"Graceless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he answered, "since it pleases you to be so gracious, and to dower so graceless a knight with your love, there is naught that you may bid me do—right or wrong, evil or good—that I will not do to the utmost of my power. I will observe your commandment, and serve in your quarrels. For you I renounce ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... mother will own no other of all her num'rous brood But such as stand at Christ's right hand, acquitted through his Blood. The pious father had now much rather his graceless son should lie In hell with devils, for ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... just rights. Miss Woodhull was essentially a militant suffragette and her stanch admirers, Miss Baylis and Miss Stetson were her enthusiastic partisans. Miss Atwell, the teacher of esthetic dancing and posing, who came thrice weekly to instill grace into the graceless and emphasize it in those who were already graceful, sat, so to speak, upon the fence, undecided which way to jump. She inclined strongly to the strictly feminine attitude of dependence upon the stronger sex, but was wise to the advantage of keeping in touch ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... all of yoush," he said drunkenly. "Hev a drink—everybody—no, everybody—come up hyar, I say!" And the graceless saloon bums dropped their cards and came trooping up together. A few of the more self-respecting men slipped quietly out into the card rooms; but the studious stranger, disdaining such puny subterfuges, remained in his place, as impassive and ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... with him to the races; he took him to lunch at suburban hotels, frequented by fast men who drove fast horses; he ministered to every coarse taste and vulgar desire possessed by the man whose nature and graceless caprices he so carefully studied. He did all this at his own expense, and at the same time he kept his principal out of the clutches of gamblers and sharpers. It was for his interest to be of actual ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... the road I must be an armed knight again: forsooth I unbound my hair e'en now and let my surcoat hang loose about me in token that thou wottest my secret. Soothly, my friend, it irks me that now we have met after a long while, I must needs be clad thus graceless. But need drave me to it, and withal the occasion that was given to me to steal this gay armour from a lad at Utterbol, the nephew of the lord; who like his eme was half my lover, half my tyrant. Of all which I will tell thee hereafter, and what wise I must needs steer ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... reporting the contents of public and private libraries, exaggeration holds sway. The library of George the Fourth, inherited by that graceless ignoramus from a book-collecting father, and presented to the British nation with ostentatious liberality only after he had failed to sell it to Russia, was said in the publications of those times to contain about 120,000 volumes. But an actual enumeration when the books were lodged in the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... so ill of behaviour, Servants more fitter for Lucre than Love, And happy are they which refrain for to prove, Shameless, pitiless, graceless, and quite past honesty; Then who of good conscience ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... it robs death of its terrors by making dying a change for the better, and burial but the planting of a seed from which there will spring a new life. In the next place, behold me as I am—weak, weary, old, shrunken in body, and graceless; look at my wrinkled face, think of my failing senses, listen to my shrilled voice. Ah! what happiness to me in the promise that when the tomb opens, as soon it will, to receive the worn-out husk I call myself, the now ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... set down in a street where the sand was over the instep, before a stiff, graceless brick building, standing close up in one corner of an acre lot. On one side, in view from the front gate, was a dilapidated hen-house—on the other, a more unsightly stable with a pig-sty attached. All the space between the house ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... this; you will mourn, when you cannot mend it. I would my mother had been here, soon would she have persuaded you. And yet,' he added, with the smile of his accustomed gaiety, 'it would have been an unco thing, as we say in Scotland, for her ladyship to have waited upon you, as her graceless son has done, and hopes to do again ere long. Down the cliffs I came, and up them I must make way back again. Now adieu, fair Cousin Lorna, I see you are in haste tonight; but I am right proud of my guardianship. Give me just one flower for token'—here he kissed his hand to me, and I threw ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... slipping away from her. No wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant distinction of a powdered coiffure—no wonder, I say, that she clung desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young scamp, even to the extent of hatching for him that amazing plot. He was not so far gone in degradation as to make him utterly hopeless for such an attempt. She hoped to keep him straight with that enormous bribe. She was clearly a woman uncommon enough ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... was in his handkerchief; so was my friend's in his; and so was mine in mine, as even now my pen drops and I reach for it again. I half regret joining the mad party that had gathered an hour later in the old law office where these two graceless characters held almost nightly revel, the instigators and conniving hosts of a reputed banquet whose MENU'S range confined itself to herrings, or "blind robins," dried beef, and cheese, with crackers, gingerbread, and sometimes pie; the whole washed ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... the heart of the worry, proving him only too likely a graceless jealous middle-age curmudgeon, a senile sentimentalist, thus did he upbraidingly mock himself—were there not signs of Damaris developing into a rather thorough paced coquette? She accepted the homage ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... passed through Temple Bar, young and happy, the year after his coronation, and again when, old and almost broken-hearted, he returned thanks for his partial recovery from insanity; and in our time that graceless son of his, the Prince Regent, came through the Bar in 1814, to thank God at St. Paul's for the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... what is your own ... and if you should at any time hereafter happen to transgress, your friends will all beg for you and be security for your good behaviour; but if your are a naughty boy,... then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful child; your parents and masters will be ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... Ibycus the poor, Let aged scandals have at length their bound: Give your graceless doings o'er, Ripe as you are for going underground. YOU the maidens' dance to lead, And cast your gloom upon those beaming stars! Daughter Pholoe may succeed, But mother Chloris what she touches mars. Young men's homes your daughter storms, Like Thyiad, madden'd by the cymbals' ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... serve and uphold it, who are the true men and the King's own lieges. Such a one am I. Then again, there are those who take such as me and transfer, carry or convey us into a bog or morass. Such a one is this graceless old man with the ax, whom I have seen already this day. There are also those who tear, destroy or scatter the papers of the law, of which this young man is the chief. Therefore, I would rede you, dame, not to rail against us, but to understand that we are ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reigned—creeping in upon us with such pictures as we painted under the reign of West, and such houses as we built under the reign of Nash, till the English eye required to rest on that which was constrained, dull, and graceless. For the last two score of years it has come to this, that if a man go in handsome attire he is a popinjay and a vain fool; and as it is better to be ugly than to be accounted vain I would not counsel a young friend to leave the beaten track on ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... year after this oath of Hannibal the fortunes of the lad took a turn for the better. An uncle, Howard Hastings, who had a place in the Customs, was willing to give a helping hand to the son of his graceless brother. He brought Warren Hastings to London. In London Warren Hastings was first sent to school at Newington, where his mind was better nourished than his body. In after life he used to declare that his meagre proportions and ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... dim and cool, as it had been that May afternoon when his feet had left tracks of dust on the shining floor. Straight ahead he saw the garden, lying graceless and deserted, with the unkemptness of extreme old age. A sharp breeze blew from door to door, and the dried grasses on the wall stirred with a sound like that of the wind among ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... Thus, graceless, holds he disputation 'Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will, And with good thoughts makes dispensation, Urging the worser sense for vantage still; Which in a moment doth confound and kill All pure effects, and doth so far proceed, That ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... same month the energy of other men of law was very keenly at work on a widely different subject. Could Messrs. Block and Curling assure Captain Marrable that a portion of his inheritance would be saved for him, or had that graceless father of his in very truth seized upon it all? There was no shadow of doubt but that if aught was spared, it had not been spared through any delicacy on the part of the Colonel. The Colonel had gone to work, paying creditors who were clamorous against him, the moment he had got ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... on through Poland and through Warsaw, Famous for mines of salt and yokes of iron: Through Courland also, which that famous farce saw Which gave her dukes the graceless name of "Biron."[547] 'T is the same landscape which the modern Mars saw, Who marched to Moscow, led by Fame, the Siren! To lose by one month's frost some twenty years Of conquest, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... as the Subject owes the Prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending Rebel And graceless traitor to her loving Lord? I am ashamed that women are so simple To offer war, where they should kneel ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... afterward cut to pieces by the enraged neighbors. Hers is but one of the many ghosts that haunt the neutral ground, and the croaking of the birds of ill luck that nest at Raven rock is blended with the cries of her dim figure. Still, graceless as these fellows were, they affected a loyalty to their respective sides, and were usually willing to fight each other when they met, especially for the plunder that was to ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... same graceless youth was in the habit of calling 'The Sentimental.' She was the darkest of the family, and the most beautiful also, where every one was more or less good-looking. She had soft brown hair, dark blue-gray eyes of the tenderest expression, and a beseeching ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... station Saw naething but abomination. In thir uncovenantit lands The gangrel Scot uplifts his hands At lack of a' sectarian fuesh'n, An' cauld religious destituetion. He rins, puir man, frae place to place, Tries a' their graceless means o' grace, Preacher on preacher, kirk on kirk— This yin a stot an' thon a stirk— A bletherin' clan, no warth a preen. As bad as Smith ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had to attend, about the gown he wore, about the master's treatment of him, about the want of plums in the pudding, as old men and schoolboys grumble. It was wonderful what a liking John James took to this odious, querulous, graceless, stupid, and snuffy old man, and how he would find pretexts for visiting him at his lodging in the old hospital. He actually took that journey that he might have a chance of seeing Clive. He sent Clive notes and packets of drawings; thanked him for books lent, asked advice about future ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Ah, graceless wretch, I knew that thou wouldst soon spoil all, and bring thyself to poverty. So, to hide thy shame, and bring thy sorrows to an end, I left this rope, which will prove ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... know their children? Would they own the graceless town, With never a ranter to worry And never ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... Quaker said to his son, who, as he was once coming out of a house of ill-fame, spied old Broadbrim heaving in sight, and immediately wore ship. The old chap, however, who always kept his weather-eye open, had had a squint of young graceless, and so up helm and hard after he cracked, and following him in, hailed him with, "Ah, Obadiah, Obadiah, thee should never be ashamed of coming out—thee should always be ashamed of going in." No, no, Jack, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... laughing amongst themselves as they followed him: and I was left with the two queens, one of whom was making ruffles for the man she loved, and the other slopping tea for the good of her country. They renewed their generous endeavours to set me right, and I (graceless beast that I am) take up the smoked card which lay before me, and with the corner of ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of the day among the graceless subs were won't to call Colonel Stevens, was having his bad quarter of an hour. Leaving his team with the orderly, John Folsom had stamped into his presence unannounced, and after his own vigorous fashion opened the ball ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... in one who rules the Church of God. How is it possible for him to admit any to the Lord's table, when he is but a judge himself?" How is it possible to excommunicate, when he ought to be excommunicated himself? So, brethren, a graceless elder is a curse instead of ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... his surprise, as he said, he saw the regiment, as he had supposed them to be much nearer home than himself. One of his graceless comrades, however, bluntly contradicted this, and accused him of being mortally frightened when he halted the night before, as although they assured him that he was full ten miles from danger, he insisted that these rifled guns had terribly long range. The baker remonstrated, and quietly ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... the good old grandfather revived in his unfortunate, perhaps graceless grandson, reseated himself on the door-step and watched the bulky, receding figure of his visitor through a pleasant blur of tears, which made the broad, rounded shoulders and the halting columns of legs dance. This David Anderson had almost forgotten that there was unpaid kindness ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... industry that could occupy mankind. The Holy Empire which so ingeniously combined the worst characteristics of despotism and republicanism kept all Germany and half Europe in the turmoil of a perpetual presidential election. A theatre where trivial personages and graceless actors performed a tragi-comedy of mingled folly, intrigue, and crime, and where earnestness and vigour were destined to be constantly baffled, now offered the principal stage for the entertainment and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mean you by trying to make common cause with the ruffians who would have carried your sister off as a prey of that graceless scamp well-called Devil's Own? I marvel to hear such words from ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... scattered rice, through all the wedding whirl A laughing fellow hurries out a certain graceless girl, Unless my hand have lost its strength, unless my eye be dim, I'll lift the shoe, the contract too, and fling ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... the strangest of transformations long before becoming a baccalaureus. You may meet with him a few years later, in the uniform of some Higher School, and find it difficult to recognize your former pupil,—now graceless, taciturn, secretive, and inclined to demand as a right what could scarcely, with propriety, be requested as a favour. You may find [432] him patronizing,—possibly something worse. Later on, at the University, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... circle, far from opening resources to their hearts or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and depressed them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and graceless, whose conversation turned on the differences which distinguished various preachers and confessors, on their own petty indispositions, on religious events insignificant even to the "Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de la Religion." As for the men who appeared in the Comtesse de Granville's ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... of our sympathy. But there is no sign of penitence or of sorrow in the mind of Absalom for this deep offence, by which he has violated God's most holy law. His course runs on; it is a selfish, wilful, violent, and graceless course, unredeemed, as far as we can see, by any trace of better things. And it ends in base rebellion against the throne and life of the father who had shown to this son more favour and affection than to any of the rest. And the king ...
— Is The Young Man Absalom Safe? • David Wright
... Wild, graceless Carmen!—Though yet this be, Savour she hath of a world undreamt, Of a world of wonder, whose salt young sea Provoked a Venus ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... even ruin, of many a goodly piece of raiment, which at times he clipped and shaped in such wise as redounded but little to the credit of either wearer or artificer. Mike was more alive to a merry troll and graceless story, in the kitchen of mine host "at the inn," than to the detail of his own shopboard, with the implements of his craft about him, making and mending the oddly assorted adjuncts of the village churls. Such was his liking for pastime and good company that the greater part ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... occasion. Then how to act (I who am no hypocrite) in the days of condolement! What farces have I to go through; and to be the principal actor in them! I'll try to think of my own latter end; a gray beard, and a graceless heir; in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm; old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such, a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... engaged to Mr. Musgrave," reply I, with a graceless and discontented curl of lip, and ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... the swallow builds in the hall and the stork on the ridge-pole, witness both that peace dwells within? For it is well known that the stork will not abide with a divided house; and as for the swallow, a plague of boils awaits the graceless hand that disturbs its nest. When the Saviour hung upon the cross, did it not perch upon the beam and pour forth its song of love and pity to His dying ear, "Soothe Him! soothe Him"? The stork from the meadow cried, "Strength Him! ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... of the prison, disguising our names as too certain to betray our objects, and baiting our invitation with some hints which we had ascertained were likely to prove temptations under his immediate circumstances. He had a graceless young son whom he was most anxious to wean from his dissolute connections, and to steady, by placing him in some office of no great responsibility. Upon this knowledge we framed the terms of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... good-humour, and told the story about the original quarrel. He added an irritating anecdote in order to provoke the poet still further. It described Pope as introduced by Cibber and Lord Warwick to very bad company. The story was one which could only be told by a graceless old representative of the old school of comedy, but it hit its mark. The two Richardsons once found Pope reading one of Cibber's pamphlets. He said, "These things are my diversion;" but they saw his features ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... "You graceless boy! Do you dare to say your father speculated instead of obeying?" cried the mother, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... lecher? O intemperate king! Wilt thou not see me? Come, come, show your face, Your grace's graceless, king's unkingly face. What, mute? hands folded, eyes fix'd on the earth? Whose turn is next now to be murdered? The famish'd Bruces are on yonder side, On this, another I will name anon; One for whose head this garland I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... which they, too, will sing the Hallel. Go now and prepare savory meat for thy father, that he may bless thee before his death.[83] Do as I bid thee, obey me as thou art wont, for thou art my son whose children, every one, will be good and God-fearing—not one shall be graceless." ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses. I suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers, but in the case of our books that do not sell, I am afraid that it is the graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame than the wickedest of the publishers. It is true that publishers will drive a hard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing to hinder an author from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... your absence and silence, as Dr. Warburton found a future state in Moses's saying nothing of the matter! I could go on with a chapter of severe interrogatories, but I think it more cruel to treat you as a hopeless reprobate; yes, you are graceless, and as I have a respect for my own scolding, I shall not throw it away ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... it. I, who had been so witless as to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless as to admit ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... quiet and go to sleep, and I'll give you some breakfast in the morning," he said to his graceless ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... on afternoons when cool shadows lay across the lawn between their houses, he often discussed these matters of life. Nancy herself had not been spared the common fate. Being now a mere graceless rudiment of humanity, all spindling arms and legs, save for a puckered, freckled face, she was past the witless time of expecting to pick up a bird with a broken wing and find it a fairy godmother who would give her three wishes. It was more ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... at our graceless junior; but it was clear that he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... rose: will you wear it an hour, Till the petals drop apart still fresh and pink and sweet? Till the petals drop from the drooping perished flower, And only the graceless thorns are left ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Dorothy, you have not lost your wits? So far from home, when you are within forty yards of your own door! (To him.) This is one of your old tricks, you graceless rogue, you. (To her.) Don't you know the gate, and the mulberry-tree; and don't you ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... how angry; how sleepless; in what horrors of death; during what long nights she lay moaning, and in almost delirious agonies respecting that future world which she quite ignored when she was in good health.—Picture to yourself, oh fair young reader, a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you be old, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that the way ye talk?" said Brother Bart, who had a spirit of his own. "And it's only what I might look for, ye graceless young reprobate! God knows it was sore against my will that I brought ye with me, Dan Dolan; for I knew ye'd be a sore trial first to last. But I had to obey them that are above me. Stay, then, if you ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... repining: as a badge of distinction for their new king, they made a general subscription, and bought him a fine cap ornamented with a white feather, and round it was engraved in letters of gold, "Peter Pippin, King of the Good Boys." A few days after Peter was chosen King, as George Graceless, Neddy Neverpray, and two or three other boys, as naughty as themselves, were playing at marbles in the church-yard, George Graceless's brother Jack, who was a very good-natured little boy, happened to stop his brother George's marble by ...
— The History of Little King Pippin • Thomas Bewick
... I kend he took up what I said. And a' his distress is about Miss Edith's marriage; and I ne'er saw a man mair taen down wi' true love in my days,—I might say man or woman, only I mind how ill Miss Edith was when she first gat word that him and you (ye muckle graceless loon) were coming against Tillietudlem wi' the rebels.—But what's the matter wi' the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... thousands in our own heaven-blessed New England, and hundreds of thousands in these United States, who receive no religious instruction whatever at home, and whose parents are connected with no religious denomination. What is to be done? We can neither compel ignorant and graceless fathers and mothers to teach their children the fear of the Lord, nor to send them to any place of worship or Sabbath-school. I ask again, what is to be done? These neglected children are in the midst of us. Our cities swarm with them. They are scattered every where over our beautiful hills and ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... car. Carter saw enough, however, to convince him that she had been weeping. One forgotten tear hung tremulously on her lashes as though too reluctant to part with her grief. A fierce resentment seized him. He turned to leave the car, determined to drag back the graceless King by ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... Hunter,) not one has ever done for us a week's honest labor. I have taken them into my service, have fed and clothed them, year after year, on their arrival from the States, and in return I have generally found them rogues and thieves, and a graceless, worthless, thriftless, lying set of vagabonds. That is my very plain and very simple description of the darkies as a body, and it would be indorsed by all the western white men with very ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Island, or in the Providence Plantations! Let him dare to keep his pitiful image out of my sight the lawful time, and then, when he returns, he shall find himself, as many a vagabond has been before him, without wife, as he will be without house to lay his graceless head in."[1] Then, catching a glimpse of the inquiring face of the old seaman, who by this time had worked his way to her very side, she abruptly added, "Here is a stranger in the place, and one who has lately arrived! Did you meet a straggling runaway, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... late hour he turned over, looked at the clock, grunted and grinned sleepily and lapsed off again into blissful oblivion, thereby cutting all his morning classes and generally submerging himself in the unregenerate ways of his graceless sophomoric year. He had never contracted to be conspicuously ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator. And this I would have you consider moreover; the man that suffereth according to the will of God, committeth not such a soul to this Creator as dwells in carnal men—a naked soul, a graceless soul, a soul that has nothing in it but sin; but he commits a converted soul, a regenerate soul, a soul adorned, beautified, and sanctified, with the jewels, and bracelets, earrings, and perfumes of the blessed Spirit of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... yellow dust which rose perversely under its baptism and surged beneath the awnings of the shops. It was Saturday, universal shopping-day in the farmland, and a ramshackle line of rustic vehicles—buggies, democrats, sulkies, lumber wagons—with graceless plough horses slumbering in the thills, stretched in ragged alignment down the curb. Shelby's smart turnout seemed fairly urban by contrast, and Ruth saw that it met with the critical ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... mules; and as, in addition to the weather, we had the Missa to deal with, the humour of the proceedings did not strike any one—except the onlookers. For she rolled and pitched and plunged and dived as she lay there at her moorings. She was never still a moment, and, in a word, behaved like the graceless, mercurial baggage she was. But she was beaten ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... wrong a taste prevails among us; How much our ancestors outsung us: Can personate an awkward scorn For those who are not poets born; And all their brother dunces lash, Who crowd the press with hourly trash. O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, Whose graceless children scorn to own thee! Their filial piety forgot, Deny their country, like a Scot; Though by their idiom and grimace, They soon betray their native place: Yet thou hast greater cause to be Ashamed of them, than they of thee, Degenerate from their ancient brood Since ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... ponder, and soon arrived at a fairly accurate understanding of the whole situation. He remembered vaguely the report of a row between Watson and Busby, and he was aware of the reckless cruelty of the dead man. It might be that in revenge for some savagery on his part, some graceless act toward Rita, this moody, half-insane youth had crept upon the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... Catherine began to make it clear to her obstinate cousin that she wished to be friends. The intimacy ripened rapidly, and, Mr. Lockwood, on their wedding day there won't be a happier woman in England than myself. Joseph was the only objector, and he appealed to Heathcliff against 'yon flaysome graceless quean, that's witched our lad wi' her bold een and her forrad ways.' But after a burst of passion at the news, Mr. Heathcliff suddenly calmed down and said to me, 'Nelly, there is a strange change ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... whose grating voice they heard above all the others; 'very soon we will have a fire.' He sent some of his men to gather brushwood, ling, and dead bracken; meantime he began to beat at the door with his axe, crying like a madman, 'Richard! Richard! Thou graceless wretch, come out of ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... their native receptacles, to contrast, with grotesque strangeness, the neat handiwork of Gillow and Seddon. It had a physiognomy and character of its own—this fantastic foreigner! Inlaid with mosaics, depicting landscapes and animals; graceless in form and fashion, but still picturesque, and winning admiration, when more closely observed, from the patient defiance of all rules of taste which had formed its cumbrous parts into one profusely ornamented and eccentric whole. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might please. No sooner did the god of day His glorious locks enkindle, Than both the wheels began to play, And from each whirling spindle Forth danced the thread right merrily, And back was coil'd unceasingly. Soon as the dawn, I say, its tresses show'd, A graceless cock most punctual crow'd. The beldam roused, more graceless yet, In greasy petticoat bedight, Struck up her farthing light, And then forthwith the bed beset, Where deeply, blessedly did snore Those two maid-servants tired and ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... brasses, tablets, and altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church. The Duke himself, however, was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles in stone and metal, even when they concerned his own beginnings. He allowed his mind to linger by preference on the many graceless and unedifying pleasures which his position placed at his command. He could on occasion close the mouths of his dependents by a good bomb-like oath, and he argued doggedly with the parson on the virtues of cock-fighting and baiting ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... gold locket somewhat shyly, and blushed deeply when he opened it and discovered a tiny miniature of herself. He was pleased to have it, and told her so in a graceless way. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... New York turned suddenly to a graceless young scamp who had once been a regular ornament to ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... the effective contrast to put against that clean and beautiful child some vivid presentation of the average thing, to sketch in a few simple lines the mean and graceless creature of our modern life, his ill-made clothes, his clumsy, half-fearful, half- brutal bearing, his coarse defective speech, his dreary unintelligent work, his shabby, impossible, bathless, artless, comfortless home; one is provoked to suggest him in some phase of typical ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Compound words, if both end not in i, retain their primitive parts entire; as, millstone, changeable, graceless; except always, also, deplorable, although, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... is it! You always did agree with me as to my own faults. Is it not true, Corona? Can you not take my part against that graceless husband of yours? He is always abusing me—as though I were his property, or his guest. Orsino, my boy, go away—we are all quarrelling here like a pack of wolves, and you ought to respect your elders. Here is your father ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... man, of some influence, who used, for amusement, to potter about in various antiquarian enterprises of no moment, but who had now been dead for some fifteen years. I then also recollected that he had an only child, a graceless gallows-bird of a son, who broke his father's heart, then wasted his substance in riotous living, and, after being long a disgrace and nuisance at home, had sunk out of sight amid the lowest strata of vice and crime in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... at last, full of years and honour; and I was summoned from school to attend her funeral. My uncle was much affected, for she had been an excellent mother. She might have been so; but I, graceless boy, could not perceive her merits as a grandmother, and showed a great deal of fortitude upon the occasion. I recollect a circumstance attendant upon her funeral which, connected as it was with a subsequent one, has since been ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by making appointments and promotions for merit rather than for political influence. This was intolerable to the spoilsmen in politics; and within two years he was summarily dismissed in a manner as graceless and cruel as any President, no matter how unfortunately bred, was ever guilty of. Jewell was succeeded by James N. Tyner, an entirely complaisant official. In 1875 Congress neglected to make any appropriation for the civil service reform ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... he had taken cover, paid him an unceremonious visit, to which Ned's indefensible delinquency gave the color of legitimate authority. Upon these occasions, Nancy, accompanied by two sturdy "servant-boys," would sally forth to the next market-town, for the purpose of bringing home "graceless Ned," as she called him. And then you might see Ned between the two servants, a few paces in advance of Nancy, having very much the appearance of a man performing a pilgrimage to the gallows, or of a deserter ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Capricorn. In the fourth house I find Jupiter in a decadence, as also in a tetragonal aspect to Saturn, associated with Mercury. Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, how graceless and unpleasant thou art! When all cuckolds shall be at a general rendezvous, thou shouldst be their standard-bearer. But whence comes this ciron-worm betwixt these two fingers? This Panurge said, putting the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Plantagenet and Constance, Duchess of Brittany, was born at Nantes, on Easter-day, 1187, six months after the death of his father. He was the first grandson of Henry II., for the graceless young King Henry had died childless. Richard was still unmarried, and the elder child of Geoffrey was a daughter named Eleanor; his birth was, therefore, the subject of universal joy. There was a prophecy of Merlin, that King Arthur should reappear ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... his rich master, Philemon. Jefferson Davis rested his argument upon the curse that God pronounced upon Canaan, and asserted that slavery was established by a decree of Almighty God and that through the portal of slavery alone the descendant of the graceless son of Noah entered the temple of civilization. Once a year the Southern minister preached from the text, "Cursed be Canaan, the son of Ham. A servant of servants shall ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... from London, where I have come, as a good profligate, graceless bachelor, for a day or two; leaving my wife and babbies at the seaside. . . . Heavens! if you were but here at this minute! A piece of salmon and a steak are cooking in the kitchen; it's a very wet day, and I have had a fire lighted; ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... the rear of the Pargo Keeling Gate. Of course Tim Gamelyn grew up in the shadow of these things. There was an old book in his father's oak kit box which Tim loved. In it he read about forgotten drill and manual exercises, the uncomfortable and graceless man[oe]uvres of the rigid but redoubtable men who fought at Waterloo. Also there were pictures in colour of warriors in three-cornered hats, high stocks and powdered wigs. These men Tim worshipped. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... one man— So anxious not to go to heaven alone— This one man I remember, and his look, Till twilight overshadowed him. He ceased. And out in darkness with the fisherfolk We passed and stumbled over mounds of moss, And heard, but did not see, the passing beck. Ah, graceless heart, would that it could regain From the dim storehouse of sensations past The impress full of tender awe, that night, Which fell on me! It was as if the Christ Had been drawn down from heaven to track us home, And any of the footsteps ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... a predicament, when his Sovereign stooped to beg as a favour what his lonely heart yearned to grant? Before he was many minutes older he was clasping his child to his breast; and was even shaking hands with her graceless husband. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... shall I enter on this graceless errand? I must not call her child; for where's the father That will in such a suit seduce his child? Then, Wife of Salisbury;—shall I so begin? No, he's my friend; and where is found the friend That will do friendship such endamagement?—{255} Neither my daughter, nor my dear friend's wife, I ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Mrs. Ross to him; and as he became aware that she was a pleasant-looking lady of middle age, who regarded him with very friendly and truthful eyes, he vowed to himself that he would bring Mr. Ogilvie to task for representing this decent and respectable woman as a graceless and dangerous coquette. No doubt she was the mother of children. At her time of life she was better employed in the nursery or in the kitchen than in flirting with young men; and could he doubt that she was a good house-mistress when he saw with his own eyes how spick and span everything was, and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Assisi, they turned with aversion to laud the antipodal trinity of lust, license, and luxury. The mysticism of medieval Christianity was repugnant to their materialism, and the symbolism of its art, expressed under rigid, graceless forms, offended eyes that craved beauty of line and beauty of colour. They ignored or condemned any ulterior purpose of art as a teaching medium for spiritual truths. To such men, a satire of Juvenal was more precious than ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Scriptures were read and a psalm was sung, and then the mother or Hamish offered a few words of prayer. They would as soon have thought of going without their morning and evening meals as without worship. It would have been a godless and graceless house, indeed, without that, in the opinion of those who had been accustomed to family worship ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the latheron summoned before the session, and was not long of making her confess that the father was Nichol Snipe, Lord Glencairn's gamekeeper; and both her and Nichol were obligated to stand in the kirk: but Nichol was a graceless reprobate, for he came with two coats, one buttoned behind him, and another buttoned before him, and two wigs of my lord's, lent him by the valet-de-chamer; the one over his face, and the other in the right way; and he stood with his face to the church- wall. ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... Clive were friends—and why not? Friends! I think you laugh, my lad. Clive it was gave England India, while your father gives—egad, England nothing but the graceless boy who lures him on to speak— "Well, Sir, you and Clive were comrades—" with a tongue thrust in your cheek! Very true: in my eyes, your eyes, all the world's eyes, Clive was man, I was, am and ever shall be—mouse, nay, mouse of all its clan Sorriest sample, if you take the kitchen's ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... smiling humor, and yet, in spite of himself, he could almost have smiled at the very consistency of the fellow. It was egotism still: aesthetic disgust at the graceless contour of his conduct, but never a hint of simple sorrow for the pain he had given. Rowland let him go, and for some moments stood watching him. Suddenly Mallet became conscious of a singular and most illogical impulse—a desire to stop him, to have another word with him—not ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... himself together a little, however, and began to use phrases again about his "graceless son," and "the young villain," and "not a penny of his." (He was, of course, genuinely ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... the idea of Rose from the dispute, it did seem such folly to Evan's common sense, that he spoke with pleasant bonhommie about it. That done, he entered into his acted part, and towered in his conceit considerably above these aristocratic boors, who were speechless and graceless, but tigers for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... would make no account, had it not been the occasion for Bazzi's unmannerly trick. For that graceless fellow chancing to spy leaning against his easel, the rod upon which Raphael was wont to rest his hand while painting, he very slyly made fast to it a nosegay of orange blossoms which the Signor Chigi had presented to me on my entrance and which ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... cleanliness, and comfort, and beauty of the habitations; and many a house which looked so very picturesque at a distance was found, on a nearer inspection, to be a very dirty domicile. Still the views from them were beautiful. Nature has done everything; it is graceless man who is in fault that all is not in accordance with it. At the corner of one of the streets we saw a number of horses, and mules, and donkeys, standing ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... wife should be better than himself was in his eyes an inversion of the proper order of things. And as of course it was impossible that he should be to blame, why, it must be her fault Clarice found herself most cruelly snubbed for days after her interference in behalf of her graceless husband. Not in public; for except in the one instance of this examination, where his sense of shame and guilt had overcome him for a moment, Vivian's company manners were faultless, and a surface observer would have pronounced ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... Mayton's attire; I can only say that in style, color and ornament it became her perfectly, and set off the beauties of a face which I had never before thought was more than pleasing and intelligent. Perhaps the anger which was excusable after Toddie's graceless caper had something to do with putting unusual color into her cheeks, and a brighter sparkle than usual in her eyes. Whatever was the cause, she looked queenly, and I half imagined that I detected in her ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... wi' care! An', if he live to be a beast, To pit some havins in his breast! [put, behavior] An' warn him, what I winna name, [will not] To stay content wi' yowes at hame; [ewes] An' no to rin an' wear his cloots, [hoofs] Like ither menseless graceless brutes. [unmannerly] 'An neist my yowie, silly thing, [next] Gude keep thee frae a tether string! O may thou ne'er forgather up [make friends] Wi' ony blastit moorland tup; But ay keep mind to moop an' mell, [nibble, meddle] Wi' sheep o' credit like thysel! ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... measure mayst thou mete our love; For how should I be loved as I love thee?— I, graceless, joyless, lacking absolutely All gifts that with thy queenship best behove;— Thou, throned in every heart's elect alcove, And crowned with garlands culled from every tree, Which for no head but thine, by Love's decree, All ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... Stancy had been an easy, melancholy, unaspiring officer, enervated and depressed by a parental affection quite beyond his control for the graceless lad Dare—the obtrusive memento of a shadowy period in De Stancy's youth, who threatened to be the curse of his old age. Throughout a long space he had persevered in his system of rigidly incarcerating within himself ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... had acquired sufficient reputation as a dramatist, or at least as a recaster of the plays of others, to excite the jealousy of the leading playwrights, whose crude dramas he condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent death-bed his old friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... that it was "built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks." What an example for Sylvia of the futility of charity—the effort on the part of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using them for the storage ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... appealing, so un-Sawyer-, un-Riverboro-like. The longer Rebecca lived in the brick house the more her Aunt Jane marveled at the child. What made her so different from everybody else. Could it be that her graceless popinjay of a father, Lorenzo de Medici Randall, had bequeathed her some strange combination of gifts instead of fortune? Her eyes, her brows, the color of her lips, the shape of her face, as well as her ways and words, proclaimed her a changeling ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and sweet Is three times gentle, and before his feet Rejoicing I shall say:—"The girl you gave Was my first Heaven, an angel bent to save. Oh, God, her maker, if my ingrate breath Is worth this rescue from the Second Death, Perhaps her dear proud eyes grow gentler too That scorned my graceless years and trophies few. Gone are those years, and gone ill-deeds that turned Her sacred beauty from my songs that burned. We now as comrades through the stars may take The rich and arduous quests I did forsake. Grant me a seraph-guide to thread the throng ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... poor enough Irish village; and perhaps the farms were not too well cultivated; and perhaps the village preacher, who was so dear to all the country round, had to administer many a thrashing to a certain graceless son of his; and perhaps Paddy Byrne was something of a pedant; and no doubt pigs ran over the "nicely sanded floor" of the inn; and no doubt the village statesmen occasionally indulged in a free fight. But do you think that was the Lissoy that Goldsmith thought ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... and the rest lay open enough to censure. So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a male Pamela—a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close: though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury |
