lot and are so advanced, yet you are as easily scared or fooled as any country maiden in Victorian times." ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... had its fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most reprehensible ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... century, by sanctioning a law under which Cape Magistrates would be forced to render homeless the Natives of the Cape in their own Cape of Good Hope? The one Colony whose administration, under its wise statesmen of the Victorian era, created for it that tremendous prestige that was felt throughout the dark continent, and that rested largely upon the fact that among its citizens, before its incorporation with the northern states, it knew no distinction of colour, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... there is no real evidence of work on the poem before this time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of commencement, and it may be pointed out that Mason himself is not so sure of 1742 as have been his Victorian successors. All he says is, "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded, at this time [1742] also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely composition depends largely on the "inclination" to believe that the "Elegy" was begun in 1742 and on a later ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... elegance of her motion is unimaginable and "her eyes are chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts." He may turn to Plato's Phaedrus and read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar's Gaul). He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is there called the "magical power of poetry." ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the handsome conveniences of life are better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately, through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence. ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Women's Education in the British Empire: edited by the Countess of Warwick. Being the Report of the Education Section, Victorian Era Exhibition, 1897. Longmans, Green, ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... influence from 1860 to 1865; but this political interregnum was less marked than the social still-stand during the same years. The Prince Consort was dead; the Queen had retired; the Prince of Wales was still a boy. In its best days, Victorian society had never been "smart." During the forties, under the influence of Louis Philippe, Courts affected to be simple, serious and middle class; and they succeeded. The taste of Louis Philippe was bourgeois beyond any ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... with rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds. Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Adventure Books was supplanted by the Romantic Heroine of the Victorian Age and the Long-winded Immaculate who accompanied her as ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... aspirations to the character of typical Englishmen, Mr. Pendyce and Mr. Barter thought themselves far from the old beef and beer, port and pigskin types of the Georgian and early Victorian era. They were men of the world, abreast of the times, who by virtue of a public school and 'Varsity training had acquired a manner, a knowledge of men and affairs, a standard of thought on which it had really never been needful to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Napoleonic Wars in 1815, to the Victorian Jubilee in 1897, Great Britain became and remained top dog economically, politically and to a large extent culturally. Britain was the workshop. British shipping was omnipresent. The pound sterling was the chief medium of foreign exchange. The British Navy patrolled the seas. English was replacing ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... once more, passing the bleak little Victorian church perched on the hill above Mr. Wicker's house. An empty lot cut into by Church Lane gave a look of isolation to the L-shaped brick building that served Mr. Wicker as both house and place of business. Chris paused to look below him. Even from where he stood, fifty feet above ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... Penn and his Quakers on what is now called the path of progress. That the first religious toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics is one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories did not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for I felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impression accidental; ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles of rulers and governing ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... rather ashamed. "But," she brightened, "he seemed pleased, don't you think? It's a pretty song, 'Strathairlie,' but it's not a pukka old one—it's early Victorian." ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... age mid-Victorian and mellow, Ere the current of life ran askew, The backs of our novels were yellow, Their hearts were of Quaker-like hue; But now, when extravagant lovers Their hectic emotions parade, In sober or colourless covers We find ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... spoken of, that ordinary man was lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... gas-man. We don't often get a chance to talk to a genuine antiquarian. I think, Mr. Blair, that you will be greatly interested in the architectural restoration of our parish church. It exemplifies the worst excesses of the mid-Victorian period. The church itself is one of the finest examples of the cruciform type. The south transept dates from the thirteenth century; the nave, clerestory, and north transept from the fifth. The chancel was restored in 1865, but ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... sketch of the greatest organ-builder of the Victorian Era has been condensed from an interview with him as set forth in the London Musical Times for ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... Propagandists, then, did not stand up to the Official Press as equals. They crept in as inferiors, or rather as open ex-centrics. For Victorian England and Third Empire France falsely proclaimed the "representative" quality of ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... Doggie showed him into the sitting-room on the drawing-room floor. A fire was burning in the grate, for though it was only early autumn, the evening was cold. The table was set for Doggie's dinner. Phineas looked round him in surprise. The heterogeneous and tasteless furniture, the dreadful Mid-Victorian prints on the walls—one was the "Return of the Guards from the Crimea," representing the landing from the troop-ship, repellent in its smug unreality, the coarse glass and well-used plate on the table, the crumpled napkin in a ring (for Marmaduke who in his mother's house had never been ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the greatest impression upon me was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sundry lectures in my junior year, by Whipple, and at a later period by George William Curtis, also influenced me. It was one of the golden periods of English literature, the climax of the Victorian epoch;—the period of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the Brownings, of Thackeray and Dickens, of Macaulay and Carlyle on one side of the Atlantic, and of Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, Ban- croft, Prescott, Motley, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... our humanitarianism and passion for liberty, quite safely, quite politely. Now that Abdul is deposed from 'his infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited since his accession—a country which, oddly enough, none but I seems to expect ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. Miss PHYLLIS PINSON looking charming in a mid-Victorian Latin-Quarterly sort of way (which is a very nice way), danced seriously, fantastically, delightfully, and with quite astonishing command of her technique—the sort of thing that nine infallible managers out of ten who know what ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... suit-cases, golf sticks, and so on, were being put outside and inside the mid-Victorian fly, which was still patronised by the young gentlemen of "Robey's," in their goings and comings from the station. And then, even before the old cab-horse had started his ambling trot townwards, Mr. and Mrs. Robey, their two little girls, and their ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of peace the nearest analogues in history would seem to be the Roman peace, say, of the days of the Antonines, and passably the British peace of the Victorian era. Changes in the scheme of law and order supervened in both of these instances, but the changes were, after all, neither unconscionably large nor were they of a subversive nature. The scheme of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... yet another lover of a later day. So the scenes shift, the figures come and go, the great things and the small of life intermingle. And as we read, by almost imperceptible stages, the Georgian has merged into the Victorian, and the young generation of one age has faded into the older generation of the next, till we are left confronted with the knowledge, albeit difficult of credence, that both have vanished into the mists of ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... ignoring him—he has been equally unfortunate in his critics. There are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations in print of Borrow's works. While other great names in the great literature of the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there has scarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were in an audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow's supreme merits, which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... as now usually conducted, succeeds in destroying much budding appreciation of poetry. Why endow these would-be interpreters of poetry, to the neglect of the class of artists whose work they profess to interpret? What should we think of England if her Victorian poets had all happened to be penniless, and she had packed them off to Grub Street and invested, instead, in a few more professors of ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... things, while gems are individual things, for the most part, to be looked at separately. But I would not lay down a rule even about gems. Certainly the universal, awkward, faceting of all precious stones—which is a relic of the mid-Victorian period—is a vulgarity that one is glad to be rid of; but if one wants for any reason the special sparkle, here or there, which comes from it, why not use it? I would use it in stained-glass—have ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... in early Victorian days, and for some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished, and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars—in accordance with the invariable law of fashion—together ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... was very simple in appearance. Asano, pointing out the parts of this apparatus to him, told him that, like the gas-engine of Victorian days, it was of the explosive type, burning a small drop of a substance called "fomile" at each stroke. It consisted simply of reservoir and piston about the long fluted crank of the propeller shaft. So much Graham saw ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... White and Elwes I have consistently capitalized the term Nature, in accordance with Spinoza's Latin text; White and Elwes capitalize it only desultorily. I have made some slight changes in Elwes' mid-Victorian punctuation and White's all-too-faithful paragraphing. The Latin paragraphs of the Ethics are extremely long. These changes are all external and as far as I can see thoroughly legitimate as well as justified. The very slight and very occasional ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... meet the situation, it would be desirable for the Government to promote special legislation along the lines of the Victorian Police Offences ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... brilliant and versatile Scotchman, whose astonishingly long and successful career in England as statesman, judge, lawyer, man of science, philanthropist, orator, and author won him a place among the immortals both of the Georgian and of the Victorian era. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... pressed by the problems of the Revolutionary Era with those of a peaceful age when the standard of legislative effort had been greatly raised is unfair; and the criticism of Pitt by a distinguished historian evinces partiality towards the Victorian statesman rather than an adequate appreciation of the difficulties besetting a Minister of George III in those times of turmoil.[790] It is true that Pitt did not inaugurate Factory legislation; that was the work of the Addington Cabinet in 1802; ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... still has some authority. The evil of two co-equal Houses of distinct natures is obvious. Each House can stop all legislation, and yet some legislation may be necessary. At this moment we have the best instance of this which could be conceived. The Upper House of our Victorian Constitution, representing the rich wool-growers, has disagreed with the Lower Assembly, and most business is suspended. But for a most curious stratagem, the machine of Government would stand still. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... In the true winter months deep sea fishing is not much favoured, except during the prevalence of westerly winds, when, for days at a time, the Pacific is as smooth as a lake; but in the rivers, from Mallacoota Inlet, which is a few miles over the Victorian boundary, to the Tweed River on the north of New South Wales, the stranger may fairly revel not only in the delights of splendid fishing but in the charms of beautiful scenery. He needs no guide, will be put to but little expense, for the country hotel accommodation is good and cheap; and, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... engaging of all eighteenth century malefactors, Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace. There is little enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with Sheppard, Peace is as drab as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime are drab compared with the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Our early-Victorian oligarchs disdained their DISRAELI as a mountebank because he wore the wrong waistcoats and had genius instead of common-sense. If he had grown to be the least like Mr. LOUIS NAPOLEON PARKER'S Disraeli, if he had taken to standing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... personal likings when they conflicted with time-honored preferences; yet this anthology,—the first published in a projected series of four or five volumes comprising the English poets from Elizabethan to Victorian times,—has certain minor features that may be deemed objectionably novel. Much the greater portion of the volume has of course, as usual, been given to those poems (by Pope, Thomson, Collins, Gray, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... with more lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fully diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin" revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The Meditation of the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... "Suppose she didn't turn out just as you thought! She's a wild, high-spirited sort of creature—is Eve. She loves the music and the rattle of life. I can't fancy her in one of those out-of-the-way, God-forsaken little mudholes you call an English village, sitting in an early-Victorian drawing-room all the afternoon, waiting for the vicar's wife to come to tea, and taking a walk before dinner for entertainment, with ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... without overflow. Cast in the early Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and Camoens, it was chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period by Shakespere, and filled with its most stimulating draughts of song and love during the Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith. And now, in this first year of the new century, the historic cup is refilled and tossed off in a radiant toast to Erato ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... the mouth, 3 1/2 ft. high and very thick. The church was rebuilt and a massive granite tower erected over the intervening aisles at the cost of the municipality, a new peal of 36 bells, cast in Holland, being installed to commemorate the Victorian jubilee of 1887. The Roman Catholic Cathedral in Huntly Street, a Gothic building, was erected in 1859. The see of Aberdeen was first founded at Mortlach in Banffshire by Malcolm II. in 1004 to celebrate his victory there over the Danes, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Sharp, that kittenish person seldom arouses in me much curiosity. I agree with George Moore that Thackeray, in the interests of mid-Victorian morality, suppressed many of her characteristics, telling us too little of her amatory temperament. Possibly, Mr. Moore may err, Becky may have had no "temperament," notwithstanding her ability to twist men around her expressive ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... other words, the presence of a specific audience, accustomed to certain Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic and of speech, has from the beginning of our imaginative literature cooperated with the instinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied writers as Dickens or Thackeray—a reticence which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocritical and dangerous to society and which they have certainly done their utmost to abolish—has ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Gaston Robert Belward looked at the image of his dead ancestor, a wild thought came: Had he himself not fought with Prince Rupert? Was he not looking at himself in stone? Was he not here to show England how a knight of Charles's time would look upon the life of the Victorian age? Would not this still cold Gaston be as strange at Ridley Court as himself fresh from tightening a cinch on the belly of a broncho? Would he not ride from where he had been sojourning as much a stranger in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a frown, and the back view of a sharp shoulder blade. To her mid-Victorian mind Sinclair Spencer was not conducting himself as a gentleman should, and her half-considered resolve to drop him from her visiting list became adamantine as she observed his appearance. Slipping her hand inside Kathleen's arm she led her ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... themselves up as troubadours or cavaliers and to talk blank verse, I don't see how they can expect to be happy living in these fifteenth-century houses. The modern family—the old man in baggy trousers and a frock-coat he could not button if he tried to; the mother of figure distinctly Victorian; the boys in flannel suits and collars up to their ears; the girls in motor caps—are as incongruous in these mediaeval dwellings as a party of Cook's tourists drinking bottled beer ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... as a summer sea, and can look at you without knowing you are there. Mr. Francis is a peaceful man, too. He looks at his wife in a helpless way when she begins to explain the difference between the Elizabethan and the Victorian poets—I don't believe he cares a cent for ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... novelist lending her Mrs. Behn, found the Novels and Plays too loose for her perusal, albeit in the heyday of the lady's youth they had been popular enough. As one might expect, Miss Julia Kavanagh, in the mid-Victorian era[17] (English Women of Letters 1863), is sad and sorry at having to mention Mrs. Behn— 'Even if her life remained pure,[18] it is amply evident her mind was "tainted to the very core. Grossness was congenial to her.... ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... of Punch's efforts outside the usual routine, and the result has been the continual popularisation of the paper. Volume after volume, too, in various forms, has been republished, culminating in the "Victorian Era," "Pictures from Punch," and "Sir John Tenniel's Cartoons;" and each one has but served to attract the favourable notice of the public to the ordinary issue. So Punch has developed his power and his resources. To him one might almost apply what ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... for themselves. All her lessons were interesting, but in this she was inspiring. She was accustomed to give themes for fortnightly exercises, and at the first lecture of this new term she announced as a special subject: "An Essay on any one of the Great Writers of the Victorian Era", promising a volume of Browning's ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... as he chose to make the words sound, they were an audacity he would have known better than to allow himself with any one but a timid early-Victorian spinster whose politeness ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the little room with angry eyes. If only Fate had set her feet in sunnier paths. She looked at the plain furniture and cheap carpet; the wallpaper was hideous; there was a frightful oleograph of two Early Victorian women with crinolines and ringlet curls hanging over the mantlepiece. They both looked smug and self-satisfied. There was an enlarged photograph of a bald-headed man wearing a Masonic apron on another wall. He was fat and had his right hand plastered ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... characteristic of the poetic mind as such. Yet it should be remembered that the philosopher and the scientist likewise assert that ours is a vital, ever-flowing, onward-urging world, in the process of "becoming" rather than merely "being." "We are far from the noon of man" sang Tennyson, in a late-Victorian and evolutionary version of St. John's "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." "The primary imagination," asserted Coleridge, "is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... style, rich," is, of course, obvious. It applies to more than one of my Victorian uncles. "Medium rich" to a cousin or so. More subtle is "medium body." This must be Uncle Hilary; he takes little exercise nowadays and his figure is suffering. Soon he will be "full-bodied" or "full and round." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... scarce varieties, including Newfoundland, New South Wales, St. Vincent, South Australia, Trinidad, and a really grand lot of Victorian. Price 10/-; ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... end of the year the export of gold from Victoria alone had very nearly reached half a million in value. In two years the population of the Victorian gold-fields almost equalled the whole population of the colony at the close of 1850. Most of the diggers lived in tents, and had absolutely no interest in the colony beyond the mere hope of profit from the diggings. If a more profitable field had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... is already known to fame by his historical novels, his admirable cricketing story, his essay in Meredithan subtlety "Brooke of Covenden," and his most successful Victorian comedy "Araminta." In his new novel he breaks ground which has never before been touched by an English novelist. He follows no less a leader than Cervantes. His hero, Sir Richard Pendragon, is Sir John ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... his partner, Jud Rush, who was once a cowboy in California, were picturesque in themselves because of the furnishings, as quaint and dusty as those pictured by Dickens. The furniture was mid-Victorian, the rugs and carpets worn by the feet of countless clients, and a musty odor of old books and papers permeated the air. It was like stepping back fifty years to enter the ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... had not graced the Elizabethan era, when he might have become a gallant buccaneer, and so got himself shot through the head; or that he had not flourished under the reign of good Queen Anne, when he would probably have turned pirate and been hanged; or that, being born in the Victorian age, he had not gone to the Far West, where he would, at least, have had the chance of getting ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... man with nothing small in his composition. Soon his ambition was gratified. In 1889 he was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Railways of Queensland; and after a few years occupation of that post was invited by the Victorian Government to the same position in connection with the railways of that important State. In 1900 he left Australia and became General Manager of the Midland Railway; but his health unfortunately soon failed, and at the comparatively early age of sixty he died at Derby in the ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... pig looking out of the top of each. There were pictures on the walls, mostly representing young ladies, more or less obviously in love, supported by rustic properties. I have noticed that the girl's first love is the monopoly of the Victorian painter, whereas the boy's is that of the novelist, but I do not know the reason ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... in fact, I do not know what it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epoch can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere, with all its faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter of course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... little soul, highly romantic and sentimental, with a pretty soprano voice, and just a sufficient talent for acting to make her absolutely invaluable in scenes from Dickens or Jane Austen, where a heroine of the innocent, pleading, pathetic, babyish, Early Victorian type ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... a small portion of a very large parlour, 70 x 40 feet, one of the few remaining, if not the last, of the old Victorian mansions in New York City, very interesting as a specimen of the most elegant style of furnishing in the first half ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... morning from his elder brother George, who was an officer in a line regiment. It had been written in the trenches before Sebastopol, for these events took place in the mid-Victorian period towards the end of the Crimean War. Or rather the letter had been begun in the trenches and finished in the military hospital, whither George had been conveyed, suffering from "fever and severe chill," which seemed to be somewhat contradictory terms, though doubtless they were ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... poker, in my hot youth, after some journey in which I had lost the key; and this act of violence was probably the reason why the trunk had so long ago ceased to travel. I unstrapped it, not without dust; it exhaled the faint scent of its long closure; it contained a tweed suit of Late Victorian pattern, some bills, some letters, a collar-stud, and—something which, after I had wondered for a moment or two what on earth it was, caused me suddenly to murmur, 'Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... stay here in your garden," he said musingly. "You think it's better to keep on walking these sunshiny gravel paths between your flower-beds, and growing to look like a pensive garden lady in a Victorian engraving." ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and new leaves. When this idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed, and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian optimism with songs like this upon ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... they got a percentage, and the wives did not worry at their own little affairs, all went smoothly. Now, since going out there and fighting, they have come back giving themselves great airs, and talking about wounded honor, and ridiculous things of that sort that one reads of in early Victorian books. One does not know where ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... common justice and toleration. Canada, as the direct outcome of Confederation, has grown strong, prosperous, energetic. The unhappy divisions which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which darkened with actual revolt and bloodshed the dawn of the Victorian era, are now only a memory. The links which bind the Dominion to Great Britain may on paper seem slight, but they are resistless. Imperial Federation has still great tasks to accomplish within our widely scattered Imperial domains, but its success in ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... the ancients were rich in it. Homer's chieftains wept easily. So did Shakespeare's heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears" when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined for them. A heart accessible to pathos, to natural beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite for the protagonist of Victorian literature. Even Becky Sharp was ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and as everything that Victoria undertakes must always be on the grandest scale, so was this. One colonist gave 1000 pounds; 4000 pounds more was subscribed, and then the Government took the matter in hand to fit out the Victorian Exploring Expedition. Camels were specially imported from India, and everything was done to ensure success; when I say everything, I mean all but the principal thing—the leader was the wrong man. He knew nothing ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... Lessing's idea of the purpose of comedy is a combination of Aristotelian and mid-Victorian ideals: "die Sitten der Zuschauer zu bilden und zu bessern, ... wenn sie nAmlich das Laster allezeit unglA1/4cklich und die Tugend am Ende glA1/4cklich sein lAsst."[22] It is on the basis of this premise that he awards the comic crown to the Cap.[23] His extravagant encomium ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that "family" and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... responsible for that. It did mark a period, and looking back now after all these years one can see that that impression was a true one. The Jubilee of '97, the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria—the end of the Victorian Era for Church as well as ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Bulwer (1805-1873), whose later stories are free from the immorality that stains the earlier, is one of the most widely read. The novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) are among the justly popular productions in this department. Among the novelists of the late Victorian Era were Charles Keade, Blackmore, Stevenson, Kipling, Meredith, Hardy, and Mrs. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... softly behind him and he found himself in undivided possession of the large indifferent apartment in which the nervous and mental troubles of the outer world eddied for a time on their way to the distinguished specialist. A bowl of daffodils, a handsome bookcase containing bound Victorian magazines and antiquated medical works, some paintings of Scotch scenery, three big armchairs, a buhl clock, and a bronze Dancing Faun, by their want of any collective idea enhanced rather than mitigated the promiscuous disregard of the room. He drifted to the midmost of the three ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... society novels which followed, in the contributions which graced the 'Keepsakes' of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of Shelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit of almost Victorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales, though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, can hardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by a brooding ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley |
