"Coarseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... clergymen." I know not how any one who has read the Morte d'Arthur can blame Tennyson in the matter. Let Malory and his sources be blamed, if to be moral is to be culpable. A few passages apart, there is no coarseness in Malory; that there are conscience, courtesy, "sweet lives," "keeping down the base in man," "amiable words," and all that Tennyson gives, and, in Mr Harrison's theory, gives without authority in the romance, my quotations from Malory demonstrate. They are chosen at a casual opening of his ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... there snakes?" asked Mrs. Campbell's languid tones, curiously like her husband's, without his coarseness—for this heavy, beefy, blear-eyed man was undoubtedly the husband whom she had never cared to mention on shipboard.—"You know I am deathly afraid of them. I should faint if I ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... experiences, and he sought some finer exercise for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him, and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press, the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the coarseness of their meal: but her father interposed, saying, "It is good enough for well people, and as good as we generally have; but if thee has anything a little nice for a poor appetite, bring it ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... and good. His heart went out to the girl in a new pity. Before the hymn was done she turned her face towards him, and, whether it was the magic of her voice, or the glorious splendour of her eyes, or the mystic touch of the fast darkening night, her face seemed to have lost much of its coarseness and all of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... kindled Swift's indignation, the haughty, presuming, tyrannizing upstart! A person of this description chanced to reside in the parish of Laracor. Swift omitted no opportunity of humbling his pride; but, as he was as ignorant as insolent, he was obliged to accommodate the coarseness of the lash to the callosity of the back. The following lines have been found written by Swift upon ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... said Helen, who felt that the boy was gaining upon her more and more: for, in spite of his coarseness, there was a frank, merry, innocent undercurrent that, she felt, might be brought to the surface, strengthened and utilised ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... and Charles Dickens, considered Fielding's complement and absolute co-equal (to say the least) in literary achievement. Smollett's fame, indeed, seems to have fallen upon an unprosperous curve. The coarseness of his fortunate rival is condoned, while his is condemned without appeal. Smollett's value is assessed without discrimination at that of his least worthy productions, and the historical value of his work as a prime modeller of all kinds of new literary material is overlooked. Consider for a moment ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... unsparingly ridiculed all stale practice, which his conviction led him to believe was inefficient, and he daringly introduced fresh, to the no small indignation of the more cut and dry portion of the faculty, for whose hate he returned contempt, of which he made no secret. From an extreme coarseness of manner, even those who believed in his skill were afraid to trust to his humour: and the dislike of his brother-practitioners to meet him superadded to this, damaged his interest considerably, and prevented his being called in until extreme ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... those found in China and many regions of northern Asia, bearing also the same name of batsha, are said to be especially common because fostered by the scarcity of women through polygamy and by the women's ignorance and coarseness. The institution of the batsha is supposed to have come to Turkestan from Persia. (Herman, "Die Paederastie bei den Sarten," Sexual-Probleme, June, 1911.) This would seem to suggest that Persia may have been a general ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... queerly on the room. Mr. Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs. Baines's curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr. Scales had no suspicion that he was transgressing a convention by virtue of which dogs have no sex. Further, he had no suspicion of the local fame of Mrs. Baines's mince-tarts. He had already eaten more ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... juice, and mellow it to wine, With citron groves adorn a distant soil, And the fat olive swell with floods of oil: We envy not the warmer clime, that lies In ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... word hildlng or hinderling—a low wretch; it is applied to Catharine for the coarseness of ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... Thackeray and Tennyson. One night when she was giving a supper-party, a fellow-guest, Roger de Beauvoir, happened to read to the company some verses he had written. The hostess, on the grounds of their alleged "coarseness," complained to Morton that she had been insulted. As a result, Morton, being head over ears in love with her, sent de Beauvoir a challenge. Lola, however, having had enough of duels, took care that nothing should come ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange somewhere a ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Soon after his coronation he married Louisa of Lorraine, a daughter of one of the sons of the Duke of Guise. She was a pure-minded and lovely woman, and her mild and gentle virtues contrasted strongly with the vulgarity, coarseness, and vice ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... was apparently the leader of the trio, was a big, unwieldy boy of sixteen, a year older and considerably larger than Bob and Joe. His eyes were close together, and he had a look of coarseness and arrogance that denoted the bully. Buck Looker, as he was called—his first name was Buckley—was generally unpopular among the boys, but as he was the son of one of the richest men of the town he usually had one or two cronies who hung about him for what they could get. One ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... at her in silence for a moment—and she at him. His aspect seemed to change under her eyes. The handsome points of the face came out; its coarseness and loutishness receded. And his manner became suddenly quiet and manly—though full of ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... however, the women never repine; they are accustomed to the burden, and bear it cheerfully; but they age very early, and after a few years of wedlock, not only lose their good looks, but acquire a coarseness of feature and a robustness of figure which make it exceedingly difficult to distinguish them from men. Nor is the difficulty lessened by the fact that the costume of both sexes is ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... a wonderful degree. They never forget a place they have once seen. If the steppe plants grow closer or thinner, if the ground shows the slightest inequality, if there is grey or black gravel of different coarseness—all these details serve as marks of recognition. When we rest a minute halfway between two post-houses to let the horses breathe, the Kirghiz driver turns round and says, "Yonder rides a Kirghiz on a dappled mare." Yet on directing my field-glass towards the indicated ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and buffoons of the eighteenth century, is gaped at like a curiosity in the salons of Edinburgh on account ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... similar spirit of self-control, have attracted our admiration by their honesty rather than their intellect; and the skeptic in human virtue has ascribed the purity of Washington as much to the mediocrity of his genius as to the sincerity of his patriotism:—the coarseness of vulgar ambition can sympathize but little with those who refuse a throne. But in Solon there is no disparity between the mental and the moral, nor can we account for the moderation of his views by affecting ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... accomplished, a lesson well learned, an act of charity repaid—anything of a dramatic nature which is as honest as daylight. Good deeds are just as dramatic as wicked deeds, and clean comedy is far and away more humorous than coarseness. Keep away from scenes of brutality, degeneracy, idiocy or anything which may bring a poignant pang of sorrow to some one of the millions of people who will see your story in the pictures, unless the pang will be one of remorse for ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Greek Worship of Manly Beauty.—The Greek worship of the beautiful masculine form is something which the later world will never understand. In this worship there is too often a coarseness, a sensual dross, over which a veil is wisely cast. but the great fact of this worship remains: to the vast majority of Greeks "beauty" does not imply a delicate maid clad in snowy drapery; it implies a perfectly shaped, bronzed, and developed youth, standing forth in his undraped ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... words: he is very angry, and hoping to conquer Collier with his own weapons, allows himself in the use of every term of contumely and contempt, but he has the sword without the arm of Scanderbeg; he has his antagonist's coarseness but not his strength. Collier replied, for contest was his delight. "He was not to be frighted from his purpose or ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... drew away a little. His fine nature was shocked by Fred's coarseness and lack of principle; still, this was the boy he had chosen for ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... in the strain of meditation on Hawthorne's life which we have been following out,—a life so beautiful and noble that to surround its ending with the remembrance of mere mortal ailment has in it something of coarseness. But it was needful to show in what way this great spirit bowed beneath the weight of its own sympathy with a national woe. Even when Dr. Holmes saw him in Boston, though "his aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable," ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... carried on by Thomas Booth, who farmed his own estate of Killerby in Yorkshire, where he turned his attention to Shorthorns about 1790, and by 1814 he was as well known as the Collings. He improved the Shorthorns by reducing the bone, especially the length and coarseness of the legs, the too prominent hips, and the heavy shoulder bones. In 1819 he removed to Warlaby, and died there in 1835, having given up the Killerby estate to his son John, who with his brother Richard ably sustained their father's reputation. ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... fancy prompted. Her sweet influence in the mining camp was beyond the power of human calculation to fathom. No gauge could be placed upon it. Like the sweep of an angel's wing, her coming seemed to have wafted nearly all the coarseness, wrong and evil ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... motions of the savage. The tresses of this lady were shining and black, like the plumage of the raven. Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds. And yet there was neither coarseness nor want of shadowing in a countenance that was exquisitely regular, and dignified and surpassingly beautiful. She smiled, as if in pity at her own momentary forgetfulness, discovering by the act a row of teeth that would have shamed the purest ivory; when, replacing the ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... uncouth when he thought she was observing him. The veneer of roughness puzzled her. That he was naturally of refined temperament she knew quite well, not alone by perception but by the plain evidence of his earlier dealings with her. Then why this affectation of coarseness, this borrowed aroma of the steward's mess ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... however, Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's influence was perceptibly upon the wane. Even Colonel Colquhoun wearied of her—to Evadne's great regret. For Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's vulgarity and coarseness of mind were always balanced by her undoubted propriety of conduct, and her faults were altogether preferable to the exceeding polish and refinement which covered the absolutely corrupt life of a new acquaintance Colonel Colquhoun had made at this ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... succession of competent masters, and cannot fail to produce a permanent and favourable change in the character of young Birmingham. The diffusion of sound classical learning was much needed to mitigate the coxcombical pretensions of the half-educated, and the vulgar coarseness of the uneducated. The inhabitants of manufacturing towns are apt to grow petty Plutocracies, in which after wealth, ignorance and assumption are the principal qualifications. Brass turns up its nose at iron, and both look down upon tin, although half an hour in the ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with me? Did I lose courage when I saw ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the full measure of loneliness, of misunderstanding, of cruel malignity. He of the most sensitive perceptions and feelings suffered from the brutality and coarseness of those who hated Him. He knew the anguish of homelessness. Listen to the cry that escaped Him: "The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." If we are following Him we too will share in the sacrificial life. "He that would come after me let him take up his cross and ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... The mariners have had no food except flesh, and gladly partake milk and fruits of the Satyrs, affording in return to Silenus the long-lost luxury of wine: the scene then going on to paint [with the utmost coarseness] the oncoming of drunkenness. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... the door being open and hooked back against the bulkhead; and passing through this doorway one found oneself in the main cabin, an apartment some thirty feet long, with three staterooms on each side of it. Abaft that again was the sail-room, well-stocked with bolts of canvas of varying degrees of coarseness and several sails, many of which seemed to be quite new, neatly rolled up into long bundles, stopped with spunyarn, and each labelled legibly with the description of the sail. Forward of the main cabin, on the starboard side, and separated by a stout bulkhead from the steward's pantry, was ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... and jocose. The ignorant would not have understood their learned allusions; the narrow-minded might have been shocked at the treatment of their shibboleths; the vulgar would have repelled them by coarseness; the sensual would have disgusted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... with scoffings and exaggerations; but this forest gentleman, for such was Wyandotte, in spite of his degradation and numerous failings, had too much consideration to make a woman's affections the subject of his coarseness and merriment. The secrets of Maud would not have been more sacred with her own brother, had such a relative existed to become her confidant, than ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... squaw to be intolerable. Even the companionship of the young females of her own race became distasteful to her; for their ignorance, and utter want of civilization, struck painfully on her now partially cultivated and awakened mind, and made her feel ashamed of the coarseness of taste and manners occasionally displayed by her former friends and associates. In the Christian captive alone had she found, since her mother's death, a companion who could sympathize in her tastes and feelings, which had ever been above the standard ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... among other nations; the centre of power was in the army. One after another, the legions put forth competitors for the purple—soldiers of fortune, whose success could never remove low habits due to a base origin, the coarseness of a life of camps—who found no congeniality in the elegance and refinement of those relics of the ancient families which were expiring in Rome. They despised the military decrepitude of the superannuated city; her recollections they hated. To such men the expediency ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... sentiment and sensuality; now soaring up into ether, and then dragging along in mud. Mire and sublimity; all that is strangely blended in this admixture of inspired dust. It may seem strange, but to me it appears that a true voluptuary should never abandon his thought to the coarseness of reality. It is only by exalting whatever terrestrial, material, physical element there is in our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, or forgetting them quite, or, at least, by never boldly naming them to ourselves, only thus ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... is Nature, Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also, Who has not look'd forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a combat, of which the details might ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... pictures that provoke the sense; I am no haughty noble, with spacious halls, and galleries that awe the echo. But so much the greater is my merit if I disdain these excesses of the ease or the pride, since I love the elegant, and have a taste! Others may be simple and honest, from the very coarseness of their habits; if I, with so much refinement and delicacy, am simple and ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... home to Mademoiselle de Guerchi how imminent was her danger. At first she had thought the commander's visit might be a snare laid to test her, but the coarseness of his expressions, the cynicism of his overtures in the presence of a third person, had convinced her she was wrong. No man could have imagined that the revolting method of seduction employed could ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... women are more chaste, and at the same time less attractive, than the Cypriotes of the present time. They are generally short and thickset; they are hardly treated by the men, as they perform most of the rough work in cultivation of the ground, and, from the extreme coarseness of their hands, they can seldom be idle; the men, on the contrary, are usually good-looking, and are far more attentive to ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... World-Animal. The imperceptible ether of Anaximenes had no positive quality beyond the atmospheric air with which it was easily confused: and even the "Infinite" of Anaximander, though free of the conditions of quality or quantity, was only an ideal chaos, relieved of its coarseness by negations. It was the illimitable storehouse or Pleroma, out of which is evolved the endless circle of phenomenal change. A moving Force was recognized in, but not clearly distinguished from, the material. Space, Time, Figure, and Number, and other common ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the whole aspect of things inside the house told of such habitual coarseness in their way of living as seemed to explain, while it formed the fitting counterpart of, the forbidding gloominess of the outside. My astonishment by degrees changed into disgust, and my disgust into uneasiness. I cannot detail the whole chain ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... produce feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, and though admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness of the original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the male. To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few, and their behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; and yet it was impossible not to feel ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his convictions of justice and of legal right were fixed, there was not among his contemporaries, in the courts of this State, an advocate, whose efforts were so nearly irresistible before a jury. He has command of sarcasm and invective, without coarseness. He attacks oppression, meanness and fraud as if they were offences not only against the public, but against himself. He has never strayed from the profession to engage in any speculations or occupations to divert his thoughts from ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... Ovid—or to seek that refinement of manners and language which has only of late prevailed amongst us, in the plays of Aristophanes and Plautus—were very foolish and very vain. In ages not so ancient, and which have revolved since the dawn of Christianity, a certain coarseness of thought and language has been prevalent; and for it still larger allowance should be made, because it has been applied to simplicity rather than to sensuality—to rustic barbarism, not to civilised corruption—and carries along with it a rough raciness, and a reference ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... feminine qualities which constitute their grace, their strength, and their dignity; thence results a certain something unpleasant and rude which does no credit to the New World. I by no means admire coarseness, and I do not admit that it is the necessary companion of energy; the tone of the journals and of the debates in Congress is often calculated to excite a just reprobation. There is in the United ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... the weakest points of the poet's character. Of the ditties of that time, most of which have been preserved, the best specimen is My Nannie, O. This song, and the one entitled Mary Morison render the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imagination and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much that degrades the life and habits ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... game which might well frighten the bravest into celibacy. She is self-assertive, she desires—very rightly—to be first, and at the first symptom of a slight from her husband she begins the process of nagging. The man is refined, and the coarseness which he did not perceive before marriage strikes him like a venomed point now; he replies fiercely, and perhaps shows contempt; then the woman tries the effect of weeping. Unhappily the tears are more exasperating ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... hippocastanea—the first word coming from esca, food; and the second from hippos, a horse; and Castana, the city, so called. The epithet "horse" does not imply any remedial use in diseases of that animal, but rather the size and coarseness of this species as compared with the Sweet Spanish Chestnut. In the same way we talk of the horse radish, the horse daisy, and the horse leech. In Turkey the fruit is given to horses touched or broken in the wind, but in this country horses ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... rattling on of indifferent things, in a rather languid way; then at last came and sank down in a very low position at Wych Hazel's feet on the carpet. She was a pretty girl; might have been extremely pretty, if her very pronounced style of manners had not drawn lines of boldness, almost of coarseness, where the lip should have been soft and the eyebrow modest. The whole expression was dissatisfied and jaded to-day, over and above those lines, which even low spirits could ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... disturbed, but depressed—hopelessly depressed. It seemed as if a breath of the real atmosphere of the world towards which she was striving had blown on her suddenly, making her shudder at its coarseness and darkness. What Moloch was this to which she was going to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... remarked of Tecumseh: whether seated at the tables of generals McArthur and Worthington, as he was during the council at Chillicothe in 1807, or brought in contact with British officers of the highest rank, his manners were entirely free from vulgarity and coarseness: he was uniformly self-possessed, and with the tact and ease of deportment which marked the poet of the heart, and which are falsely supposed to be the result of civilization and refinement only, he readily accommodated himself to the novelties of his new ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... enthusiastic gratitude? They had, in their time, had to deal with some pleasant specimens of humanity, to be sure; but when with any more odious and impracticable than Tittlebat Titmouse threatened to prove himself? What hold could they get upon such a character as his? Beneath all his coarseness and weakness, there was a glimmer of low cunning which might suffice to keep their superior and practised astuteness at its full stretch. These were difficulties, cheerless enough in the contemplation, truly; but, nevertheless, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... their invitations, for they lived near the road we wished to pursue. I have so often spoken of the wretchedness of Indian huts, and of the coarseness of the food, that I need not describe them. They were no exceptions to the general rule. The scene before them was wild and dreary. At some distance off appeared a mass of long rushes, beyond which extended a sheet ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Henry Martyn's character!—the contrasting attributes of sternness and gentleness, his martyrlike determination to do his whole duty at any cost to himself from suffering and insult, the keen shrinking of a nature so refined and sensitive from coarseness and abuse, undeviating yet uncompromising, bringing to our thoughts the Divine Exemplar. I pass by the incidents of the voyage, including mutiny, sickness and death, romantic stay at St. Salvador, battles at the Cape of Good Hope, etc., ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... impertinent truths, he confesses that he is a real John Bull and always speaks his mind. If he now and then flies into an unreasonable burst of passion about trifles, he observes that John Bull is a choleric old blade, but then his passion is over in a moment and he bears no malice. If he betrays a coarseness of taste and an insensibility to foreign refinements, he thanks Heaven for his ignorance—he is a plain John Bull and has no relish for frippery and knick-knacks. His very proneness to be gulled by strangers and to pay extravagantly for absurdities is ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... before the mind. Nothing will escape the memory:—nothing. The days of childhood, of youth, of middle age, of elder years will give in their report. The soul will see things then as they are, no longer tricked out in false and flattering guise. There, in all their miserable littleness, and coarseness, and meanness, and cowardice, bygone sins will rise up before the stern tribunal of the unsparing memory, each as it was, each as it is, each as GOD saw it at the time, each as ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... period this gaiety was replaced by the utmost frankness and fullness of humour, as a boy's merry madness by the witty wisdom of a man: but now for a time it would seem as if the good comic qualities of either period were displaced and ousted by mere coarseness and crudity like that of a hard harsh photograph. This ultra-Circean transformation of spirit and brutification of speech we do not find in the lighter interludes of great and perfect tragedy: for the porter in Macbeth makes ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... between value in use and value in exchange. (Polit., I, 3, Schn.) Similarly D. Hume, who allows a period of luxury, culture, industry, of trade and manufactures, of freedom and circulation of money, to be preceded by one in which the feeling of wants is not awakened, in which coarseness and idleness prevail, one in which agriculture is alone pursued, and monetary economy and freedom decline, and trade by barter obtains. (Discourses, passim, especially On Interest and on Money.) A similar contrast we find frequently, and as ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... taste. The other day, too, she was quite taken with this cornelian tray so let her keep it for her use. In this silk bag she'll find the work, which she asked me some time ago to do for her. (Tell her) that she mustn't despise it for its coarseness, but make the best of it and turn it to some account. Present respects to her from our part and inquire after her health on behalf of Mr. Pao-yue; that will be all there's ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first evening after Frank's return. Ever since then her father was much in her mind—the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship with Nature. All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams and grass and animals. And in it all stood her father, whom she had left alone, in that interminable interval between ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... seemingly innocent—she knew that he was spoken of as a good business man. He, too, then had his other side. For him the Battle of the Street was an exhilaration. Beneath that boyish exterior was the tough coarseness, the male hardness, the callousness that met the brunt and withstood the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... excels all previous revivals. It is unparalleled in its vulgarity. The imbecile coarseness of its language makes one ashamed of human nature. Had it existed in Swift's time, he might have added a fresh clause to his terrible indictment of mankind. Its metaphors are borrowed from the slaughter-house, ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... article of furniture in the home of the pueblo Indian is the mealing trough, containing the household milling apparatus. This trough usually contains a series of three metates of varying degrees of coarseness firmly fixed in a slanting position most convenient for the workers. It consists of thin slabs of sandstone set into the floor on edge, similar slabs forming the separating partitions between the compartments. This arrangement is shown in Fig. 105, illustrating ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... is copious beyond example; but it is seldom sufficiently select; rich as it is in imagination, it too commonly wants taste and delicacy; it has the fault of coarseness, which Burke's images in prose two centuries afterwards, sometimes fell into. But Collins's images are as pure, and of as exquisite delicacy, as they are spiritual. They are not human beings invested with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... and cruel, with which Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare always speak of the populace; for it is entirely true that, in great states, the lower orders are low by nature as well as by task, being precisely that part of the commonwealth which has been thrust down for its coarseness or unworthiness (by coarseness I mean especially insensibility and irreverence—the "profane" of Horace); and when this ceases to be so, and the corruption and profanity are in the higher instead of the lower orders, there arises, first, helpless ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... delight, and did all in her power to encourage his better nature and to show that she appreciated the alteration in his bearing. At the same time, she was rather puzzled in her mind, for an occasional flash of coarseness or ferocity showed her that the real nature of the man was unaltered, and that he was putting an ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bread produced from the latter, especially in Paris and Vienna, is unrivalled for delicacy, texture, and colour. Whole meal may be bought; but mills are now cheaply made for home use, and wheat may be ground to any degree of coarseness desired." ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... dingle, on which account the dingle was wet and dank, from the dews of the night. I kindled my fire, and, after sitting by it for some time to warm my frame, I took some of the coarse food which I have already mentioned; notwithstanding my late struggle, and the coarseness of the fare, I ate with appetite. My provisions had by this time been very much diminished, and I saw that it would be speedily necessary, in the event of my continuing to reside in the dingle, to lay in a fresh store. After my meal I ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... solid body which we touch but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... served twenty-five years in the army, had saved a small sum of money, and bought himself a few acres of land a mile and a half from Moscow. He could scarcely read and write; but in spite of his external clumsiness and coarseness, he was shrewd and cunning, and even, on occasion, capable of sharp practice, like many Little Russians. He was a fearful egoist, obstinate as an ox, and in general exceedingly impolite, especially with strangers; I even detected ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and the percentage of worthless material in it varies somewhat It is coarsely ground, but the large pieces disintegrate in the soil much more rapidly than limestone would do. It contains a little nitrogen and phosphoric acid, partially available, as an offset to coarseness and some lack of purity, as compared with the highest grade of fine stone. It is profitable to buy oyster shell at limestone prices if used liberally enough to furnish a supply for a term of years. The oxide, or burned shell lime, would be nearly the ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... sentiments and virtues that even in the present day command our admiration. We should then feel little surprised at seeing barbarity and heroism united, so much energy combined with so much weakness, and the natural coarseness of man in a savage state blended with the most sublime aspirations ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... manners and persons, combining the features of comedy and farce, for comedy represents the characters of a class, farce those of individuals. Their essence was that of the modern pantomime, and their coarseness, and even indecency, gratified the love of broad humor which characterized the Roman people. After a time, when they became established as popular favorites, the dialogue occupied a more prominent ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... went on, "but a kind of hesitation whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form.... There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... directed not to manure our land for potatoes when the disease prevails. It is said we can raise no sound potatoes on rich land when the rot is abroad. This is an error. The richness of the soil does not promote the disease; but if any kind of manure be applied that, from its bulk and coarseness, keeps the soil open to the air, the potatoes will rot. But fertilize to the highest extent, in any way that does not make the soil too open, and let in the air, and the crop will be greatly increased with perfect safety. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such as the service required; but he had some taste, and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He lived among the Alps; and his reading lay among the alpine sublimities of Milton and Shakspeare. Through his very eyes he imbibed a daily scorn of Gottsched and his monstrous compound of German coarseness with French sensual levity. He could not look at his native Alps, but he saw in them, and their austere grandeurs or their dread realities, a spiritual reproach to the hollowness and falsehood of that dull imposture which Gottsched offered by way of substitute for nature. He was ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... I can only do it in a sentence or two, of more important changes in these fifty years. English manners and morals have been bettered, much of savagery and coarseness has been got rid of; low, cruel amusements have been abandoned. Thanks to the great Total Abstinence movement very largely, the national conscience has been stirred in regard to the great national sin of intoxication. A national system of education has come into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon—youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... although, it must be owned, not more gross than the dramatists of Elizabethan and Restoration times, and even the novelists of last century, sometimes deigned to be. In particular, they made the mistake, of venerable date and not quite unknown to this day, of confounding humour with coarseness. A humorous ballad is usually a thing to be fingered gingerly. Yet, although (partly for the reason hinted at) humour has been said not to be a strongly marked element of the flower of our ballad poetry, there are many of the best of them that have imbedded in them ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... a challenge in her glance, but the man, not knowing what was expected of him, made no answer. At first he had been almost repelled by the girl, but he was becoming mildly interested in her. She could, he thought, be daring to the verge of coarseness, and he did not admire her pessimism, which was probably a pose; but there was a vein of elfish mischief in her that appealed to him. Sitting among the heather, small, lithe, and felinely graceful, watching him with a provocative smile in her rather narrow eyes, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... "that man must have a handsome sister;" indeed, it bears an absurdly strong family likeness to Cecil's, amounting to a parody. But the outline of feature which in her is so fine and clear, is dull and filled out even to coarseness. It reminded one of looking at the same landscape, first through the medium of a bright blue sky, and then through driving mist, when crag, and cliff, and wood still show themselves, but blurred and dimly. His hair ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... more bitter and subtle poison. Calling to mind the period, we the more honor the great artist's resolution; if the delicacy of our improved times is offended by what may seem deformity upon his canvas, we must remember that we do not shrink from Hogarth's coarseness, but from the coarseness he labored, by exposing, to expel. He painted what Smollett, and Fielding, and Richardson wrote far more offensively; but he surpassed the novelists both in truth and in intention. He painted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... life—playing out their parts in the divine scheme of life. Their animal passions and desires are actions viewed sympathetically and lovingly by the advanced soul, and nothing "Wrong" or disgusting is seen there. And even the coarseness and brutality of the savage races are so regarded by these advanced souls. They see everything as natural according to the grade and degree of development ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... patrons to hang their garments on hat-pegs, often under a printed warning that the proprietor would disclaim responsibility in case of loss. In the one known as "Bert's Place" indeed the warning was positively vulgar: "Watch Your Overcoat." Of course that sort of coarseness would have been impossible ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... her mind against the worst. Mrs Hardman's duties as hostess could not be neglected, and she mixed with her guests with the dignified affability of former years. In watching her son's proceedings, she had frequent occasion to bewail a coarseness and impetuosity of manner, which had doubtless been imbibed from his recent adventures. His attentions to Lady Elizabeth were as incessant and warm as on a similar occasion they were cold and distant. When the guests were ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... forecast the training of such a life, how should we have pictured it? Surely as sheltered from the coarseness of the world, delicately nourished, sedulously cultured; but God orders that this life should manifest itself in the house of the village carpenter, out of reach of schools, in a little wicked town, under the commonest conditions ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the door. The handle turned and the door opened as if the person who came in had forgotten the ceremony of knocking. Susan laid down on the bed the ugly little night-dress she had been looking at; it lay there stiff with its coarseness, its short arms stretched out. She turned about and faced Margery Latimer, who had crossed the threshold and ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... either party in the civic dispute—indeed one might more properly call it the civil war—that is raging here. I dare say you have read, then, the abuse these "nature's gentlemen" are pleased to shower upon me, and the scandalous coarseness they consider they are entitled to ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... it, nor of ill nature. In a land where there were no newspapers, telegraphs, telephones, railroads, or neighbours, it seemed like the expression of a confidence which had in it neither malice nor impertinent coarseness. And yet Bauer was puzzled to know what Clifford's real feeling was towards Miss Gray even after Clifford's own open statement made to him that day while they were sitting on the ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... illustrates what I have said on the editorial function (Vol. I, p. 15). What precedes and follows has some criticism on the Government, the Astronomer Royal, etc., but reserved in allusion, oblique in sarcasm, and not fiercely uncourteous. The coarseness of the passage I have quoted shows editorial insertion, which is also shown by its blunder. The inserter is waiting for the Almanac of 1851 that he may review Mr. Adams's paper, which is to be contained in it. His own contributor, only two sentences before ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... it were, at every pore, with an athletic body; but coarse, and rude, and intellectually weak—almost an animal. When you are regarding the upper classes of society, you see less distinctly the absence of the spirit, unless, you look with a spiritual eye. The coarseness has passed away—the rudeness is no longer seen: there is a refinement in the pleasures. But if you take the life led by the young men of our country—strong, athletic, healthy men—it is still the life of the flesh: the unthinking, and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no higher ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance, Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and beautiful. And something pitiable, ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... Haydon, who never loved a portrait-painter much, yet says of Lawrence, that he was 'amiable, kind, generous, and forgiving.' Further on he adds: 'He had smiled so often and so long, that at last his smile had the appearance of being set in enamel.' But then, Mr. Haydon prided himself on his coarseness, defiance, and hatred of conventionality, deeming these fitting attributes of the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... double-leaved gate of iron, to which we tied our horses before entering the churchyard. But instead of a neat burial-place, which the whole approach would have given us to expect, we found a desert. The grass was of extraordinary coarseness, and mingled with quantities of vile-looking weeds. Several of the graves had not even a spot of green upon them, but were mere heaps of yellow earth in huge lumps, mixed with large stones. There was not above a score of graves in the whole place, two or three of which only ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... acquainted, whence any conclusion may be drawn in favour of the presence of women, is Pax, v. 963-967. But still it remains doubtful, and I recommend it to the consideration of the critic.—AUTHOR.], while the men were almost constantly together, the language of conversation contracted a certain coarseness, as is always the case under similar circumstances. In modern Europe, since the origin of chivalry, women have given the tone to social life, and to the respectful homage which we yield to them, we owe the prevalence ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... under her orders; and at every halt, an altar was set up and the sacrament administered. No oath or foul language passed without punishment or censure. Even the roughest and most hardened veterans obeyed her. They had put off for a time the bestial coarseness which had grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they felt that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and acknowledged the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent Maid was leading ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... spring McCloud and I went to Sacramento and sold our chunks of gold (it was all very coarse) to Page, Bacon & Co. who were themselves surprised at the coarseness of the whole lot. When our savings were weighed up we found we had made half an ounce a day, clear of all expenses, for the ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... speech,—how different from what Lincoln had spoken in the same place in the previous April. Johnson was exhilarated by his success, forgetful that he still faced a hostile majority in Congress, exasperated by opposition, and roused by the shouts of the crowd,—and his native passion and coarseness came out. Sumner had been severe in his language; he had likened President Johnson to President Pierce in the Kansas days, and hinted a family resemblance to Pharaoh of Egypt. Wendell Phillips was in ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to cut different kinds of metals with tools of various shapes when using different depths of cut and coarseness of feed, and also the power required to feed the tool ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... well, the bookmaker often did business with him and for him. Sometimes he went to Trent Park. He was a man of good education, there was no coarseness about him. ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... the British Quarterly for January, says of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, applies with equal force to Mrs. Davis. "She seems to have been saved from the coarseness and strenuous tone of the typical strong-minded woman, although probably some of her opinions might shock staid people who are innocent alike of philosophy and the doctrines of the new era." Though in fact this typical strong-minded woman of whom we hear so much in England ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... as he looked at this great, strapping woman, whose red face was the very representative of coarseness and meanness. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Rhine—but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting country—unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe—lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High Acht, the Kellberg ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... a brook with a child on his shoulders, cannot fail of attracting your attention. This colossal personage is painted on the folding-doors which defend the capital performance just mentioned from vulgar eyes; and here Rubens has selected a very proper subject to display the gigantic coarseness of ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in all to Heaven's will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He, the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself more completely ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the courage to take a single open step, to forbid, for instance, all future correspondence with London. To do so would be to declare his suspicions. He wished to declare them; it would have gratified him intensely to vomit impeachments, to terrify her with coarseness and violence; but, on the other hand, by keeping quiet he might surprise positive evidence, and ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... call this a vulgar play. So far from it, that I do not scruple to say that it appears to me one of the most refined productions in the language. The elegance of the composition is in exact proportion to the coarseness of the materials: by "happy alchemy of mind," the author has extracted an essence of refinement from the dregs of human life, and turns its very dross into gold. The scenes, characters, and incidents ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... a handsome woman, but with a suggestion of coarseness in form and features, though her face, in spite of its too-evident signs of dissipation, ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentlemen—by whom I do not mean just now the rich—have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, for ever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this "haggardness," this "coarseness," &c., &c., for the list is too long to specify, be an accident, or a property, of the man of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... speaking to a gentleman, or even to a man of ordinary appearance and breeding, he did the same in his reply; and when I touched my hat to a liveried coachman or waiting man, his hat was immediately under his arm. So much may be done, and such advantages gained, by simply avoiding coarseness and vulgarity, and being well bred and agreeable. Nor can the case be otherwise. For the foundation of good breeding is good nature and good sense—two of the most useful and indispensable attributes of a well-constituted mind. Let it not be forgotten, however, ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... point of perfection, will, whenever he enters the crowd of life, be harassed with innumerable distresses, from which those who have not in the same manner increased their sensations find no disturbance. His exotick softness will shrink at the coarseness of vulgar felicity, like a plant transplanted to northern nurseries, from the dews and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... to the theatres, here and there, when some new piece was presented, but it was rather as a study than an amusement; and after a knowledge of the public idol in private life had slowly swept away all the romance of their first meeting, the innate coarseness of this beautiful, selfish woman was not long in revealing itself to the pure-minded girl, who soon began to grieve that she could not love and still admire the mother she had at first almost worshipped. Olympia, who had ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... little consequence, whether I live to finish the Persian New Testament, or do not. I look back with pity and shame on my former self, and on the importance I then attached to my life and labours. The more I see of my own works, the more I am ashamed of them. Coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of men. I am sick when I look at man, and his wisdom, and his doings, and am relieved only by reflecting that we have a city whose builder and maker is God. The least of His works is refreshing to ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... much as does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him, and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain himself. I remember what he said about him because it was ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... carpeted thickly on the lake bottom; next, the gold could be dived for in the shallower portions, but the temperature of the water was man-killing; and, finally, the draining of the lake was too stupendous a task for two men in the shorter half of a short summer. Undeterred, reasoning from the coarseness of the gold that it had not traveled far, they had set out in search of the mother lode. They had crossed the big glacier that frowned on the southern rim and devoted themselves to the puzzling maze of small valleys and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... young creature curled into a position at once passionate, languid, and merely awkward, with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coarseness of the gutter. He was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a refinement, white in its brilliance. She was an image of Regent Street, a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the strength of his prejudice and his regretable coarseness, one quotation will be enough to display both. Speaking of certain early Christian missionaries, he says,[8] "It is not so very improbable that the new religion, before which the flourishing Roman civilization relapsed into a state of barbarism, should have been ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... refining my sentiments, made my heart the more susceptible! Cursed be my good sense, that fixed me to one object, and taught me the preference I enjoyed was but my due! Had I been ugly, nobody would have tempted me; had I been ignorant, the charms of my person would not have atoned for the coarseness of my conversation; had I been giddy, my vanity would have divided my inclinations, and my ideas would have been so diffused, that I should never have listened to the enchantments of ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... paint such pictures so free from coarseness, so magnificent in all art qualities, that the world was delighted with them. After him, however, the lowered aim had its influence; poorer artists tried to follow in his footsteps, and the world of art soon became flooded with mediocre examples of these meaningless ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... counsel with friends and revise his manuscript in the light of their criticisms. Even after the printing had begun, the revision continued. Things looked differently in the cold type of the proof-sheet, and he saw that he had occasionally gone too far in the direction of coarseness and extravagance. Thus the original draft had provided that Amalia should actually be sent to a convent, and that the furious Karl should appear with his robbers and threaten to convert the nunnery into a brothel unless ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... prisoners were carefully thought out, but it is not to be supposed that these Bakufu prisons presented many of the features on which modern criminology insists. On the contrary, a prisoner was exposed to serious suffering from heat and cold, while the coarseness of the fare provided for him often caused disease and sometimes death. Nevertheless, the Japanese prisons in Tokugawa days were little, if anything, inferior to the corresponding institutions in Anglo-Saxon countries at the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of. Then, as to the young lady's own sentiments, her mother knew them better than she did herself; she understood her daughter's pride, that she dreaded to be made an object of bargain and sale; but Mrs. Broadhurst, who, with all her coarseness of mind, had rather a better notion of love matters than Lady Clonbrony, perceived, through her daughter's horror of being offered to Lord Colambre, through her anxiety that nothing approaching to an advance on the part of her family ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... mother and the books he read, he would have inevitably fallen into low company. But he had promised his mother to shun it. He saw its result in his father's conduct, and as he read, and his mind matured, the narrow coarseness of such company became repugnant. From time to time he was sorely tempted to leave the home which his father made hateful in many respects, and try his fortunes among strangers who would not associate him with a sot; but his ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... clad in male attire; and oaths that men might shudder at, issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be—some are—the mothers of England! But can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli |
