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Quaintly   Listen
adverb
Quaintly  adv.  In a quaint manner.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books



... screams of the girl brought all the household to the spot—the Canons, the little Abbe, the cook, the scullion—indeed all the inmates of the Seminary. Jasmin quaintly remarks, "A girl always likes to have the sins known that she has caused others to commit." But in this case, according to Jasmin's own showing, the girl was not to blame. The trick which he played might be very innocent, but to the assembled ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles

... have sung, but ah, not seen— Things proper to the age of Saturn— Shall greet you here; for we have been Wrought quaintly, on the Arcadian pattern. Your poet's lips will break in song For joy, to see at last appearing The bulls and bears, a peaceful throng, While a ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts

... quaintly moulded Oft his humid boots would lie; And his queer surtout was folded On some strange old ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... Christ who took the babes upon His knee; the same Divine Christ who, with hyssop and gall, and mingled blood and tears, passed death's dread portals on the dark brow of Calvary. The same grand figure, but quaintly dressed in words that savoured of the London slums and of the soldier's camp, and yet so hedged around with earnest love and childlike faith that all its grossest trappings fell away and left us nothing but ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... the arching of the ceiling. The walls they proposed to leave plain, and only to cover them over with a bright brown color. The delicate pillars and the quaintly molded ornaments were to be distinguished from them by a dark shade. But as in such things one thing ever leads on to another, they determined at least on having festoons of flowers and fruit, which should, as it were, unite heaven and earth. Here Ottilie was in her element. The gardens ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... was disturbing me. Elizabeth. A daughter is being delivered unto me this morning. I have a feeling it will be more painful than the original delivery. She has been, as they quaintly say, educated; prepared for her ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... said Ralph laughing, and he stepped forward leading his horse, for now the wood was light all about, as the fire waxed and burned clear; so that Ralph could see that the new-comer was clad in quaintly-fashioned armour after the fashion of that land, with a bright steel sallet on the head, and a long green surcoat over the body armour. Slender of make was the new-comer, not big nor ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... to the attempt to make a scientific observation when the condition under consideration is affected by the means employed, he rather quaintly cited the impossibility of discovering the length of trousers by bending ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... descended before its hospitable doors, travel-worn and weary, we had been pained to find a sort of full-dress dinner going on where we expected to find an ordinary table d'hote. For this reason alone we passed the hotel by, and hunted out the quaintly named Hotel du Croissant, in a dimly lighted little back street, indicated by a flaring crescent of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... dealing with those times it is not often that we get penetration into the underlying methods of the trading class. But a lucid insight is inadvertently given by Walter Barrett (who, for sixty years, was in the mercantile trade), in his smug and conventional, but quaintly entertaining, volumes, "The Merchants of Old New York." This strong instance shows like a flashlight that while the success of the shippers was attributed to a fine category of energetic qualities, the benevolent assistance of the United States ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... designed and outlined by ribbings of blue. Some of them contained her pictures. The chairs, the sofas, the little tabourets, were upholstered in yellow, their wood matching the panels. Above the carved mantel of yellowing marble was a quaintly shaped mirror extending to the high ceiling, and flanked on either side by sconces. The carpet was a golden brown, the hangings in the tall windows yellow. And in the morning the sun came in, not boisterously, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... some good, for Dr. B—— has not, and I don't know as Dr. K—— will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer." This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future, already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into; though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not yet ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... doubt. Could the reader see the collection now before me, cut with a good piece of stem and some foliage, and pushed into a deep vase, he would not only own that they were a pleasing contrast, but quaintly grand for ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood

... feel. This part of him was often the subject of talk with those of us who knew him well. But what charmed me most, more even than his brilliant mental gifts, were the sweetness of his disposition and his quaintly quizzical and happy humour. Ambition was not strong in him, was in fact all but absent, and he often rallied me on mine. He never in all his life asked for any improvement in salary or position; but, in spite of his inveterate modesty, rose high, became Chief Accountant of the Midland ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... Contentment, so the very popular ballad, Old Grimes, written about 1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an undergraduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, is in some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly pathetic Last Leaf. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... happy by the gifts with which the chapman clinched his bargain, after the Eastern fashion. To the Prior he gave a roll of worked silk to be used as an edging to an altar cloth or banner, and to Wulf a dagger handle, quaintly carved in olive wood to the fashion of a rampant lion. Wulf thanked him, and then asked him with a somewhat shamed face if he had more embroidery for sale, whereat the Prior smiled. The quick-eyed Cypriote saw the smile, and inquired ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... brother, Bartholomew, who was a map-maker and a serious student of geography, also settled in Lisbon. The two either opened a book-and-map shop, or at least they worked in one at odd times, Christopher acting as a draftsman; for, as he himself quaintly expressed it, "God had endowed me with ingenuity and manual skill in designing spheres, and inscribing upon them in the proper places cities, rivers and mountains, isles and ports." He appears to have tried to earn a little money by commerce as well as by map-making. ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley

... the long, dark vessels, with their grotesque, quaintly carved prows and sterns, seemed to be like some strange living creatures working along paths of silver, so regularly went the paddles, turning the sea into lines of ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... collection) of the mother whom all of them united to adore. There is an actual photograph of her here, taken at the age of twenty, which goes far to explain how she came to be the heroine of the story; the lurking gaiety and laughter of it quaintly foretelling the great ecclesiastical lady who, on one occasion when the Archbishop was absent, could announce to her enraptured children that family prayers should be remitted, "as a treat!" Schooldays at Wellington; Cambridge; some topical memoirs of the Georgian regime in Athens, and (what ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various

... the second landing, where I was faced by a green door with a quaintly carved electric bell in the shape of an Egyptian girl's head, a red stone in the centre of the forehead forming what appeared to be the button. Anyhow I pressed it and waited, and a moment later the door swung silently open. A small but very alert ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... was too strong for his generation. As Fries, one hundred years later quaintly says, ... "immortalis Micheli tam claram lucem accendit ut succesores proximi eam ne ferre quidem potuerint." Notwithstanding Micheli's clear distinctions, he was entirely disregarded, and our little Lycogala was dubbed Lycoperdon and Mucor down ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... the dark-green rings Stained quaintly on the lea, To image fairy glee; While thro' dry grass a faint breeze sings, And swarms of insects revel Along the sultry level:— No more will watch their brilliant wings, Now lightly dip, now soar, Then sink, and rise once more. My lady's death ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... and of the two successive years should ever be memorable, for it marks a great change in the constitution of English society. It would seem that, under the quiet regime of the Tory Cabinet, the upper ten thousand (as they were quaintly called in those days,) had taken a somewhat more frigid tone. The Prince of Wales had inclined to be restful after the revels of his youth. The prolonged seclusion of Queen Victoria, who was then engaged upon that superb ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... pots as an act of gallantry. "Basil," says John Evelyn, "imparts a grateful flavour to sallets if not too strong, but is somewhat offensive to the eyes." Shenstone, in his School Mistress's Garden, tells of "the tufted Basil," and Culpeper quaintly says: "Something is the matter; Basil and Rue will never grow together: no, nor near one another." It is related [47] that a certain advocate of Genoa was once sent as an ambassador to treat for conditions ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... advantage of the first pause in the succession of quaintly innocent questions which she was as usual addressing to me, "I have been looking at that rough old cross hanging between the windows, and fancying that it must surely be ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... bed-tray, and the like. Ivan's outfit, consisting solely of the things she herself had given him, had been packed in his mother's one small foreign trunk, whose contents until then, Miss Clarkson, observed, was an ikon, quaintly framed. Of letters, of souvenirs, of any clue of any kind to the identity of mother and son, there was none. She felt sure that the names they ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... American city above Canal Street, it was there and spreading (like the measles and other evils); everybody said so; even her paper, L'Abeille, referred to it in French—resentfully. She believed in it historically; but for herself, she "never travelled," excepting, as she quaintly put it, in her "acquaintances"—the French streets with which she ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... acquaintance, he finds a total of 67 men, from 73 to 93 years of age. Their average age is 78 and a fraction. Of these 67, 54 were smokers or chewers; 9 only, non-consumers of tobacco; and 4 were doubtful, or not ascertained. About nine-elevenths smoked or chewed. The compiler quaintly adds, "How much longer these men might have lived without tobacco, it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... back, and Verrall is in her company. She comes back into my memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by intervening things, seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the slightly discolored panes of crinkled glass in the window of the Menton post-office and grocer's shop. It was on the second ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... held; Paris still smiled; and, buttoning up his coat, he paused for a moment on the doorstep to turn his face to the copper-red sun and breathe in the crisp, invigorating air; then, with a quaintly decisive manner that seemed to set sentiment aside, he walked to the edge of the footpath and hailed a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... is evident from the kernelling and the battlements mentioned. Castles of jelly templewise made. Lel. Coll. IV. p. 227. [2] lynger. longer. [3] gretust. greatest. [4] ee, i. e. thou. [5] kyrnels. Battlements. V. Gloss. Keyntlich, quaintly, curiously. V. Gloss. [6] bataiwyng. embatteling. [7] helde. put, cast. [8] another. As the middle one and only two more are provided for, the two remaining were to be filled, I presume, in the same manner alternately. [9] holde it broun. make it brown. [10] ew ardaunt. hot water. Eau, water; ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge

... apartment on the Grand Canal, I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing (many ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... been a slave in Virginia, the property of a Mr Stewart; and the captain of the vessel stated that the owner had put him on board, to be conveyed to Jamaica, and there sold. In what was called the return to the writ, the justification for keeping Somerset in restraint was thus quaintly stated:—'That at the time of bringing the said James Somerset from Africa, and long before, there were, and from thence hitherto there have been, and still are, great numbers of negro slaves in Africa; and that during all the time aforesaid, there hath been, and still is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various

... an old tree leans across From bank to bank, an ancient tree, Quaintly cushioned with curious moss, A bridge for the cool wood-nymphs and me: Half seen they flit, while here I sit By the magical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... between hunting, drinking, and preaching. You do not in France find such advertisements as he had heard of in England, 'Wanted a curacy in a good sporting country, where the duty is light and the neighbourhood convivial.' The proper exercise for a country clergyman, he rather quaintly observes, is agriculture. The ideal parson, that is, should be a squire in canonical dress. The clergy of the eighteenth century probably varied between the extremes represented by Trulliber and the Vicar of Wakefield. Many of them were excellent people, with a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... something in the sea-weed, girding his clean, faded robe above his bare sticks of legs—but Margarita and me. The camphor trees lose their lacquered green and turn to distant chestnut; the scarlet lily fades to a dull rose marsh flower; the lines of the temple are only quaintly-eaved rocks and ledges, and I am over seas again. I wonder if that is the reason I love this place so? But there were no geyser baths there and I had no rheumatism then! Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe—even the sciatic nerve, we ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... not have asked me here," he said to Romayne, in his quaintly good-humored way. "I can't part with those pictures when I say good-by to-day. You will find me calling here again and again, till you are perfectly sick of me. Look at this sea piece. Who thinks of the brushes and palette of that painter? There, truth to Nature and poetical ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins

... be a wing of the house. The servant ushered him into a room—and, in despite of himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be—spacious and quaintly rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm, cozy glow over everything. He ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... again: it prefers to have the freedom of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a "Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated from the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between the Body and the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... the same sept, and also that of first cousins, is forbidden. The caste do not employ Brahmans at their marriage and other ceremonies, and they account for this somewhat quaintly by saying that their ancestors were at one time accustomed to rely on the calculations of Brahman priests; but many marriages which the Brahman foretold as auspicious turned out very much the reverse; and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... and more during the next two days. There was a great charm about the old house and the quaintly laid out grounds in which it stood—especially on the south side, where Geoff's work lay. The weather, too, was delightfully mild just then; it seemed a sort of foretaste of summer, and the boy felt all his old love for the country revive and grow stronger than ever as he raked and weeded and did ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth

... really a weird sensation to come from the outer world and talk to these people. No, no, he may to some extent have secured notoriety in circles even as far off as London, but really there is nothing in the man. Why, he was brought up here in the village! But these quaintly prejudiced folk are, after all, but a remnant, and the great mass of people all around in the farms and cottages prize his fame highly. The pride with which a villager refers to the fact that he went to school ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... swans could have been cited in a simile illustrating profusion. Bass quaintly stated that the "dying song" of the swan, so celebrated by poets, "exactly resembled the creaking of a rusty ale-house sign on a windy day." The remark is not so pretty as, but far more true than, that of the bard who would have us believe that the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... "valueless," "contemptible." Cf. Merch. of Ven. ii., 4: "'tis vile, unless it may be quaintly ordered." The flocks and herds have no value, are contemptible, as adversaries; hence, "helpless." ...
— Esther • Jean Racine

... world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... illness, when the Coronation was postponed in the summer of 1902. The stalls next claim our attention, and it must be pointed out that only part of these date from the sixteenth century, but the ancient seats are easily distinguished from the later ones by their quaintly carved misereres. The rest were added when the Order of the Knights of the Bath was reconstituted by George I. in 1725, and the banners above, as well as the coats of arms at the back of the top stalls, belong to the Knights. The Dean was made Chaplain of the Order, a ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... develop to a true hedonic "swell," hop on a pinnacle apart, Like a monkey on a stick, and your phrases quaintly pick, and then prattle about Art. Take some laboured paradoxes, and, like Samson's flaming foxes, let them loose amidst the corn (Or the honest commonplaces) of the Philistines whose graces you regard with lofty scorn. And every one will say, As you squirm your wormy way, "If this young ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... abbess joyfully put it on. The next morning she could stand on her feet and the third day she was restored to perfect health. Later, a nun was cured of a headache by the same girdle, but when next it was wanted, it could nowhere be found. Bede argues quaintly that its disappearance was also an act of Divine Providence, since some of the sick who flocked to it might be unworthy, and, not being cured, might doubt its efficacy, while in reality, their own unworthiness was to blame. "Thus," ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney

... strong women that laid the foundations of the great Negro church of today, with its five million members and ninety millions of dollars in property. One of the early mothers of the church, Mary Still, writes thus quaintly, in the forties: ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... Bowness' street we stand— Nine swains enamoured of our wives, Each quaintly writing on his hand, In haste, as ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... pennons of russet and black, the chosen colors of the five knights challengers. The cords of the tents were of the same color. Before each pavilion was suspended the shield of the knight by whom it was occupied, and beside it stood his squire, quaintly disguised as a salvage[40-2] or silvan man, or in some other fantastic dress, according to the taste of his master and the character he was pleased to assume during the game. The central pavilion, as the place of honor, had been assigned to Brian de Bois-Guilbert, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... upon which Ned's eyes rested was seated in the centre of the group, on a quaintly made stool, and his gorgeous dress immediately suggested that this must be the great man himself whom they had come to see. For he was evidently got up expressly for the occasion, with his courtiers carefully arranged about him, some ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... rhymed legends in the city square, the Gruyere people better loved their dances, the long Celtic Korols (or Coraules), when, singing in chorus in wild winding farandoles, they went dancing over vales and hills, day in and day out until human strength could bear no more. Such was the famous dance quaintly recounted in ancient French by ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... for their delicate flavour and soft flesh. There are of course loads of grapes, varying from the little honey-tasting purple sort, that has been introduced from California, to the huge but somewhat insipid bunches of the white Regina; we note also the quaintly shaped "Ladies' Fingers," which are especially sweet. The figs, massed together in serried layers between fresh vine leaves and costing a soldo the dozen, stand around in glossy purple pyramids, so luscious that their sugary tears are exuding from their skins, and so ripe that they seem ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... freely-rotating nucleus occasions by its position the diurnal and annual changes of magnetic declination. It has thus been attempted in our own day, with tedious solemnity, to clothe in a scientific garb the quaintly-devised fiction of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... artist—to note him in his apprenticeship—when he tamed as well as his rough nature would permit, his hand to the delicate graving so cherished by his master, Ellis Gamble; and when freed from his apprenticeship, he sought art through the stirring scenes of life, saying quaintly enough, that "copying other men's works resembled pouring wine out of one vessel into another; there was no increase of quantity, and the flavor of the vintage was liable to evaporate;"—whoever would study the great, as well as the small, peculiarities ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,—two quaintly cropped yew-trees,—still thrive; the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune,—as much the same and as different as Now and Then. The house is full of old family relics and pictures, the sun shining on them through the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... enters, quaintly neat, All pride and business, bustle and conceit; With looks unalter'd by these scenes of woe, With speed that, ent'ring, speaks his haste to go. He bids the gazing throng around him fly, And carries fate and physic in ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... indeed. The chest, however, when set down in front of the Father of Swords, proved to be nothing at all like the one out of which the Brazilian had taken his gold anklet. It was quite small and painted green, though quaintly enough provided with triple locks of beaten iron. The Father of Swords unlocked them deliberately, withdrew from an inner compartment a round tin case, and from that a roll of parchment which he pressed to his lips with infinite solemnity. He then ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... quarterings of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. While they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... Pasquin, who had nothing but advertisements pasted upon him. I had seen Marphorius in the Capitol; there has long been an end to the witty dialogues of the days of Sixtus V., so quaintly told by Leti; they are so little 'birds of a feather' (for Pasquin is a mutilated fragment, Marphorius a colossal statue of the ocean) that, residing as they did at different parts of the town, it is difficult to understand ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... wisely one sweet instrument to choose— The native reed; which, tutored with rare skill, Brought other Muses[1] down to aid its trill! A cheerful song that sometimes quaintly masked The fancy, as the affections sweetly tasked; And won from England's proud and foreign[2] court, For native England's tongue, a sweet report— And sympathy—till in due time it grew A permanent voice that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various

... poor-laws nothing but a vast agency for demoralising the poor, tempered by a system of petty tyrannical interference. He proposes, therefore, that the poor-law should be abolished. Notice should be given that no children born after a certain day should be entitled to parish help; and, as he quaintly suggests, the clergyman might explain to every couple, after publishing the banns, the immorality of reckless marriage, and the reasons for abolishing a system which had been proved to frustrate the intentions of the founders.[254] Private charity, he thinks, would meet the distress ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... of spice and salt and wine and honey, Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue! Flower of lavish love and lyric fury, Mixed on lips forever rash and young, Wildly droll and quaintly tender;— ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... suggestion, and he was already waiting, his soft felt hat in one ungloved hand, and a heavy, quaintly carved ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... the ancient mansions in the United Kingdom, and there is still, happily, a large selection, none perhaps is so picturesque and quaintly original in its architecture as the secluded Warwickshire house Compton Winyates. The general impression of its vast complication of gable ends and twisted chimneys is that some enchanted palace has found its way out of one of the fairy-tale books ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea

... beguiled of Demophoon; Nor Jove's son, when the charms of Iole Were shrin'd within his heart. And yet there hides No sorrowful repentance here, but mirth, Not for the fault (that doth not come to mind), But for the virtue, whose o'erruling sway And providence have wrought thus quaintly. Here The skill is look'd into, that fashioneth With such effectual working, and the good Discern'd, accruing to this upper world From that below. But fully to content Thy wishes, all that in this sphere have birth, Demands my further parle. Inquire thou wouldst, Who of this light ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects—art and divorce. He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... course was bad for king and kingdom would say so roundly in direct words of reproof, but withal so reasonably and sweetly that he made "the rhinoceros harrow the valleys" after him, as his biographer quaintly puts it, glancing at Job. The counsel was not limited to celestial themes. Hugh checked his temper, softened his sentences, and got him to do good turns to churches and religious places. He unloosed the king's rather tight fist, and made him a good almsgiver. One offence Hugh ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... his assent and was led through the house, across a more extensive garden, from which a marvellous view of the valley and the climbing slopes behind held him spellbound, by the side of a small, quaintly shaped church, to a circular group of buildings of considerable extent. The man conducted him to the front of a white-plastered cottage covered with roses, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of moly, and one of them distinguished among horticulturists as Homer's moly. Sir T. Brown thus quaintly renders two lines in the "Odyssey" relating ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... is an old-time "cheese stewer" or a reasonable substitute. The base of this is what was once quaintly called a "hot-water bath." This was a sort of miniature wash boiler just big enough to fit in snugly half a dozen individual tins, made squarish and standing high enough above the bath water to keep any of it from getting ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... not been so hard a task, either," quaintly remarked Sir Henry, as he rose. "I am giving her to you, understand, for your father's sake; in the trust that you are the same honourably good man, standing well before the world and Heaven, that he was. Unless your looks belie ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... various castellated turrets, and the clusters of decorated chimneys, with the quaintly carven beasts seemingly toboganning down the gables of the wings, together form a fine example of Tudor architecture, though the appearance would have been still better had the Gatehouse when restored in the eighteenth century been kept to its original proportions, ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold

... padre's absence. After we had breakfasted, and the light had become sufficient, we made our way to the old church, in front of which are some beautifully gnarled and irregular ancient olive trees, amid which the old bells are quaintly hung. Entering the church, we soon found the Titian, a descent from the cross. The figures are boldly painted and skillfully grouped; the action and lighting concentrate upon the figure of the Christ. ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... central side (not where it now does), giving entrance from a small anteroom, in which the visitor now beholds the receptacle for old rolls and papers. At the right, on entering, where now, if our memory mistake not, is placed a press, stood the bed, quaintly carved, and with hangings of damascene. At the farther end the deep recess which faced the ancient door was fitted up as a kind of oratory. And there were to be seen, besides the crucifix and the Mass-book, a profusion of small vessels of gold and crystal, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... broken before his arrival. His only embarrassment, in fact, arose from the difficulty which he naturally experienced in adapting himself to the speech and address of the Mitchenor family. The greetings of old Eli, grave, yet kindly, of Abigail, quaintly familiar and tender, of Moses, cordial and slightly condescending, and finally of Asenath, simple and natural to a degree which impressed him like a new revelation in woman, at once indicated to him his position among them. His city manners, he felt, instinctively, must be unlearned, or at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... he, with his head on one side, quaintly, "wasn't that a blasphermous yarn old Dave was givin' us about the wind blowing that log chain away a link at a time? Old ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... to an imitation of Horace, quaintly entitled an "Allusion to the Tenth Satire of his First Book" which was the production of Rochester. As however it appeared without a name, it may have been for a time imputed to some of the inferior wits, whom his Lordship patronized. It contains a warm attack on ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... seats rising one above another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop's seat above all,—after the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has a curious bass-relief, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... portion of boiled rice and ghee. The pigeons also came together in hundreds in an open space under the shade of a noble peepul tree, where grain was thrown out for them at three o'clock every day; and among them were many chattering sparrows and not a few green parrots, which walked quaintly among the bustling pigeons, their long tails moving from side to side like the pointer of the scale on which the Bunia weighed his rupees. This resemblance struck him as he reclined against the fat red cushion in his verandah ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... astonishment I beheld Kouaga, standing erect with arms folded beneath his white burnouse, talking in an undertone to a dark-bearded stranger who also wore flowing Arab garments and bore in his hand a long-barrelled flint-lock gun with quaintly-inlaid stock. The man seemed older than the Grand Vizier of Mo, for his beard was tinged with grey, and the brown hand that held the gun was lean ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... out of the ice field and steaming past Cape St. John. This was the dividing line between the English and French in the settlement of their troubles in 1635. North of it is called the French or Treaty Shore, or as the French themselves so much more quaintly named it, "Le Petit Nord." It is at the north end of Le Petit Nord that St. ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... in their extravagance of green and crimson, red and white carnations, red, white, and yellow roses. The sunshine broke into colour, it laughed, it danced, it almost rioted, among the flowers; but in the prim alleys, and on the formal hedges of box, and the quaintly-clipped yews, and the old purple brick walls, where fruit trees were trellised, it lay fast, fast asleep. Without the walls, in the deep cool greenery of the park, there was a perpetual drip-drip ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... insanity. But Caesar's victories were only advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them. Caesar is greater off the battle field than on it. Nelson off his quarterdeck was so quaintly out of the question that when his head was injured at the battle of the Nile, and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous, the difference was not important enough to be noticed. It may, however, be said that peace ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... the tinker who can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a habit of Monte-Cristo—that is George Borrow. For them that love these differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other side of the road and fare in ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... Forgotten hast reposed for many a year! Oft at my father's revels thou didst shine, To glad the earnest guests was thine, As each to other passed the generous cheer. The gorgeous brede of figures, quaintly wrought, Which he who quaff'd must first in rhyme expound, Then drain the goblet at one draught profound, Hath nights of boyhood to fond memory brought. I to my neighbour shall not reach thee now, Nor on thy rich device shall I my cunning show. Here is a juice, makes drunk without ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... him, all the time his brain busy to invent some fresh scheme to obtain funds. Then, punctually at five, he took leave of his friend, and entering a fiacre, drove along to Deauville, that fashionable village of smart villas, with its big, white casino and its quaintly built but ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux

... on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... Nature, or the simple observation of phenomena, is often used as an opiate to quiet the higher faculties. There can be no question of the fact that many persons pass much of their lives working in the in-door or out-door laboratories of science, just as old women knit, just as prisoners carve quaintly elaborate toys in their dungeons. The product is not absolutely useless in either case; the fingers of the body or of the mind become swift and cunning, but the soul does not grow under such culture. We are willing to allow that many of those who browse in the sleepy meadows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... direction. He was met upon the threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Paris: but one questions whether Parisian society be now 'under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue' than our own. The sum total of the matter seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again the old Puritans were right. And quaintly enough, the party in the English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence are the most scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth, are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than Puritan precision that with the most virtuous ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... said quaintly, "there was a good genie who let me in through the keyhole. I didn't meddle with anything, you know—I just looked at the beautiful room where you work. And I didn't glance, even, at the picture on the easel. The genie told me you wouldn't like that. I would ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... terrible group of rocks jutting out into the Channel, just off the French coast hard by Alderney, some six miles to the north-west of which island they lie. Rocks that are cruel and relentless as the surges that sweep over them in stormy weather, and which are so quaintly named from their helmet, or "casque"-like resemblance—rocks, concerning which the poet Swinburne has sung in his eloquent verse, that breathes the very spirit of the sea in depicting the strife ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... were of the most delicate rose color, tinged with gold; the carpet, a ground of white velvet pile bestrewed with delicate roses; the furniture of delicate pink satin, with setting of quaintly carved ebony. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... that their lives would go on forever in just this way,—that they would always be, as her grandfather liked to put it, "shipmates," walking together, studying together, sitting as they sat now, at their simple meals, with just the same quaintly flowered dishes, the same oddly turned teapot, with its attendant cream pitcher (slightly cracked as to lip) and the sugar-bowl, with a laboring ship depicted in blue on its curved side, which was not related, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... was evident from his silence. Seeing her as she stood there, so quaintly pretty, so feminine in look and manner—in short, such a flower—it was but natural that he should marvel at ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... clear, came the sound of footsteps on the road near by. Sighing, Barnabas turned thitherwards and beheld advancing towards them one who paused, now and then, to look about him as though at a loss, and then hurried on again. A very desolate figure he was, and quaintly pathetic because of his gray hair, and the empty sleeve that flapped helplessly to and fro with the hurry of his going—a figure, indeed, that there was no mistaking. Being come to the finger-post, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... a mass of living snow, while the flashing sunlight is perpetually endeavoring to paint a rainbow in the ever-mounting spray, and yet never quite succeeds. And those massive rocks, too, piling themselves up so quaintly on either side of the falls, just where they take the final plunge—are they not magnificent? How verdant and mossy, and superb in their ruggedness! Oh! if we were only upon one of those ledges—that one that seems ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... 359 [Bishop Hall quaintly remarks, that "No devil is so dangerous as the religious devil." "Suppose the ends of this Engagement to be good, (which they are not,) yet the meanes and ways of prosecution are unlawful, because there is not an equall avoiding of rocks on both hands, but a joyning with malignants to suppresse ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... thee quaintly Beneath the leaf; thy shell-shaped winglets faintly— (As thin as spangle Of cobwebbed rain)—held up at airy angle; I hear thy tinkle With faery notes the silvery ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... kneeling effigy of Martin, Recorder of London, and Reader of the Middle Temple, 1615. Near this is the effigy—also colored and under a canopy—of Edmund Plowden, the famous jurist, of whom Lord Ellenborough said that "better authority could not be cited"; and referring to whom Fuller quaintly remarks: "How excellent a medley is made, when honesty and ability meet in a man of his profession!" There is also a monument to James Howell (1594-1666), whose entertaining letters, chiefly written from the Fleet, give many curious particulars relating ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... the manner of enforcing it. "This transaction raised my temper some," writes Winslow in his Diary; and he proceeds to record his opinion that "it is the most ungenteel, ill-natured thing that ever I saw." He sent Monckton a quaintly indignant note, in which he observed that the affair "looks odd, and will appear so in future history;" but his commander, reckless of the judgments of posterity, gave him ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... Clergy School he decided to accept a friend's invitation to visit him in savage Africa so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in the highly sophisticated atmosphere of Oxford. As he quaintly put it: "Since Paul went into Arabia for three years, I don't see why I should not go to British East Africa for six months!" He did not, however, stay the whole time there, but re-visited his beloved Mauritius, and ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey

... principal members of the company, we will now ask the reader to follow the ladies into the drawing room. Government House drawing room was indeed an apartment of costly elegance. Richly covered and gilded furniture was arranged in stately profusion. Quaintly and gorgeously embroidered silken draperies were festooned with graceful effect. Rare paintings adorned the frescoed walls. Priceless cabinets, vases and statuary were grouped with artistic hand. Turkey ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour

... lived in great poverty, being neglected by a monarch and a court for whose amusement he had done so much. They laughed at the jester, and let him starve. Indeed, he seems to have had few friends; and this is accounted for quaintly by Aubrey, who says: "Satirical wits disoblige whom they converse with, and consequently make to themselves many enemies, and few friends; and this was his manner ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... States, have produced several authors of merit. Perhaps the earliest of these was David Cusick, who, in 1825, printed his Ancient History of the Six Nations. He was a full blood Tuscarora, and his English is far from correct. Yet the arrangement of his matter is skillful, and some passages quaintly vivid and forcible. Another member of the Iroquois confederacy, Peter Dooyentate Clarke, has taken up the Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts, and has made a readable little book (published at Toronto, 1870); ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton

... with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother minister in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly delivered in the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and old-fashioned reverence which sat strangely on one of his years. "Be faithful with the young man," continued ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... quaintly in the centre of the Cantankerous Old Lady's sallow cheek. 'My dear,' she murmured, 'my name is the one thing on earth I'm really ashamed of. My parents chose to inflict upon me the most odious label that human ingenuity ever devised for a ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... girl I've ever known, Melissa," said he quaintly. "You won't let anybody else have a thing to ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... attempts no serious acts advance; The fire of love is blown by dalliance. In working his fair neck she did so grace it, 70 She still was working her own arms t' embrace it: That, and his shoulders, and his hands were seen Above the stream; and with a pure sea-green She did so quaintly shadow every limb, All might be seen beneath the waves to swim. In this conceited scarf she wrought beside A moon in change, and shooting stars did glide In number after her with bloody beams; Which figur'd her affects[72] in their extremes, Pursuing nature in her Cynthian body, 80 And did her thoughts ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... turquoise is set, the eyes are formed of garnet, and the tongue of red onyx. The whole is of silver-gilt, and within the mouth is a small figure of Jonah, whose adventure is thus strangely mixed with the general design. The sea is quaintly indicated by the circular base, chased with figures of sea-monsters disporting in the waves. It would not be easy to select a more characteristic specimen of antique table-plate. The inventories of similar articles once possessed by the French ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... her bed, and immediately above a velvet-covered prie-dieu, there was a small figure of the Virgin and Child—one of those quaintly pretty devices for holding holy water, which the reverent superstition of the past century rendered a necessary adjunct of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... carefully made by Colonel Whittlesey,[235] the total area covered by these intrenchments is no less than twelve square miles, and the length of the mounds exceeds two miles. The large entrances protected by mounds thirty-five feet high, the avenues leading to them which are regular labyrinths, the quaintly shaped mounds — one, for instance, represents the foot of a gigantic bird — all combine to strike the visitor with astonishment. We give a representation (Fig. 86) of a group, not unlike that we have just described, which is situated at Liberty (Ohio), and ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... generation to generation. In the city of Grasse there were at the outbreak of the war fifty establishments making perfumes. The French perfumer does not confine himself to a single sense. He appeals as well to sight and sound and association. He adds to the attractiveness of his creation by a quaintly shaped bottle, an artistic box and an enticing name such as "Dans les Nues," "Le Coeur de Jeannette," "Nuit de Chine," "Un Air Embaume," "Le Vertige," "Bon Vieux Temps," "L'Heure Bleue," "Nuit d'Amour," "Quelques ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... polite," she said to herself. And so when the servants, who took their tone from their mistress, were insolent and ordered her about, she would hold her head erect, and reply to them sometimes in a way which made them stare at her, it was so quaintly civil. ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... 25th or 26th of December," his daughter once quaintly added to me, "he would note that the days were beginning to get longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... Rocket Falls in order to carry off the fledglings from the nests of the blue rock pigeons, and said that several lives had thus been lost. He said that there was no way of reaching the bottom of the cliff, and rather quaintly added, "Those who came up again came up, and those who did not, died." He said that some European had once put what was evidently dynamite into the pool. A great explosion followed, which killed a large number of fish, many of which were washed over ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... lore that he had already obtained for the ears of his kinsfolk in the country. A general laugh, at the expense of the admiring Pardon succeeded. Nightingale bestowed a knowing wink on one or two of his familiars, and, profiting by the occasion, "to freshen his nip," as he quaintly styled swallowing a pint of rum and water, he continued his narrative by saying, in a ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... too material for such imaginings," Francis replied, "but there is a quaintly artificial air about it all. We must go and look for ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of peasant life. Quaintly and slowly oxen under yoke were used on the streets to haul the farmers' grain to the large public square, where, under the scorching sun the farmer and his helpers toiled with hand flailers, thrashing the grain. Strange ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... Our report of these words, as we rejoin our companions, is the first intimation given that the bombardment is deferred. But, though, there is some disappointment, their surprise is not extreme. For Garibaldi never informs even his nearest aide-de-camp what he is about to do. In fact, he quaintly says, "If his shirt knew his plans, he would take it off and burn it." Some half-hour later, having descended from the eminence, we take our last look of Garibaldi. He has retired with a single servant to a sequestered place upon the mount, whither he daily resorts, and where his mid-day repast ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various



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