"Baseless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among the different races of mankind.[184] It was once commonly stated, as by Morgan and by Maine, that this abhorrence was the result of experience; the marriages of closely related persons were found to be injurious to offspring and were therefore avoided. This theory, however, is baseless because the marriages of closely related persons are not injurious to the offspring. Consanguineous marriages, so closely as they can be investigated on a large scale,—that is to say, marriages between cousins,—as Huth was the first to show, develop ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... seek and win Isabella's regard. She gazed and gazed, till she could have fancied her very destiny was in some way connected with the Queen's visit to Segovia—that some mysterious influences were connecting her, insignificant as she was, with Isabella's will. She strove with the baseless vision; but it would gain ground, folding up her whole mind in its formless imaginings. The sight of her husband, conversing eagerly with the sovereign, in some degree startled her back to the present scene. His cheek was flushed with exercise and ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... perplexed by his old friend's approval of them. 'There we decidedly differ,' said he, when the case of Dr. Shrapnel was related by the colonel, with a refusal to condemn Mr. Romfrey. He pronounced Mr. Romfrey's charges against Dr. Shrapnel, taken in conjunction with his conduct, to be baseless, childish, and wanton. The colonel would not see the case in that light; but Cecilia did. It was a justification of Beauchamp; and how could she ever have been blind to it?—scarcely blind, she remembered, but sensitively blinking her eyelids to distract her sight in contemplating ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... discovered this unknown sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... now are ended. These our actors [feminine] As I foretold you, were all spirits, and [masculine] Are melted into air, into thin air; [masculine] And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, [feminine] The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... foundations the Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting the nature ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... where the life of a King was at stake, any communication must have been official, and if it were made through the Spanish ambassador in London, Grenville would certainly have referred to it in his despatches to Madrid.[151] We may therefore dismiss Godoy's story as a cruel and baseless slander, due to the spiteful desire of a discredited politician to drag down a great name nearer to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... impossible, for the [25] proper study of Mind-healing would cure the insane. That persons have gone away from the Massachusetts Metaphysical College "made insane by Mrs. Eddy's teachings," like a hundred other stories, is a baseless fabrication offered solely to injure her or her school. [30] The enemy is trying to make capital out ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... topographers, who have founded upon it the tradition that two knights on their way to Fulham to be blessed by the Bishop of London quarrelled and fought at the Westbourne Bridge, and killed each other, and hence gave rise to the name. This story may be dismissed as entirely baseless; the real explanation is much less romantic. The word is probably connected with the Manor of Neyt, which was adjacent to Westminster, and as pronunciation rather than orthography was relied upon in early days, this seems much the most likely explanation. Lysons says: "Adjoining ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Right is nature's plan; And following nature is the march of man. Whene'er he deviates in the least degree, When, free himself, he would be more than free, The baseless column, rear'd to bear his bust, Falls as he mounts, and whelms ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve, And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... genera, have upon insufficient data been regarded as so many states or conditions of one and the same plant. Had the very pertinent suggestions of Professor de Bary been more generally acted upon, these suspicions would have been baseless. His observations are so valuable as a caution, that we cannot forbear prefacing our own remarks on this subject by quoting them.[A] In order to determine, he says, whether an organic form, an organ, or an organism, belongs to the same series of development ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... been noted again and again: mere size has often little to do with a man's physical prowess. The list of anecdotes wherein the little fellow "puts it all over" the big bully is exceptionally long. Nor are more than a bare majority of the anecdotes baseless. In our own lumber woods a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound man with no other weapon than his two hands once nearly killed a two-hundred-pound blacksmith for pushing him off a bench. This phenomenon arises from the fact that the little man seems capable often of releasing at will a greater ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... word more. I will keep sacred and secret in my heart what you have told me, dear child. I will not judge you hardly. You are young—so young—as young as I was when I went forth to sorrow and misery. For you, even though I think your dream baseless, and that you are feeding hope on what may turn out to be the ashes of disappointment, I will not despair. I know your idol is worthy, and love for one who is pure and noble cannot work ill in the end. I will keep your secret; now, Lucy, little sister—keep mine. I can never wed with ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... matter in the same easy way in which those double-ender floating palaces Fritz had noticed on the way up could go astern in order to avoid an obstruction; albeit Nat was prolific in the extreme with all manner of excuses—excuses that were as baseless and unsubstantial as the foam churned up by the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the transient pageants of an hour; And earthly pride is like the passing flower, That springs to fall, and blossoms but to die. 'T is as the tower erected on a cloud, Baseless and silly as the schoolboy's dream. Ages and epochs that destroy our pride, And then record its downfall, what are they But the poor creatures of man's teeming brain? Hath Heaven its ages? or doth Heaven preserve Its stated eras? Doth the Omnipotent Hear ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... science, they have wasted the lamp of life, forgetful of the midnight hour, or when, lost in poetic dreams, fancy has peopled the scene, and the soul has been disturbed, till it shook the constitution by the passions that meditation had raised, whose objects, the baseless fabric of a vision, faded before the exhausted eye, they must have ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... vaster rolls the surge, that sweeps the shores 250 Of Cerne, and the green Hesperides, And long-renowned Atlantis,[172] whether sunk Now to the bottom of the "monstrous world;" Or was it but a shadow of the mind, Vapoury and baseless, like the distant clouds That seem the promise of an unknown land To the pale-eyed and wasted mariner, Cold on the rocking mast. The pilot plies, Now tossed upon Bayonna's mountain-surge, High to the north ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... extremely sensitive feeling, as well as of shrewd and delicate perceptions. He lived a most uncomfortable life, and he was quite aware of it. The one person who should have been his truest friend deliberately nursed baseless enmity towards him. The only one whom he loved in all the world hated him with deadly hatred. And there was no cause for it but one—the strongest cause of all—the reason why Cain slew his brother. He was of God, and she was of the world. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in The Tempest the connection between the successive images—the baseless fabric of this vision—the cloud-capped towers—the gorgeous palaces—the solemn temples—the great globe itself—is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... fears turned out to be baseless. For instance, one day Johnny Boatman, a little boy not quite four years old, was lost. His mother was almost crazed, for word went out that the Indians had stolen him. A day later the lad was found under a tree, asleep. He ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... planters and their leadership followed. The illusion spread that they were not doing their share of the fighting; and as rich men were permitted to hire substitutes to represent them in the army, this really baseless report was easily propped up in the public mind with what appeared ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... seem'd to lash along his steeds of fire; And shot along the air with glancing ray, Swift as a falcon darting on its prey; No planet's swift career could match his speed, That seem'd the power of fancy to exceed. The courier of the sky I mark'd with dread, As by degrees the baseless fabric fled That human power had built, while high disdain I felt within to see the toiling train Striving to seize each transitory thing That fleets away on dissolution's wing; And soonest from the firmest grasp recede, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... originate? To which the answer mainly is, With that lean Gentleman whom we saw with Papers in the OEil-de-Boeuf on New-year's day last. With Monseigneur the Marechal de Belleisle principally; with the ambitious cupidities and baseless vanities of the French Court and Nation, as represented by Belleisle. George II.'s Spanish War, if you will examine, had a real necessity in it. Jenkins's Ear was the ridiculous outside figure this matter had: Jenkins's Ear was ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... paradoxical, (that is, revolting to popular opinion,) but was not so; for it fell in with prevailing opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 'catching' it, as though it were the most dangerous of microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream. But, now, I was eager to look out of the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the window- pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... to the terrible travesty of justice which was going on. Magistrates were seen to have overlooked the most flagrant instances of falsehood and contradiction on the part of both accusers and accused, using the baseless hypothesis that the devil had warped their senses. The disgusting partiality shown in the accusations was disrelished, as was the resort that had been had to torture. One poor old man of eighty they crushed to death because he would ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... reputations, which appear at one time so brilliant, and a short time after are heard of no more. Here, also, are countless vows and prayers for unattainable objects, lovers' sighs and tears, time spent in gaming, dressing, and doing nothing, the leisure of the dull and the intentions of the lazy, baseless projects, intrigues, and plots; these and such like ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... with a series of dissolving views. Headlands and mountains with cloud-capped pinnacles appeared and faded away; ships under sail floated across the sky; towers and palaces reared their forms indistinctly amid the vapour, and then vanished, like the baseless ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... How baseless is the mightiest earthly pride, The diamond is but charcoal purified, The lordliest pearl that decks a monarch's breast Is but an ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... scholar shook his head. "No, on the contrary, I am relieved from my fears. The alarm was baseless. I have it not, I thank Heaven. I have not the disease. Nor, if there be any certainty in medicine, shall ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... laughed outright this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... her. Should she end in the convent of Crowland? And suspecting, fearing, imagining all sorts of baseless phantoms, she hardened her ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear that his child is sick, or his wife unfaithful, or that he has been cheated out of his property. Hundreds of homesick men whose whole lives have been bound up in the family circle pour in upon the secretaries, begging ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... neither in the mountains of Samaria, nor in the temples of Jerusalem, or Rome, or London. 'The cloud-capt towers-the gorgeous palaces-the solemn temples-yea, the great globe itself, shall dissolve, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.' Or in language far more solemn and striking, because they are the unerring words of truth, 'The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English language stands. It has the start of all other languages—the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... last. But this solitude and desolation add infinitely to its charm; just as the mystery and romance that enshroud the far-off monasteries in their desolate mountain retreats would fall away as "the baseless fabric of a vision" if they were brought into the crowded and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... their late father's lawyers, and that she was going to shut herself up, and write some long letters in connection with that business. After she had got into her own room, she was never sensible of how time was passing—never conscious of any feeling within her, except a baseless, helpless hope that the French police might yet be proved to have made some terrible mistake—until she heard a violent shower of rain come on a little after sunset. The noise of the rain, and the freshness it brought with it in the air, seemed to awaken her as if ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Victor Emmanuel's sense of personal dignity preserved him from bending to the rod of imperial displeasure. Cavour was ready even to forestall the cry for precautionary measures; the air was full of wild rumours, and he thought that Victor Emmanuel's days and his own were threatened, a baseless suspicion, for the most reckless conspirators in those times accounted regicide madness in a free country. But he believed it, and for this reason, as well as from his entirely sincere abhorrence of political ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... injunctions to say nothing more to anybody on the subject, and pledging Merrill to reticence, he had gone home, written brief and hurried letters to Ray and to Gleason, told his wife that he had heard the stories, and that until Ray had a chance to explain would regard them as baseless rumors, or at the worst as exaggerations, for which Gleason was responsible; then he had slept the sleep of the just until the corporal of the guard came banging at the door at four A.M. to say the reveille had sounded ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... it altogether unlikely that some of the more shrewd Italian or Spanish diplomatists at the Vatican—advised, perhaps, by their English bishops and dukes—may hope to affect the issue rather in the Unionist than in the Home Rule direction? Such suspicions may be entirely baseless, but it will be impossible to disregard them entirely during the events of ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... They have been taught that in a time of profound peace England, France, and Russia deliberately initiated a war of aggression to destroy the commercial power of Germany. The documents hereinafter analyzed will show how utterly baseless this fiction is. Even if the truth were known, no one can blame the German, who now rallies to his flag with such superhuman devotion, for whether the cause of his country is just or unjust, its prestige, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... It was impossible to doubt it, unfortunately. You remember what I told you of her ungovernable, wild fits of passion—which she expected me to reciprocate. She terrified me! And think how she tortured herself with baseless self-reproaches in the ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... world, it was only through the medium of the company in its relations to that world. I had formed some attachments,—ties which have lasted through life thus far, and will always last,—but these attachments were immediate only, and, so far as I felt, were almost baseless; for not directly could I see and feel what was felt by the men I loved. Outside the narrow bounds of the company my world was all abstract. I fought for that world, for it appealed to my reason; but it was with ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... egregiously misunderstood that many entire systems of interpretation—which were believed in for generations, and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion— are clearly proved to have been utterly baseless. Colossal usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built, like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... pride or for utility; no temples, canals, or roads remain to remind posterity of our conquest and dominion. Were the English rule over India suddenly cast off, in a single generation the tradition of our Eastern empire would appear a splendid but baseless dream, that of our administration an allegory, of our victories ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... and that only in calm meditation. But in this separation from real life he is likely to lose sight of all the limits of human nature, and seeking pure form he may easily lose himself in arbitrary and baseless conceptions. Reason will abstract itself too much from experience, and the practical man will not be able to carry out, in the crush of real life, what the contemplative mind has discovered on the peaceful path of thought. Thus, what makes a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... plan you devise for our meeting here during Passion week, dear Hal, is a baseless vision. Our friends go up to London the week after next, and I do not know when I shall be able again to stay so far ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... within him and Emilia's, though it lacked experience, was a woman's regarding love. And moreover, she did not weep, but practically suggested his favourable chances, which it was a sad satisfaction to him to prove baseless, and to knock utterly over. The grief in which the soul of a human creature is persistently seeking (since it cannot be thrown off) to clothe itself comfortably, finds in tears an irritating expression of sympathy. Hints of a brighter future are its nourishment. Such embryos are not tenacious of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reflexion the impulse of the moment, in any and every case all alike, great and small, good and bad, leaders and followers, or however else we may class them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... latter to the Senate. The propriety of this course of action depended somewhat on the question of Sherman's physical condition. Rumor declared that he was suffering from mental decay, due to his age, but McKinley believed the rumor to be baseless, summoned him to the cabinet, and Hanna was subsequently appointed to the Senate. When Sherman took up the duties of his office it appeared that the rumor had been all too true, and a serious lapse of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... instance of this carefully premeditated and unscrupulous gulling and thwarting of the American Embassy. The accidental discovery of the circumstance that the baseless charge of espionage levelled against me was still hanging over my head somewhat worried me. I ascertained one exceedingly disturbing fact which was communicated to me within the camp. Had I committed any offence, no matter how trivial, while in the camps, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... that our hearts were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer, on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper: with a special stipulation that they were "not to be fetched till twelve." This wandering ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... our view. The trees and buildings, the spectators and their crowded equipages, and finally, the earth itself, at first distinctly seen, gradually became obscured by the thickening mist, and growing whiter in their forms, and fainter in their outlines, soon faded away 'like the baseless fabric of a vision,' leaving us, to all appearance, stationary in the cloud that still continued to involve us in its watery folds. To heighten the interest and maintain the illusion of the scene, the shouts and voices of the multitude whom we had left behind us, cheering the ascent, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... wild sons. The long- sleeved garment which he gave to the lad probably meant to indicate his purpose to bestow on him the right of the first-born forfeited by Reuben, and so the violent rage which it excited was not altogether baseless. The whole miserable household strife teaches the rottenness of the polygamous relation on which it rested, and the folly of paternal favouritism. So it carries teaching especially needed then, but not out ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... anything at all. Of both of them it may be said that no men stood higher in their profession, and that Mr Ball's suspicions, had they been known in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, would have been scouted as utterly baseless. And, for the comfort of my readers, let me assure them that they were utterly baseless. There might, perhaps, have been a little vanity about Mr Slow as to the names of his aristocratic clients; but he was an honest, painstaking man, who had ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... be begun. An essential condition, as already pointed out, of all the projected invasions was the receipt of assistance from sympathisers in the enemy's country. Hoche himself expected this even in Tate's case; but experience proved the expectation to be baseless. When the prisoners taken with Tate were being conducted to their place of confinement, the difficulty was to protect them, 'car la population furieuse contre les Francais voulait les lyncher.' Captain Desbriere dwells at some length on the mutinies in the ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... I foretold you, are all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... roast, and be lord paramount over kitchen and larder. His disappointment was therefore great at finding all the solid joys of red deer and moor-game, kippered salmon and mutton hams, "vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision," ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... contrast had nothing sad in it; and it was pleasant to feel that it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering under the tall ancient woods, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and rent him. "This fellow," said GRUBLET, "will get too uppish—I must show up his trash"; and accordingly he fulminated against his friend in the organ that he had by that time come to consider as his own. This baseless sense of proprietorship, in fact, it was that wrecked GRUBLET. In an evil moment for himself he tried to ride rough-shod over CHEPSTOWE, and that temporary genius dismissed him with a promptitude that should stand to his credit against many shortcomings. GRUBLET, I believe, still ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... interest in these people, who, he repeated, "are just dogs," referring to their legendary origin, of which they are not ashamed. His assertion that they have learned politeness from the Japanese is simply baseless. Their politeness, though of quite another and more manly stamp, is savage, not civilised. The men came back at dark, the meal was prepared, and we sat round the fire as before; but there was no sake, except in the possession ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... that the outcome of a study of Richard Rolle will be effeminacy. Not that that indeed is the special temptation of the English: a chill commonplace acquiescence in a convenient, if baseless, hope that somehow "things will come all right," is far more likely to lead them astray than any "burning yearning to GOD with a wonderful delight and certainty." Is not George Herbert's ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... true, I admit, but I assure you that the bright prospects you have cut out for yourself are very delusive. They will never be realised, at least in the shape in which you have depicted them on your imagination. They will dissolve, my boy, on a nearer approach, and, as Shakespeare has it, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind,' or, at least, not ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... could get something to do when this dross is gone. In London there are sermons in stones, certainly, but not "good in everything,"—an observation I should take the liberty of making to the Swan if he were not now, alas! "the baseless fabric of a vision."'" ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... charge is quite baseless, sir,' said his son-in- law. 'You must know by this time—or if you do not, it has been a monstrous cruel injustice to me that I should have been allowed to remain in your mind with such a stain upon my character—you must know ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... was not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis—to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry—to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive methods, for the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... unsound; and he was at times altogether thrown out by the capricious starlings of the prophet's mind. These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse. Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; and the hare still ran on the mountains, but the soup was already served in silver plate. Carthew in a few days could command a hundred and fifty pounds; Hadden was ready with five hundred; why should they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Government of Korea, in obedience to His Imperial Majesty's wishes, is now engaged in the task of reorganizing the various institutions of State. But those who are ignorant of the march of events in the world and who fail correctly to distinguish loyalty from treason have by wild and baseless rumours instigated people's minds and caused the rowdies in various places to rise in insurrection. These insurgents commit all sorts of horrible crimes, such as murdering peaceful people, both native and foreign, robbing their property, burning official and private buildings, and destroying ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... teach them to speak the truth is nothing less than to teach them the art of lying. In your zeal to rule, control, and teach them, you never find sufficient means at your disposal. You wish to gain fresh influence over their minds by baseless maxims, by unreasonable precepts; and you would rather they knew their lessons and told lies, than leave ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to plan deliberately a situation calculated to turn a cherished sentiment into ridicule? If he had seriously thought his daughter capable of supporting the role he had assigned her, had there ever been ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... demanded an anti-slavery restriction on every inch of soil owned by the United States. They viewed with abhorrence the legislation which had placed freedom and slavery on the same plane in the Territories of Utah and New Mexico. They believed that Texas had been paid for a baseless claim ten millions of dollars, one-half of which, as a sharp critic declared, was hush-money, the other half blood-money. They regarded the cruel law for the return of fugitive slaves as an abomination in the sight of God and man. In their judgment it ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Denmark, and in Norway the Germans have inspired the apprehension that, if England was at war with Germany, England would violate the neutrality of those countries and seize some of their harbors. This allegation is as baseless as the allegation about our intention to violate the neutrality of Belgium, and events have shown it to be so. But it seems to be a rule with Germany to attribute to others the designs that she herself entertains; as it is clear now that, for some long time past, it has been a settled ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... many things about the mysterious Hester, but never that she bore that name, as a matter of simple fact. The connection with Caliban had been too much for my overtrained imagination, and heaven knows what baseless theories I had woven around what was at best (or worst) a mere coincidence. For me the scarlet letter had flamed upon what I now know to have been a blameless breast, and in my excited fancy a stormy nature had suffered ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in midair; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails a system based on ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... in according to Gallatin the honor of this field day. It was left to John C. Hamilton, half a century later, to charge a want of courage upon Gallatin,—a baseless charge.[3] Not Malesherbes, the noble advocate defending the accused monarch before the angry French convention, with the certainty of the guillotine as the reward of his generosity, is more worthy of admiration than Gallatin ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... championship of Bulgaria. Had it been in the power of Americans to have saved Louis XVI. from the scaffold, they would have shown cruel ingratitude not to have interfered in his behalf. It was a most arrogant and baseless assumption on the part of the French democracy to claim credit for what the Bourbon king had done in sending his army and navy to these shores and supplying funds to equip and maintain our troops. It is ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means—as so many good and earnest women seem to imagine—by any multiplication of Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the reason of his indifference. It became plain to her at once that there was some other attraction, to use her own expression. In short, it was evident that the hope she had so fondly cherished was a baseless delusion, and that she would "never make anything out of that man yonder," in the Countess' forcible phrase. The Countess seemed to have been a judge of character. Mme. Vauquer's aversion was naturally more energetic than her friendship, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... same terms. Had the French Government retraced its steps, improved the condition of its soldiers, and mitigated the punishment for desertion during the long war, Frederick's army would have fallen to pieces 'like the baseless ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... which are generally baseless—the mere expression of society's floating malice, the scum of ill-nature on the ocean of talk—Captain Winstanley was a universal favourite. He went everywhere, and was liked wherever he went. He was gifted with that adaptability and hardiness which is, of all cleverness, most valuable in polite ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed—theories involving the construction of perhaps as much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these three I ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... bitter was the feeling against the horseflesh fable—for fable, our anger notwithstanding, we insisted it was—that thinking meat-eaters began to look upon it as a bad omen, and to wonder why a baseless rumour should stir up so much indignation. Tales of this kind, whether or not they tallied with probability, had come to be pooh-poohed, to be treated with disdain. Hence it was rather odd that an anecdote so racy should excite ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... they regard the most important of all arts, and the first obligation imposed by God on man—namely, the cultivation of the soil. They leave this to the slaves, who are few and ill-fed, and know no more of agriculture than their masters do; ... their great laziness, together with a silly, baseless vanity, makes them look upon all manual labor as degrading, proper only for slaves, and so they prefer poverty to doing honest work. To this must be added their ambition to make rapid fortunes, as some of them do, by contraband trading, ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... intended to convey is that in those industries which are controlled by Jews no such attempts have been made to better the lot of the workers employed in them as have been made in those industries which are controlled by non-Jews. This charge, likewise, is wholly baseless, as anybody who desires to know the truth can readily ascertain. It was my good fortune and privilege, as one of the representatives of the public appointed by President Wilson, to serve as a member ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... charge the professors of Scriptural Christianity with being on the high road to Calvinism, and prepared, by their faith in the corruption of human nature, and the atonement of Christ, for the most extreme views of the Divine decrees. Yet these bold and baseless assertions have their weight with those for whom they are intended, and many weak but good persons are held in passive bondage to these teachers and their creed, through the holy fear of moving a ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... would have done their utmost to exact a reckoning for past abuses. Upon the whole, then, Sir Francis had materially strengthened his position. But the strength was fictitious rather than real, and the baseless fabric which he had reared with such pains quickly tottered and fell. The three new Councillors were not long in discovering that their places were sinecures. His Excellency wanted none of their counsel, and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... drapes it with hues of enchanting beauty. Sometimes the haze plays fantastic tricks with it,—a cloud-cap hangs on Monte Solaro, or a mist obscures the base, and the massive summits of rock seem to float in the air, baseless fabrics of a vision that the rising wind will carry away perhaps. I know now what Homer means by "wandering islands." Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so destroy forever another island of the imagination? The bane of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... penitentiary; the warden himself has placed himself on record numerous times to the effect that under no circumstances would he take the word of a prisoner over that of a guard. To be reported means to be punished, be the report baseless or not. It follows naturally that guards never scruple to give full rein to any animosity they may privately feel against a man, knowing that they will be able to "put it across" with the higher official to whom complaint may ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the fact that they are so persistent, we have thought it well to inform you of them and to tell you how earnestly we hope that they are baseless. We trust that you will set both our minds ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... all over; an interval of agonizing doubt—of days passed in miserable journeys to gain tidings, of hopes that took firmer root even as they were more baseless—was changed to the certainty of the death that eclipsed all happiness for the ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... 'his light can do us no good, while it is a light outside of us. If he in any way confused the conclusions of his logic (which is often extremely inconsequent and mistaken) with the perceptions of his divinely illuminated soul, our belief might prove baseless.' (Soul, pp. 226. 227.) ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the hilltops; your ears ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with an old and established reputation for mysterious if not supernatural disturbances. What he has got is a house with no reputation whatever of that kind, with no history, with nothing germane to his purpose beyond a cloud of baseless rumours produced during the last twelve-month. Who is responsible for the imposture it is not my business to know or to inquire, but that it is an imposture of the most shallow and impudent kind there can be no manner of doubt. I interviewed in P—— a man who has the district at ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... interesting. It is to be presumed that our beloved country existed before the Flood: if so, it must have had a history. I have therefore endeavoured to fill up what is lacking in the annals of our land, by a record of its antediluvian state, adapted to the meanest comprehension, and founded on the most baseless facts. I am desirous, sir, to see myself in print. I should like my work, sir, to appear in large letters; in very large letters, sir. Indeed, sir, it would give me joy, if you would condescend to print it altogether ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Christians had filled no large space in the eye of the world. Until the days of Domitian we do not hear of a single noble or distinguished person who had joined their ranks. That the Pudens and Claudia of Rom. xvi. were the Pudens and Claudia of Martial's Epigrams seems to me to be a baseless dream. If the "foreign superstition" with which Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, was charged, and of which she was acquitted, was indeed, as has been suspected, the Christian religion, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... whence comes this baseless jealousy? Have you ever seen in my conduct anything that should not be seen in that of a good, faithful, and virtuous wife? Cursed be the hour I first knew you, since you suspect me of that which my heart could never imagine. You know me badly ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... the potash in the fertilizer is in form of sulphate. Usually that profits the user nothing, and often the claim is baseless, but if it is a sulphate, the cost of the potash should have only 20 per cent added to the valuation of the potash, which usually will not add one dollar to the total cost of the ton of mixed fertilizer. Basing the valuations of the pounds of plant-food in the mixed fertilizer ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... between enthusiasm and despair that fills a Chestertonian while reading any of his literary biographies. For so much is built on this theory which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... development of the world is a great fact; the theory of atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... made by various writers that his cold was the cause of his dispositions not being as well planned as on former occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon's cold on the twenty-sixth of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Mesched, and my brothers read The paper I had written, their wrath rose Against my tutor whom they deemed the spy. He, being found asleep beside the king Who lay dead, to his door they brought The baseless charge of murder. Through the streets They sent their criers to proclaim the deed. So, clamorous for his life, the people came And dragged him forth, and led him to the block And slew him. On a spear they set his head, And placed it high upon the tower above The eastern gate. ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... tormented all grown persons to illustrate with more knowledge, still more,—how we bless the chance that gave to us your great realities, which life has daily helped us, helps us still, to interpret, instead of thin and baseless fictions that would all this time have hampered us, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fearful influence of worn-out cloth! Can a long series of unchanging kindness balance patched elbows? are not cracked boots receipts in full for hours of anxious love and care? does not the kindness of a life fade "like the baseless fabric of a vision" before the withering touch of poverty's stern stamp? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... inexperienced in national administration, for the party had been proscribed for six terms. The greatest attention was attracted by the two former Confederates, Garland and Lamar, whose career did much to disprove the "gloomy and baseless superstition" of twenty years, "that one half of the nation had become the irreconcilable enemies of the national unity and the national will." It was an American Administration, and of its chief, James Russell Lowell, who had known men in many lands, wrote, "He is a truly American ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... envious East represents that a Chicago young man travelling in Louisiana wrote to his sweetheart: "DEAR MAMIE,—I have shot an alligator. When I have shot another, I will send you a pair of slippers." The implication is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, a base and baseless calumny. New York itself does not present a higher average of female beauty than Chicago, and that is saying a great deal. But I must not enlarge on this fascinating topic. A Judgment of Paris is always a delicate business, and I am in nowise called upon to make the invidious award. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... spite of themselves, and with the times, they had still learned little and forgotten little. So it was that Sir George Arthur, a Tory governor in partibus infidelium, was driven into panic by Durham's frank criticisms, and expounded to Normanby, his Whig chief, fears not altogether baseless: "The bait of responsible government has been eagerly taken, and its poison is working most mischievously.... {249} The measure recommended by such high authority is the worst evil that has yet befallen Upper Canada":[22] and again, "since the Earl of Durham's ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... persuade Sir Winterton to give Mr. Quisante a private assurance that the scandal is entirely baseless, would Mr. Quisante state publicly that he was convinced of its falsity and did not wish it to influence ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... guilty. I do not know the lady who was so wantonly charged with this crime, and I do not know of any case in the annals of criminal jurisprudence which, from the evidence submitted in the case, had so baseless a foundation for so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... up resignedly and followed him to the managingeditor's office. We were not greeted directly. Instead, a question was thrown furiously over our heads. "Where is he? What bristling and baseless egomania sways him to affront the Daily Intelligencer with his contumacious and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... against the softness of this suave, yet merciless, being. Only a will as strong as her own could hope to cope with this smiling fury; and this he was determined to show, though, alas! he had everything to lose in a struggle that robbed her of nothing but a hope which was but a baseless fabric at best; for he was more than ever determined ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... citizens,' replied the Prefect, inclining with civility to Publius, 'the Christians have reached at no time fifty thousand. As for the conjecture touching the number of those who secretly embrace this injurious superstition, I hold it utterly baseless. It may serve a dying cause to repeat such statements, but they accord not ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... saw how thoughtless, unprepared, and baseless were all the objections we had made, and how greatly the echo of the present was heard in them, the voice of which, in the province of culture, the old man would fain not have heard. Our objections, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... that goes towards the uprearing of this visible fane, each human soul that does its part in building the invisible temple of our national faith, is bearing witness to, and lending its support to, that which is either the truth of truths, or the baseless fabric of a dream. ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... the Tribune, "and gloomy fantasy, that man's fate is pre-ordained—irrevocable—unchangeable, from the moment of his birth! Yet, were the dream not baseless, fain would I know which of yon stately lights is my natal star,—which images—which reflects—my career in life, and the memory I shall leave in death." As this thought crossed him, and his gaze was still fixed above, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... last chapter of the last book was done, it occurred to me to wonder whether I might ever be able to afford to get for a week or two where the thermometer went below ninety degrees in summer. But this was a wild and baseless dream, whose irrationality I quickly recognized. For such books as those into which I had been coining a year of my young strength and heart, I received the sum of one hundred dollars apiece. The "Gypsy" publisher was more munificent. He offered one ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... Poe's book, and very likely did not know how to read. After having handed over Pym's journal, he had not troubled himself about its publication. Having retired to Illinois at first and to the Falklands afterwards, he had no notion of the stir that the work had made, or of the fantastic and baseless climax to which our great poet had brought ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... of organic nature—not only does it fall to the ground, but positively becomes itself converted into one of the strongest arguments in favour of the theory. As soon as the allegation is found to be baseless, the very fact that it cannot be brought to bear upon any one of all the millions of adaptive structures in organic nature becomes a fact of vast significance on the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... ye not already enjoy the bliss of the prophetic vision, until the bursting in of the reality? Ah, ye do! Now think it not over-officious in your cousin of low capacity to assure you that your hopes are but the baseless fabrics of vain minds. The day of examination will reveal to your astonished sensibilities that ye have dreamed the dream of fools. Those noble young men, who are the objects of your hatred, will soar ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... baseless attacks on myself and the colleagues of my Embassy in the columns of the Providence Journal impels me to ask whether your Excellency cannot see your way to make it clear that these attacks are not countenanced by the American Government. Such slanders against the representatives ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... then a patient cannot have too much air; in scarlet fever, for the first few days the windows, be it winter or summer, must to the widest extent be opened. The fear of the patient catching cold by doing so is one of the numerous prejudices and baseless fears that haunt the nursery, and the sooner it is exploded the better it will he for human life. The valances and bed-curtains ought to be removed, and there should be as little furniture in the room ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... of the theory is as baseless as the first. All men have spiritual faculties, and have not obtained by them all needed spiritual things. They have not in their own opinion, and surely they are competent judges of "what lies wholly in the plane of their own consciousness." In proof of the fact that mankind have not, in their own ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man's morals ... but no! We were persuaded that rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been seen dancing at Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z—— was a baseless fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled. And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so. 'I suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask, with ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... gave rise to two legends about him which are still so often repeated that their absurdity must be mentioned here, although they have been known for many years to be baseless. One is perpetuated by an inscription on the organ in the church at Whitchurch, to the effect that Handel composed the oratorio of Esther on this instrument. Handel was never organist at Whitchurch; the church existed ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... furnished by the "Miller's" picture of the life of a poor scholar in lodgings at Oxford, or by the "Reeve's" rival narrative of the results of a Trumpington walk taken by two undergraduates of the "Soler Hall" at Cambridge. Equally baseless is the supposition of one of Chaucer's earliest biographers, that he completed his academical studies at Paris—and equally futile the concomitant fiction that in France "he acquired much applause by his literary exercises." Finally, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which pervade the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... say: Formerly, when the nation was disunited and disturbed, there was no one who could give unity to it. The princes therefore stood up together; constant references were made to antiquity to the injury of the present state; baseless statements were dressed up to confound what was real, and men made a boast of their own peculiar learning to condemn what their rulers appointed. And now, when Your Majesty has consolidated the empire, and, distinguishing black from white, has ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... began to speak of Barbee and his new girl, of anything that offered itself to his mind as a lighter topic. But Helen was in no responsive mood. It seemed to her that a shadow had crept across the sky; that the warmth had gone out of the sunlight. A fear crept into her heart, and like many a baseless emotion grew into certainty, that if Alan Howard and Jim Courtot came face to face it would be Alan who fell. When she saw how straight and virile Howard sat in the saddle; when she marked how full of life and the sheer joy of life he was; when she read in his eyes something ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... to Neptune leav'st The easy victory and baseless fame? Why o'er thy shoulder hangs thine idle bow? Ne'er in our father's halls again, as erst Among th' Immortals, let me hear thee boast How thou with Neptune ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... unpleasant impression has even been aggravated by the allegations contained in your letter. Your bitter attack on Great Britain is not only baseless, but is the more unjustifiable coming as it does, in the midst of a great war, from the Commandant-General of one of the British Dominions. Your reference to barbarous acts during the South African War cannot justify the criminal ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... concealment for the express purpose of deceiving, is recognized as clearly in warfare as in peaceful civil life; and the writer on Christian ethics who appeals to the approved practices of warfare in support of the "lie of necessity" can have only the plea of ignorance as an excuse for his baseless argument. ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... confessed (strange memory nowadays), that he owed to her a moral redemption. His morality, in fact, no one doubted; the suspicions Mrs. Hannaford had once entertained when his coldness to her began, she now knew to be baseless. Absorbed in meditations upon bloodshed and havoc, he held high the ideal of chastity, and, in company agreeable to him, could allude to it as the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... the stolid asseveration of the German. "The home is sacred." The speaker's tone was so malevolent that Hamilton was impressed, in spite of himself. And then, suddenly, a suspicion upreared itself in his brain—a suspicion so monstrous, so absurd, so baseless, so extravagantly impossible, that he would have laughed aloud, but for the sincerity of the feeling manifested in the faces of the men before him. His eyes roved from Schmidt to the faded woman who was the man's wife. He saw her shrinking behind the ample bulk of Mrs. McMahon, her ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... are related a very large number of my dreams. Again and again events of that day and of the preceding days form the basis of dreams; trivial circumstances are revived one by one and fragments of the experience itself are seized, distorted and each woven into what I can no longer term "the baseless fabric of a vision." For instance the day preceding I broke my umbrella and found a shop where it was mended. In dream after dream appears that broken umbrella under various circumstances and when I ask the reason for its apparent importance I can not escape the conclusion that ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... and wiser dispositions towards us; perhaps on that event their conduct may be changed. But what England is to become on the crush of her internal structure, now seeming to be begun, I cannot foresee. Her monied interest, created by her paper system, and now constituting a baseless mass of wealth equal to that of the owners of the soil, must disappear with that system, and the medium for paying great taxes thus failing, her navy must be without support. That it shall be supported by permitting her to claim dominion of the ocean, and to levy tribute ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... having been hastily summoned, would return to demand angrily what the rumpus was all about. By this time the clerk would have recovered his wits sufficiently to denounce the proceeding as an outrage and the suit as baseless. But his master, who saw judgment against himself for sixty dollars and his goods actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to, much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they availed ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" have but a brief career on earth. It is chiefly the incessant action of water and of air that makes them vanish like the "baseless fabric of a vision." On the moon these causes of disintegration and of decay are all absent, though perhaps the changes of temperature in the transition from lunar day to lunar night would be attended with expansions and ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Nor distant is the hour; low murmurs spread, And whispered fears, creating what they dread; Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here, [5] There, the heart-witherings of unuttered fear, And that sad death, whence most affection bleeds, Which sickness, only of the soul, precedes. Thy baseless wealth dissolves in air away, Like mists that melt before the morning ray: No more on crowded mart or busy street Friends, meeting friends, with cheerful hurry greet; Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants bend Their altered looks, and evil days portend, And fold their arms, and ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... was never refuted, is really too horrible to ponder over. It puts in the shade any responsibility Napoleon had for the death of the Duc d'Enghien. It is needless to enlarge on the silly and altogether baseless attacks that were not only allowed to be made, but, we have good grounds for stating, were manufactured by members of the Government and their agents, and circulated for the purpose of distracting the public mind from their own iniquities, and inflaming bitter passions and prejudices by accusing ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... avarice of Phillip V., who caused many of the inmates to be burned alive, in order that the fire might purify at one and the same time, the infection of the body and that of the soul, giving as an ostensible reason for his fiendish barbarity, the absurd and baseless allegation, that the Lepers had been bribed to commit the detestable sin and horrible crime of poisoning the wells, waters, etc., used by the Christians. The real cause being a desire, through this flimsy excuse, to rob the richer hospitals of their funds and ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... him for myself, madam," retorted the minister. I thought indeed he spoke with an effort that made this gallantry seem not altogether baseless in fact. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... thinking, and a sudden fear arose within him that Spanish reinforcements were on their way, and that Perez was merely fighting for time until they should arrive. This fear grew until it became belief, though a baseless one, and, hoisting sail as quietly as possible, he stole out of Santiago Bay on the fourth night after hostilities had opened. As thanks are cheap, Perez received a good many ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... would please me better, nothing would afford my country greater pleasure and satisfaction, than to see this marriage consummated. It would nail that baseless lie which has so long ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... building was granted him, and the first Crystal Palace—the first palace for the people in England—went slowly up, amid the sun-dropped shades of Hyde Park. Temporary as was that marvelous structure, destined so soon to pass away, like "the baseless fabric of a vision," I can but think it the grandest of the monuments to the memory of the Prince- Consort, though little did he so regard it. To his poetic yet practical mind it was the universal temple of industry and art, the valhalla of the heroes of commerce, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... man." He was one of the Society of Apostles, and characteristically contributed an essay on Ghosts. Only the preface survives: it is not written in a scientific style; but bids us "not assume that any vision IS baseless." Perhaps the author went on to discuss "veridical hallucinations," but his ideas about these ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... destitute of foundation in reason and truth. It was imputed that the measure originated in the conception of extending the limits of slave labor beyond those previously assigned to it, and that such was its natural as well as intended effect; and these baseless assumptions were made, in the Northern States, the ground of unceasing assault ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... such flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world's flowers being withered, would be grieved by those sorrowful jewels; and to what purpose? Why should it be? They were but a sign of broken joys and baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle dust. Let them be. He would restore them to her guardian when he came down; he in his turn would ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... allowed to say (for the letters tell us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further that, by whatever causes impelled, he certainly worked too hard during the last two years of his life. With regard to the passage quoted, what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust, for that is a transitory malady most incident to authorship; but that, could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the side of the friend he addressed—could he for an hour or two have visited London—all this apprehension ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... shows good literary workmanship. It does not weary the reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthusiasm—not to say baseless encomium—for which too many female biographers have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling women.'... Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too much in ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... of the mother and daughter, in the maternal tenderness of Rome, and the filial obedience of Constantinople. In the synod of Florence, the Greeks and Latins had embraced, and subscribed, and promised; but these signs of friendship were perfidious or fruitless; [5] and the baseless fabric of the union vanished like a dream. [6] The emperor and his prelates returned home in the Venetian galleys; but as they touched at the Morea and the Isles of Corfu and Lesbos, the subjects of the Latins complained that the pretended union would be an instrument of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... round the garden before he came in, as he had a headache, and went on through the walks which were sacred to Lucy, not thinking of her, but wondering bitterly whether anybody would stand by him, or whether an utterly baseless slander would outweigh all the five years of his life which he had spent among the people of Carlingford. Meanwhile John stood at the door and watched him, and of course thought it was very "queer." "It aint as if he'd a-been sitting up all night, like our ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my roof, and laid myself down in my misery. My unhappy imagination suggested numberless baseless projects, and prescribed impossible resolutions. When a man is struggling in the wreck of his fortunes, he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed. Ah, my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... too indiscriminate when it assailed the existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars, baseless as the Patrician legends may be. Colgan's Lives of Irish Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the scenes described. He visited them under the best guidance; and Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul |
