"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... approbation, had every intention of providing for him: we had enough and to spare: money and land and house room for half a dozen families, and our two selves alone to enjoy it all. He always seemed fond of us. I suppose it was his facile manner, which could take the appearance of an interest and affection which ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... old man was more precious to Mr. Tryan than any mere onlooker could have imagined. To persons possessing a great deal of that facile psychology which prejudges individuals by means of formulae, and casts them, without further trouble, into duly lettered pigeon-holes, the Evangelical curate might seem to be doing simply what all other men like to do—carrying ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the world (for I as yet In studied silence hugged my secret bliss) How facile was my Muse's task, when set Virtue's and grace's features to express! For whilst accomplished thou wert in my sight I nothing had to do, but look ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... real work has been done in American mythology that very diverse opinions as to its interpretation prevail among writers. Too many of them apply to it facile generalizations, such as "heliolatry," "animism," "ancestral worship," "primitive philosophizing," and think that such a sesame will unloose all its mysteries. The result has been that while each satisfies himself, he ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... back the tears of which they were half ashamed, they continued up the street, happy in the reconciliation, so facile and so complete in childhood, when bygones are bygones, and there is no danger of ghosts, once laid, ever rising up again to give ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... men. They stood out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face. He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner something of the versatility of his experience. Physically ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... window draperies; hating life, that had no mercy; hating the duplicity that had led Karslake into making untrue love to her, but inexplicably not hating Karslake himself, or the enshrined image that wore his name; hating herself for her facile readiness to give love where all but the guise of love was lacking, and for knowing this deep hurt where she should have felt only scorn and anger; but hating, most of all, or rather for the first time discovering how well she hated, him to whom unerring intuition told her she owed this brimming ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he had no small command, and in the middle business—in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic—he was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Time will hardly begrudge Daudet. As for Kings in Exile, it is difficult to see how even the art with which the tragedy of Queen Frederique's life is unfolded or the growing power of characterization displayed in her, in the loyal Merault, in the facile, decadent Christian, can make up for the lack of broadly human appeal in the general subject-matter of a book which was so sympathetically written as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, it is not so effective a book as The ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... la Celebrite de Votre nom ainsi que l'amitie dont Vous m'honorez, exigeroient de moi la dedicace d'un bien plus important ouvrage. La seule chose qui a pu me determiner a Vous offrir celui-ci de preference, c'est qu'il me paroit d'une execution plus facile et par la meme plus propre a contribuer a la Satisfaction dont Vous jouissez dans l'aimable Cercle de Votre Famille.—C'est surtout, lorsque les heureux talents d'une fille cherie se seront developpes ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... flight of tales, novels of all sorts, droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur de Balzac has a facile, unequal, risky pen. He starts off quickly, sets himself in a gallop, and then, all at once, he stumbles to the ground, rising only to fall again. Most of his openings are delightful; but his conclusions degenerate or become excessive. At a certain moment, he loses self-control. His observing ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... work had seemed to clog up in details and slow down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invasion of personal rights and freedom, the hamstringing of his work, the feeling of being cut off from the main currents of his field, filled him with despair, ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... as a diamond; one pictures those crocodiles fainting in the heat, and notes, too, whence the author of the "Sphinx" drew his hard, glittering, mineralogical flavour. The verse is not so much easy as facile. And not all the grace of internals can atone for external monotony. That trick—that full stop at the end of nearly every fourth line—it impairs the charm of the music and renders its flow jerky; coming, as it does, like an ever-repeated blow, it grows wearisome ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... not the question to consider, Judge—but the right. Still, so far as this fear is concerned, don't let it trouble you. The choice of successor will fall upon some one quite as facile to the wishes of Ralph Dewey & Company as ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... when this misfortune occurred which shaped the rest of her life, fixing the straitened circumstances in which she was to pass her youth and preparing the burdens which ultimately were to be lifted by her facile pen. Happily the little Alcotts, of whom there were three, were too young to feel the perplexities that harassed their parents and their early years could hardly have been passed more pleasantly or profitably if they had been the daughters of millionaires. ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil. Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... said, has it not?—absolutely cold while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known. Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the atmosphere he lived ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... or system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision; still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the discordant despair ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... intriguing bustle of Naples, he retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia, throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the "facile fatuity" of Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist has called the function of the real; his temperament was not of the kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his life—it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward he loses personal touch ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... poetic lines of your mountain drapery about you; the azure straits gliding past you in homage, and bringing the world's treasures to your feet! Very beautiful, but false and fickle and cowardly in every phase of your history, a ready victim for every invader, a facile prey, ever siding ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... of vocabulary do we wish to acquire? A facile, readily used one? An accurate one? Or one as nearly as may be comprehensive? The three kinds do not necessarily coexist. The possession of one may even hinder and retard the acquisition of another. Thus if we seek a ready vocabulary, an accurate vocabulary may cause us to halt and hesitate for ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... had a warm heart, and a purse that was never closed. He was a facile speaker whose eloquence was of a forensic type. His friendships were passionate. While in prison he received news of the death of one of his friends, Gilbert, who had been guillotined at Evreux, and when some one congratulated him on his approaching release he replied: ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... intellect of this great man, still continues to shed its vast illumination over the world of science, particularly that of medicine; which, if it owes its birth to the divine old man of Cos, is not less indebted for its nurture and growth to the celebrated native of Pergamus. GALEN is the facile princeps of physicians. His astonishing industry, perseverance, and acquirements, his ingenious arguments, and persuasive eloquence, give him an unquestionable claim to the title of princeps, so long ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... from whom he derived so large a number of the stories in his magnificent collection, and whom he regarded as a model story-teller. I am tempted to quote his account at length. "Anything but beautiful," he says, "she has facile speech, efficacious phrases, an attractive manner of telling, whence you divine her extraordinary memory and the sallies of her natural wit. Messia already reckons her seventy years, and is a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. As a child, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... cases of temperaments without loyal affection, but with much natural charm. Those are the people who get what is called 'spoilt,' because it is so much easier to believe in the existence of qualities which are superficially displayed than in qualities which lie too deep for facile expression. One comes across cases of children of intense emotional natures, and very little power of expressing their feelings, or of showing their affection. Of course, too, example is far more potent than precept, and it is very difficult ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the most favourable modern specimen of the buoyant amateur. Possessing a big heart, kindly feeling, a brilliant wit, and a facile pen, he treated art as his playfellow and never as his master. And in the spirit in which his work was executed so must it be judged. The work of an amateur artist possessing a distinct vein of humour is, in my opinion, far more entertaining ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant, prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can see it in his verse. A touch of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... a group of poets who, being attached to the Court, and devoting some, at least, of their verses to conventional love-making, are called the Cavalier Poets. Among the others Thomas Carew follows the classical principles of Jonson in lyrics which are facile, smooth, and sometimes a little frigid. Sir John Suckling, a handsome and capricious representative of all the extravagances of the Court set, with whom he was enormously popular, tossed off with affected carelessness a mass of slovenly ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of his father, and is now about fifty years of age, or probably a little more. M. Bertin is a man of esprit, and of literary tastes, with the habits, feelings, and demeanor of a well-bred gentleman. Of an agreeable and facile commerce, the editor of the Debats is a man of elegant and Epicurean habits; but does not allow his luxurious tastes to interfere with the business of this nether world. According to M. Texier, he reads with his own proprietary and editorial eyes ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... has struck out no new field for itself; it still remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that defined sphere it has developed a surprising activity. It has occupied the attention and become the facile instrument of men of the greatest genius, writers of whom any age and any language might be proud. It has been tender and fiery, severe and voluminous, gorgeous and marmoreal, in turns. It has translated ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... share in the inheritance. He is utterly at variance with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His creatures into the world for their pain and ruin. Whatever happens to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to live and to have lived. He adopts no facile system of compensations and offsets. He rather protests with all his might that, however broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the whole situation has not been your ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pauci potuerunt, Quo me detrusit paene extremis sensibus? Quem nulla ambitio, nulla umquam largitio, Nullus timor, vis nulla, nulla auctoritas Movere potuit in juventa de statu; Ecce in senecta ut facile labefecit loco Viri Excellentis mente clemente edita Submissa placide blandiloquens oratio! Etenim ipsi di negare cui nihil potuerunt, Hominem me denegare quis posset pati? Ergo bis tricenis annis actis sine tota Eques Romanus ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... a pamphlet against his opponents. If a critic has, as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to a prophet, it ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson will pass through a period of facile condemnation and neglect before we arrive at the true appreciation of his work. The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing. ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... quite exceptional in such a 'light-weight.' The extravagance is not glaring enough to discompose us. Surely a tolerable proximate approach to possible existence ought to satisfy a not viciously captious critic. We are reading of shadowy beings: why should not the facile mists be permeated with a somewhat subtler light, and melt into somewhat airier forms of perfection than we have been accustomed to catch imprisoned in the substantial dulness of the flesh? If we will only choose, we may revel in the company of somewhat glorified mortals. It may be a luxury ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... LISIDEIUS say? if they themselves acknowledge they are too strictly tied up by those laws: for the breaking which, he has blamed the English? I will allege CORNEILLE's words, as I find them in the end of this Discourse of The three Unities. Il est facile aux speculatifs d'etre severe, &c. ''Tis easy, for speculative people to judge severely: but if they would produce to public view, ten or twelve pieces of this nature; they would, perhaps, give more latitude to the Rules, than I ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... You have been so consistent a philosopher, that I am sure you will make a steady Christian. You're not the man to be led by the nose by a sophistical mumbler. You could never be made the prey of a grasping proselytism; you are not the sport of every whiff of doctrine, nor the facile slave of whatever superstition is last buzzed in your ear. No, no: you've got a masculine intellect, and think for ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... reawakened in his heart; here was a girl—pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... customers. To this day he can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?' From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop-front; and whereas the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet, companionable village.—And how the mountains love their children! The sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces only in the midst of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Milone exists for us, and that it lives among the glories of language as a published oration. I find, on looking through the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, that in his estimation the Pro Milone was the first in favor of all our author's orations—"facile princeps," if we may collect the critic's ideas on the subject from the number of references made and examples taken. Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great orators, both Greek and Latin, with whose speeches ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... upon an empty measure. So "This is the Cat that Killed the Rat" is expanded into five pictures. The dog has four, the cat three, and the rest of the story is amplified with its secondary incidents duly sought and depicted. This literary expression is possibly the most marked characteristic of a facile and able draughtsman. He studied his subject as no one else ever studied it—he must have played with it, dreamed of it, worried it night and day, until he knew it ten times better than its author. Then he portrayed it simply and with irresistible vigour, with ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... former chapter mention has been made of Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Mark Twain had known in his California days. He was fond of Stoddard, who was a facile and pleasing writer of poems and descriptive articles. During the period that he had been acting as Mark Twain's secretary in London, he had taken pleasure in collecting for him the news reports of the celebrated Tichborn Claimant case, then in the English courts. Clemens ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rather kindlily of The Queen Pedauque as Dumas would have equipped it... Yes, in reading here, it is the most facile and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas would have contrived this book,—somewhat as in the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... Meantime the quick-eyed facile crowd around him beguiled the tedium of waiting with good-humoured chaff. One great creature with a shaggy mane and a sanguinary voice came up, bottle in hand, saluted the downcast head with a mixture of deference and familiarity, then climbed ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... desire to put himself into the hands of Sindhia was very much increased by the violent conduct of Afrasyab towards one who, whatever his faults, had endeared himself, by long years' association, to the facile monarch. Majad-ud-daulah, the Finance Minister, having attempted to dissuade his Majesty from going to Agra, the haughty Moghul sent Najaf Kuli Khan with a sufficient force to Majad's house, and seizing him, with ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... foreign affairs under Louis XV, would entertain no such visionary plan. It was clear to every one that the island could no longer be held by its old masters. He had found a facile instrument for the measures necessary to his contemplated seizure of it in the son of a Corsican refugee, that later notorious Buttafuoco, who, carrying water on both shoulders, had ingratiated himself with his father's old ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... sadly envisaging the loveliness of the world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her life could never ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... verbis: Ut Ion scribit, quinquavicesima est littera, quam vocant "agma," cujus forma nulla est et vox communis est Graecis et Latinis, ut his verbis: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. In ejusmodi Graeci et Accius noster bina G scribunt, alii N et G, quod in hoc veritatem videre facile ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... for what possible affinity could there be between a thoughtful, intellectual man like Malcolm Herrick, with his habitual reserve, his nature refined, critical, and yet imaginative, with its strong bias to pessimism, and its intolerance of all shams, and Cedric, with his facile, pleasure-loving temperament, at once indolent and mercurial—a creature of moods and tenses, as fiery as a Welshman, but full of lovable and ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of the truth of what Dr. Higdon had spoken, and saw that Garret's mind was made up to do what was required of him. The young man was glad enough that this should be the case; but he felt a certain contempt for the facile disposition of the man, who, after spending years of his life and running innumerable perils in the circulation of these books, could in a few weeks consent to become a participant in the ceremony of solemnly burning them, in acknowledgment that they were dangerous and evil ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... if Nathanael and his companions were very easily convinced, as if their adhesion to such tremendous claims as those of Jesus Christ was much too facile a thing to be a very deep one. But what can be put down in black and white goes a very short way to solve the secret of the power which drew ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... considering the circumstances, as that of Beecher's preaching. The only difference is, that the latter finds an audience that through intellectual facility is able to follow him in any path; while Spurgeon, on the other hand, finds his audience destitute of any such facilities, yet finds them facile in every direction where he can bring into alliance with his power their emotions or their peculiar modes of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... or a desire for self-vindication that induces me to take the field once more against the Lamarckian principle, it is the conviction that the progress of our knowledge is being obstructed by the acceptance of this fallacious principle, since the facile explanation it apparently affords prevents our seeking after a truer explanation ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... them. We have collected from other parts of our lives mental furniture and bric- a-brac that time and association have endeared to us, have installed these meagre belongings convenient to our hand, and contrived an entrance giving facile access to our living-rooms, avoiding the effort of a long detour through the echoing corridors and disused salons behind. No acquaintances, and but few friends, penetrate into the private chambers of our thoughts. We set aside a common room ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... any dog-gone auty-mo-bile that ever infested the trail. Infest is a word that Casey would have used often had he known its dictionary reputation. Having been deprived of close acquaintance with dictionaries, but having a facile imagination and some creative ability, Casey kept pace with progress and invented words of his own which he applied lavishly to all automobiles; but particularly and emphatically he applied the spiciest, most colorful ones ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... openings were numerous to a familiar intercourse with those middle-aged nameless gentlemen of easy circumstances who haunt clubs, and dine a great deal at each others' houses and chambers; men who travel regularly a little, and gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do; great critics of little things; profuse in minor luxuries and inclined to the respectable practice of a decorous profligacy; peering through the window of a clubhouse as if they were discovering ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... organized endeavor," he confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a substantial sum—a large penny-in-the-slot—might produce quick and facile results. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... impossible for an unprejudiced reader to interpret this and the other poems upon the same subject in any way but one. The mistress of Shakespeare, fascinated by the beauty and brilliant qualities of his friend, took advantage of the poet's absence to win that facile heart, so incapable of resisting the charms of woman and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... facile disposition, quickly fell into the ways of the trio, and rather enjoyed the luxury of now and then getting a rise out of the undergrads by showing that "he knew a thing or ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... very beautiful. These panels were grouped in a great and elaborate framing of dark metal, which passed into the metallic caryatidae of the galleries, and the great structural lines of the interior. The facile grace of these panels enhanced the mighty white effort that laboured in the centre of the scheme. Graham's eyes came back to the Council, and Howard was descending the steps. As he drew nearer his features could be distinguished, and Graham saw ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... notwithstanding all his application and industry, did not succeed in earning enough money by sculpture to enable him to live by the art, and the idea occurred to him that he might nevertheless be able to pursue his modelling in some material more facile and less dear than marble. Hence it was that he began to make his models in clay, and to endeavour by experiment so to coat and bake the clay as to render those models durable. After many trials ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... facile, ardent way to think of himself as brokenhearted if he lost her, and he had never seen her in such a mood as this before, or anything approaching to it It was no pretence for the moment that he loved her. He felt for the first time that their two hearts were near. And though ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... When Valentine, always facile, had begun to consider this matter, a drawing of the building, as it was to look when restored, was made, in order to stir up his zeal, and make him long for a parish church that would do him and the vicar credit. He beheld ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... e for a Cambril, as dost, most, ghost, bright, right, sign, design, and short, notwithstanding e Cambril as hence, since, prince, possible, facile, but Prince and Simple proper Names be spoken, with i long, that an unknown Reader mistake not ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... organization, General Rosecrans being President, and the Mayor of the city, first Vice-President. To the furtherance of this work, Mrs. Mendenhall devoted all her energies. Eloquent appeals from her facile pen were addressed to loyal and patriotic men and women all over the country, and a special circular and appeal to the patriotic young ladies of Cincinnati and the Ohio valley for their hearty co-operation in the good work. The correspondence and supervision ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... primoribus urbis; sed revera ut sibi consuleret: nam habuit in animo comprimere nimiam quorundam procacitatem in loquendo, a qua nec ipse exemptus fuit. Nam suo nomine compescere erat invidiosum, sub alieno facile et utile. Ergo specie legis tractavit, quasi populi Romani majestas infamaretur. This, I think, is a sufficient comment on that passage of Tacitus. I will add only by the way that the whole family of the Caesars and all ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... questions whether a good actor can also be a good man? On the whole, as you may have gathered, while I should call Proud Peter a comfortable tale of the eupeptic type, I enjoyed it rather less than other stories from the same facile pen. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, a lovely ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... stream beneath the night, Thy funeral glides to Life's eternal home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... wonder on the subject.' Was there ever a passage like this? The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... In his facile comprehension of German and Latin books, he had long since forgotten his first painful steps: now in his agony they recurred to mock him. He had learnt these alien alphabets by observing in some bulky Hebrew books that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... would be very sad; but are you sure that you do not exaggerate the situation? There is not so much calculation in life. It is more mediocre and more facile. Perhaps the Prince and the Baron have ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... States sat in the same Cabinet and pursued with unremitting energy ideas that were mutually uncompromising. Thomas Jefferson, although born of the old aristocratic stock of Virginia, had early announced himself a Democrat, and had led that faction throughout the Revolution. His facile and fiery mind gave to the Declaration of Independence an irresistible appeal, and it still remains after nearly one hundred and fifty years one of the most contagious documents ever drawn up. Going to France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he found the French ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... never in his life felt such repulsion as toward what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that it seemed simple. His thoughts were too ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... against deserting the creed of their mothers. And even a savant, like Professor Gazzia, who writes on Giordano Bruno, knows the trick of touching this facile cord of the human heart. Speaking of Bruno's philosophy, he says: "I call it plainly the Negation of God, of that God, I mean, of whom I first heard at ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... ice or snow which had undergone such a process of induration as wholly and for ever to have lost its fluidity: [Footnote: Augustine: Quid est crystallum? Nix est glacie durata per multos annos, ita ut a sole vel igne facile dissolvi non possit. So too in Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy of Valentinian, a chaste matron is said to be 'cold as crystal never to be thawed again.'] and Pliny, backing up one mistake by another, affirmed that it was only found in regions of extreme cold. The fact is, that the Greek ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of ultimate, universal happiness will dawn rather when all other people become like philosophers. In the meantime, it is the height of moral and political folly to act as if that day had arrived or else could be ushered in by morning. Spinoza had nothing but contempt for facile-tongued, feather-brained Utopians. He loved humanity too sincerely to mislead humanity or himself that way. And so we find in Spinoza's Ethics as in his Tractatus two systems of morals—one for the many who are called, and one for the few who are chosen. In the Tractatus, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Sinclair is always quietly sure of herself. That is why she will not be hurried, but moves through her gradual scheme with so leisured a serenity; why her style, fluent and facile, never forces its natural eloquence; why her humour plays with a diffused light over all her work and seldom needs the advertisement of scintillating epigrams. Judged by almost every standard to which a comedy like ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposed that Abelard should enter the canon's house as her tutor, and Fulbert's avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d'amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Heloise seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratto s'apprende,[65] and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... she could only laugh in its face—so eager and restless was the effort which it made, and so hopeless the defeat. Enormous mirrors, spread on white and gold walls; large copies from Italian pictures, collected by Henry Marsham in Rome; more facile statues holding innumerable lights; great pieces of modern china painted with realistic roses and poppies; crimson carpets, gilt furniture, and flaring cabinets—Miss Drake frowned as she looked at it. "What could be done with it?" she ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ne peut plus compter ses bonnes fortunes, est de tous, celui qui connoit le moins les faveurs. C'est le coeur qui les accorde, & ce n'est pas le coeur qu'un homme a la mode interesse. Plus on est prone par les femmes, plus il est facile de les avoir, mais moins il est ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... his art was concerned; Allston showed the impression of England, Italy, and Flanders, all at once, in his refined and thoughtful style, and Hunt manifested in every stroke of his brilliant brush the learned and facile methods that are in vogue in the leading ateliers of modern Paris. In these men, and in the followers whom their preeminent ability drew after them, we perceive the dominant impulse to be of alien origin; Fuller alone, of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... as a facile optimist in this matter. In the matter of international co-operation we have a long way to go before we reach our goal, and we can already see one or two serious failures. I deeply deplore that last year the League ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... parties, mais le plus etonnant de ceux de ce genre que nous ait transmis l'histoire. Ce spectacle dont j'ai donne ailleurs la description, [Footnote: Hist. de la vie privee des Francais, t. III, p. 324.] et qui absorba en pur faste des sommes considerables qu'il eut ete facile dans les circonstances d'employer beaucoup mieux, se termina par quelques voeux d'armes tant de la part du duc que de celle de plusieurs seigneurs de sa cour: et c'est tout ce qui en resulta. Au reste il eut lieu en fevrier, et Mahomet ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... Ethel. He is facile princeps here in his own world, but we do not know how it may be when he is measured with public schoolmen, who have had more first-rate tutorship ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... always large, impressive; the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is no longer bound to the actual form of the special object which first represented it, but he may be said to mould a more indefinite and plastic substance into which he can with spontaneous or facile art incarnate his whole person. Hence this substance will assume an anthropomorphic form, and will issue, not in a mysterious being of extrinsic and indefinite form, but in a person with human ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... antecedents. Half the literati of our age do but like these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy and science ran before types were so facile or letters ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... le plus grand de tous les maux necessaires, soit relativement a ceux qui l'endurent, soit par rapport a ceux qui sont contraints d'en employer les victimes, existe dans toute l'etendue des deux Louisianes. Il ne seroit pas facile de determiner pendant combien d'annees la partie septentrionale en aura besoin; mais on peut assurer qu'il doit exister bien des siecles encore dans le Midi si le Gouvernement veut y encourager l'agriculture, qui est son unique ressource. Les Negres seuls peuvent se livrer aux travaux dans ces ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... presentation. As thinkers now addressed themselves to all cultivated people, intelligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites; the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers proper—who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i. p. 563), did not seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and desired only to disseminate it; who did not ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... eloquence. This is a source of bad Literature. There are certain views in Religion, Ethics, and Politics, which readily lend themselves to eloquence, because eloquent men have written largely on them, and the temptation to secure this facile effect often seduces men to advocate these views in preference to views they really see to be more rational. That this eloquence at second-hand is but feeble in its effect, does not restrain others from repeating it. Experience never seems to teach them that grand speech comes ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... this facile, copious, enthusiastic poet, not yet thirty, who grew hot over the Mexican War and poured forth his indignation in an unforgettable political satire such as no English provincial poet could possibly have written. What a weapon he had, and how it flashed in his hand, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... and views of men (and women) and their customs the padre unfolded as we went along, drawn from his professional experience, and recounted, perhaps, with more freedom to a foreigner who understood his language, and doubtless rendered of more facile delivery by the frequent investigations of the contents of the bottles which he made as the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... et a natura adjuvetur, et in universorum generum infinitis disceptationibus exercitatus; ornatissimos scriptores oratoresque ad cognoscendum imitandumque legerit;—nae ille haud sane, quemadmodum verba struat et illuminet, a magistris istis requiret. Ita facile in rerum abundantia ad orationis ornamenta, sine duce, natura ipsa, si modo ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... loyalty to the person of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period. Lost causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland, do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the English political mind. As for that more facile, after-dinner attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the head of the toast-list only when the king ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... I will," he said, with his facile assent. But his tone expressed slight intention, and his indifference bespoke a too great wealth of "chunes"; he could feel no lack in some unremembered combination, sport of the moment, when another strain would come at will, as sweet perchance, ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... substance with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul, appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the facile material, bringing with it more of Donatello's character than the keenest observer could detect at any one moment in the face of the original Vain expectation!—some touch, whereby the artist thought to improve or hasten the result, interfered with the design of his unseen spiritual assistant, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her sex. Her soul hated it; she cried aloud for equal treatment, for a share of the iron and rigour of life. Their manners were a mere cloak for contempt. If they could only be rude to a woman, it would be a welcome relief from this facile condescension. What had she or any woman with brains to do in that galley? They despised her kind, with the scorn of sultans who chose their women-folk for looks and graces. The thought was degrading, and a bitterness filled her heart against the whole clique of easy aristocrats. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... of it, never thought of it, never even hoped it, till that moment. I had scribbled on, idly, carelessly, out of what seemed a mere facile impulse, correcting nothing; seldom even reading what I had written, after it was committed to paper. I had sometimes been pleased with a melodious cadence or a happy image—sometimes amused with my own flow of thought ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... speech enforced their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre. This inbred civility - to use the word in its completest meaning - this natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all that is required to make a governable nation and a just ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... insult to her soul. And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to have such power over her. All that was most firmly established in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure were battering at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. "Therefore, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... could never catch a glimpse of her. Miss Ferris called several times on business, but Priscilla always happened to be out. Her name was posted on the bulletin-board for having library books that were overdue. She even wrote a paper for one of the German Club meetings (Georgie was not a facile German scholar, and it had required a whole Saturday); but owing to the fact that she was suddenly called out of town, she did not ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... immediately, with incomparable meekness and humility, renounced his own undertaking. Oh, how blessed are such souls, bold and strong in the undertakings God proposes to them, and withal tractable and facile in giving them up when God so disposes. It is a mark of a most perfect Indifference to leave off doing a good work when God pleases, and to return, our journey half accomplished when God's Will, which is our guide, so ordains."[1] I may tell you, my ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... truth and made her resolution, and confided it to Rose during the first hours of her mother's illness, when the fight for life had drawn them together, it would not have been hard. But with the beginning of convalescence, when Rose, with an easy visit and a few facile caresses, could outweigh in one hour, all of Portia's unremitting tireless service during the other twenty-three, and carry off as a prize the whole of her mother's gratitude and affection, the old envy and irritation had ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... business, had despatched one of his courtiers, Sir Patrick Murray, to do the part of 'Whip' among the ministers north of the Tay, and so to pack the Assembly with members who rarely attended it, who were unaccustomed to its business, and who were more likely to be facile for the King's purposes than their brethren in the south. Murray—'the Apostle of the North,' as he was sarcastically called—brought the Highland ministers down in droves, poisoned their minds with jealousy of the southern ministers, and flattered them with the assurance ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... Facile with phrases of length and Latinity, Like honorificabilitudinity, Where is the maid could resist your vicinity, Wiled by the impudent grace of your plea? Then your vivacity and pertinacity Carry the day with the divil's audacity; No mere veracity robs your sagacity ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... nay, Dr B—— hath pronounced, "Citius Maevii Aeneadem quam Scribleri istrus tragoediam hanc crediderium, cujus autorem Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... came. She sank into a chair, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook convulsively. In a moment Dirk was on his knees beside her, with his arms round her, kissing her, calling her all sorts of pet names, and the facile tears ran down his own cheeks. Presently she released ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... and inspiration more than a solemn, professional catechetical probing of their religious state. But I think, as I have already said, that the world is improving in this matter. Our pastors are more social, more facile, more appreciative of the fact that, in all their personal intercourse with their people, they must win love and give sympathy if they would do good in the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... rugged young man, intensely in earnest, and therefore neither popular nor successful was that young partner of Dr. Kingston. Had Harold been squire, the resignation of the patient into his hands would have been less facile; but as a mere Australian visitor, he was no prize, and might follow his own taste if he preferred the practitioner to whom club, cottage, and union patients ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ought perhaps to be noticed: it is the accentuation of the Latin. Adverbs, for instance, are generally accented on the last syllable, e.g., doctiu's, facile', qua'm, eo', quo': the rule, however, is by no means regularly kept. But this has evidently nothing to do with the peculiar conditions under which Campion's book was produced, and is to be accounted for by ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... we may say that little or no formal demonstration of respect is shown a chief. He is a Manbo of more than usual ability, of strong character, quick to discover the intricacies of an involved question, facile of tongue, loved for his hospitality and generous nature, more frequently better provided with worldly goods than his fellow clansmen, and as a rule with a reputation for fair dealing. Such are, in general, the sources of the respect that gives him a moral weight in the arbitration ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... recreation, and many a happy evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator. Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at these my facile fingers made me ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... altissimus impendebat, ut facile perpauci prohibere possent, a very high mountain overhung, so that a very few could easily ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... the debris of much consulting, had grown accustomed to having her trivial gossip interrupted by the advent of fresh letters and a new supply of specimen ores. She had grown glib in reading off the unfamiliar phrasing of the letters, facile in writing down the totally unspellable words of Opdyke's dictated replies. In all of this, however, she had been made to feel aware that she herself stood first to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... than the Essay on Population has ever been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the problems of human increase were manfully faced. It proffered no suggestions ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a solitary fault—too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard had moved and had his being. Witness—according to Crane—the demoniac cleverness of the Brazilian in ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... horrible!" she murmured, striving to keep back her tears. "And why? Why?" she repeated, as infinite grief for love that was lost seemed to overwhelm her. It was revolting to think that Riasantzeff had always lied to her in such a facile, heartless way. "And not only he, but all the others lied, too," she thought. "They all of them professed to be so delighted at our marriage, and said that he was such a good, honest fellow! Well, no, they didn't actually lie about it, but they simply didn't ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... thus to refuse in thought to entertain either a probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgment, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist nor the scientific atheist has ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... came to America in 1892, and who is a violinist of much ability, with a beautiful tone, facile and brilliant technique, but somewhat lacking in elegance and polish, did not come to tour the country as a virtuoso. He was engaged by Mr. Walter Damrosch as concert-master for the New York orchestra, ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... point of departure for the lively and facile genius of Gretry, who laid the foundation stones of that lyric comedywhich has flourished in France with so much luxuriance. From the outset merriment and humor were by no means the sole object of the French comic opera, as in the case of its Italian sister. Gretry ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... that 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse "have been received into the canon on evidence less complete" than that belonging to the others. The very general admission of the fourth gospel as the apostle John's, is a curious example of facile traditionalism. Biblical criticism, however, scarcely existed in the first three centuries. It is for us to set the subject in another light, because our means of judging are superior. If the resources of the early ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... diffused self-government has abolished the old divisions between the governing classes and the governed, only one class remains over whom all men can exercise sovereignty—namely, the women. Hence a shuddering dread runs through society at the proposal to also abolish this last refuge of facile domination." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent reactions or excitement ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... boys had the air of doing now what they did every night of their lives. With facile ease, they led the way through the long hall to the drawing-room. James followed, and en route he observed at the extremity of a side-hall two young people sitting with their hands together in a dusky corner. "Male and female created He them!" reflected James, with all the tolerant, disdainful ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... bone when I died? All my life-time I never felt or thought of the existence of such a bone! On the other hand, I object to having the same worn muscles, the same shrivelled skin with which I may happen to die. Why give me the same body as that? Why not rather my youthful body, which was strong, and facile, and capable? The matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not serve to make half the muscle I had when young. But I thank God that St. Paul says it will not be the same body. That body dies—up springs another body. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Mrs. Simpson had nothing else to do she laid her pen to the task of telling him once again how cherished a satisfaction they found in Laura, and how reluctant they would be to lose it. She wrote in that strain of facile sympathy which seems part of an Englishwoman's education, and often begged him to believe that the more she knew of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly she realised how dreary for him must have ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... it." Johnson. "I do not know but that you are. There is Lord Carlisle (smiling)—he never understands anything, and yet the dog is well enough. Then, sir, there is Forster—he understands many things, and yet the fellow is fretful. Again, sir, there is Dickens, with a facile way with him—like Davy, sir, like Davy—yet I am told that the man is lying at a hedge alehouse by the seashore in Kent as long as they will trust him." Boswell. "But there are no hedges by the sea in Kent, sir." Johnson. "And why not, sir?" Boswell (at a loss). "I don't know, sir, unless—" ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... pleases," said the facile Overtop, "we could easily prove that all the reports which Mr. Minford gathered in Westchester County, prejudicial to my client, arose from a confounding of another person with him. But, as this explanation would involve the disclosure ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... wisdom which I here recognize will often sink into a passion of avarice, accumulating wealth which they cannot conceivably enjoy; a stupidity so manifest that every age of satire has found it the most facile of commonplaces. Or, again, those who fail to find wisdom in that last phase will constantly pretend an unreal world, making plans for a future that cannot be there. So did a man eleven years ago in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, for this man, being eighty-seven years of age, wealthy, ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... worth giving for its academic flavour:—'Jam inde a pueritia literarum studio imbutus, et in celeberrimo Etonensi gymnasio informatus, ad nostram accessit academiam, ubi morum honestate, pietate, et pudore nemini aequalium secundus, indole et ingenio facile omnibus antecellebat. Summis deinde nostrae academiae honoribus cumulatus ad res civiles cum magna omnium expectatione se contulit; expectatione tamen major omni evasit. In senatus enim domum inferiorem cooptatus, eam ad negotia tractanda habilitatem, et ingenii perspicacitatem exhibebat, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... meme des Anglois, la Nouvelle Angleterre a une tres petite Etendue du Coste de L'est, il est facile de ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... senioque hebetem, morboque gravatum, Dulcis here, antiquo me quod amore foves, Suave habet et carum Zephyrus tuus, et leviore Se sentit mortis conditione premi. Interiere quidem, tibi quae placuisse solebant, Et formae dotes, et facile ingenium: Deficiunt sensus, tremulae scintillula vitae Vix micat, in cinerem mox abitura brevem. Sola manet, vetuli tibi nec despecta ministri, Mens grata, ipsaque in morte memor domini. Hanc tu igitur, pro blanditiis ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... complain that their memory is defective, and their studies unfruitful. This defect arises from their indulging the facile pleasures of perceptions, in preference to the laborious habit of forming them into ideas. Perceptions require only the sensibility of taste, and their pleasures are continuous, easy, and exquisite. Ideas are an art of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... unfortunate men who muddle away a great deal of money, no one knows how; or he may be a too strict economist, a man who takes too good care of the pence, till he tires his wife's life out about an extra dollar; or he may be facile, or weakly good-natured, and have a friend who preys on him, and for whom he is disposed to become security. Finally, the beloved Charles, Henry, or Reginald may have none of these propensities, but may chance to be an honest merchant, or a tradesman, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... Mrs. Milray. It was the second anniversary of her divorce, which had remained, after a married life of many vicissitudes, almost the only experience untried in that relation, and which had been happily accomplished in the courts of Dacotah, upon grounds that satisfied the facile justice of that State. Milray had dealt handsomely with his widow, as he unresentfully called her, and the money he assigned her was of a destiny perhaps as honored as its origin. She employed it in the negotiation of a second ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Agra until the 9th December. There was so much of beauty and interest in and around the place, that Lady Canning found a wealth of subjects for her facile pencil, and was well content to remain there. There were the usual banquets to the residents, and entertainments given by the Agra people to those in camp, one of them being a party in the Taj gardens, to give us an opportunity of seeing the tomb by moonlight, when it certainly looks its ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... compelled to decline all such engagements. He took an active part in politics, holding that Christianity was not a series of dogmas, but a rule of everyday life, and did not hesitate to attack the abuses of the day from the pulpit. He was as facile with the pen as with the tongue, and his publications were many and important. All in all, he was one of the most influential and picturesque figures that has ever occupied an ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... electric waves, ether must. It has already been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without interference. What will not the more facile ether do? ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... aloud, but our voices were low and lulling, as if quieter than silence. Then we talked of my calm paintings, shadowing deeper lonelinesses in them. But it was my highest rapture to sit in stillness for hours while Heraine, cushioned at my feet, made cunning embroideries, like some facile poet whose ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good or the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself float with the stream, never caring for the future. He ruled a little set of newcomers, he had friendships—or rather, habits of fifteen years' standing, and men with whom he ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... comprehensive, startled and confounded her visitor, who felt that if he had come to gratify his curiosity he should be in danger of going away still more curious than satiated. She added in her gay, friendly, trustful tone—the tone of facile intercourse, the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age—"I am very familiar with your name; Miss Chancellor has told me ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common man, blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd spirit seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly or not ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... are little read, and his unfinished but faithful translation of Homer did not have the success which met the facile paraphrase of Monti. His other works were chiefly critical, and are valued for their learning. The Italians claim that in his studies of Dante he was the first to reveal him to Europe in his political character, "as the inspired poet, who availed himself of art for the civil ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... were almost maliciously favourable, and d'Avranche was simple and easy as a boy, with his sailor's bonhomie and his naturally facile spirit. A fateful adaptability was his greatest weapon in life, and his greatest danger. He saw that Guida herself was unconscious of the revelation she was making, and he showed no surprise, but he caught the note of her simplicity, and responded in kind. He flattered her deftly—not that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... reread them. I wondered whether it were because of the fact that I was his father—though a most inadequate one—that I thought them somewhat unusual. He had learned French—Maude wrote—with remarkable ease. I was particularly struck in these letters with the boy's power of observation, with his facile use of language, with the vivid simplicity of his descriptions of the life around him, of his experiences at school. The letters were thoughtful—not dashed off in a hurry; they gave evidence in every line of the delicacy of feeling that was, I think, his most appealing quality, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... whoever is absent, and hold a jubilee at the restaurant down-stairs when any one gets ahead with an extra story. No other publishers have come rapping at my door in a mad attempt to steal me away from Mr. Carver. I have no bulky mail soliciting stories from my facile pen. But I am making good with Mr. Carver, and that's the ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... see him calmly assent to the surrender of Athenian liberties. In short, Aristophanes perhaps mingled more truth than usual with his wit, when even in the shades below he says of Sophocles, "He was contented here—he's contented there." A disposition thus facile, united with an admirable genius, will, not unoften, effect a miracle, and reconcile prosperity with ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a half," resumed the sheriff, and falling into the tone of a facile auctioneer he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... how could it be otherwise, when he wrote all this volume (as it were) cursorily and in haste, never having so much leisure as to overlook one leaf after he had scribbled the same," stamps Tofte as perhaps a facile, but certainly not ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Ida Palliser's pen-and-ink sketches before to-day—had seen herself represented in every ridiculous guise and attitude by that young person's facile pen. Her large cheeks reddened in anticipation of her pupil's insolence. She took the sheaf of crumpled paper and thrust it hastily ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... in judicio faciem, non bene facit; iste et pro buccella panis deseret veritatem. Here is noted, that a judge were better be a briber than a respecter of persons; for a corrupt judge offendeth not so lightly as a facile. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... whom I despise that I love her, even when I know that it is only a convention and that she will not be deceived by it. I have never bent my knee to the ground when my heart did not go with it. So that class of women known as facile is unknown to me, or if I allow myself to be taken with them, it is without knowing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the rhyme too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for one thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that the feeling for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those of other countries. The most scientific ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... and Porson. Oh! I know many of the world's men have grown in England. Who can deny that? What we mean is, your society is not penetrated with learning. But my Professor shall dispute with you. Now you are facile in our German you can defend yourself. He is a deep scholar, broad over tongues and dialects, European, Asiatic-a lion to me, poor little mouse! I am speaking of Herr ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dark and musty—no time to light the lamps; but Mr Armitage, the facile, the adroit, a perfect Mercury and old in experience, called in four linkmen waiting by their ladies' empty chairs in the ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... admired her own facile adjectives said to a casual acquaintance: "How can you go about with that moth-eaten, squint-eyed, bag of a girl!" "Because," answered the youth whom she had intended to dazzle, "the lady of your flattering epithets happens ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... decisive period of the War, I had frequent contact with Mr. Keynes, and I always admired his exactness and his precision. I could not always find it in myself to praise his friendly spirit. But he had an almost mystic force of severity, and those enormous squanderings of wealth, that facile assumption of liabilities that characterized this period of the War, must have doubtless produced in him a sense of infinite disgust. This state of mind often made him very exigent, and sometimes unjustifiably suspicious. His word had a decisive effect on the actions ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... common stock. "Gracious rills from the Hazlitt watershed have flowed in all directions, fertilizing a dry and thirsty land"—is the happily turned phrase of Mr. Birrell. If in our own day there are still persons who, looking upon criticism as a severe science, occasionally sneer at him as a "facile eulogist,"[120] those who regard it rather as a gift have seen in him "the greatest critic that England has yet produced."[121] Wherever the golden mean between these two extremes of opinion may lie, there is no doubt that for introducing readers to an appreciation of the great things ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Rowland wondered what were her domestic secrets. If her mother was a daughter of the great Republic, it was to be supposed that the young girl was a flower of the American soil; but her beauty had a robustness and tone uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood. She spoke with a vague foreign accent, as if she had spent her life in strange countries. The little Italian apparently divined Rowland's mute imaginings, for he presently ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... at the Royal Institution were of some help to me. I attended courses by Owen, Tyndall, Huxley, and Bain. Of these, Huxley was FACILE PRINCEPS, though both Owen and Tyndall were second to no other. Bain was disappointing. I was a careful student of his books, and always admired the logical lucidity of his writing. But to the mixed audience ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... with side-whiskers, genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity: a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful. Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older than himself, daughter of a Derbyshire squire. He expected to get at least ten ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... go on now for days like this, in this bright frank state of seemingly pure spontaneity, so essentially oblivious of the existence of anything but herself, but so ready and facile in her interest. Ah it was a bitter thing for a man to be near her, and her father cursed his fatherhood. But he must learn not to see her, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the greatest possible contrast—Harry Kaperton had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed facile excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of tremendous emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult within, harsh and dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his somber greenish-black dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Crook"—his eyes were on the Tocsin's letter that lay before him. He read on—for once, even to Jimmie Dale's keen, facile mind, a first reading had failed to convey the full significance of what she had written. It was too amazing, almost beyond belief—the series of crimes, rampant for the past few weeks, at which the community had stood aghast, the ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... from the mass of brilliant vital endeavor is a new burden and a source almost of dismay. Why should we omit so melodious a work as Moskowski's Jeanne d'Arc,—full of perhaps too facile charm? It was, of course, impossible to treat all the wonderful music of the Glazounows and the Kallinikows. And there is the limpid beauty of the Bohemian Suk, or the heroic vigor of a Volbach. We ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp |
