"Inelegant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the clothes that are WRAPPED AROUND. The former style, with its jackets, trousers, and leggings, is not absolutely unknown to the Athenians,—their old enemies, the Persians, wear these[*]; but such clumsy, inelegant garments are despised and ridiculed as fit only for the "Barbarians" who use them. They are not merely absurdly homely; they cannot even be thrown off promptly in an emergency, leaving the glorious human form free to put forth any noble ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... their birch-bark baskets very convenient for a number of purposes. My bread- basket, knife-tray, sugar-basket, are all of this humble material. When ornamented and wrought in patterns with dyed quills, I can assure you, they are by no means inelegant. They manufacture vessels of birch-bark so well, that they will serve for many useful household purposes, such as holding water, milk, broth, or any other liquid; they are sewn or rather stitched together with the tough roots of the tamarack or larch, or else with ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... (1160-1230) and his grandson Moses continued the line of faithful but inelegant translators. Judah had turned into Hebrew the works of Bachya, Ibn Gebirol, Jehuda Halevi, Ibn Janach, and Saadiah. Samuel was the translator of Maimonides, and bore a brave part in the defence of his master in the bitter controversies which arose as to the lawfulness ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... old black letter books; they were rich in matter, though their style was inelegant; wonderfully so, considering how conversant the writers were with the best ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... she could not be accused of being old-fashioned. None would dare to despise her. She was what Hilda could never be, had never long desired to be. She was what Hilda had definitely renounced being. And there stood Hilda, immature, graceless, harsh, inelegant, dowdy, holding the letter between her inky fingers, in the midst of all that hard masculine mess,—and a part of it, the blindly devoted subaltern, who could expect none of the ritual of homage given to women, who must sit and work and stand and strain and say 'yes,' and pretend ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth Hodgson's inelegant but ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... on which their poets made shipwreck.[27] Let us, however, rejoice for the sake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable to read Shakespeare. One for whom Moliere is too eccentric, grotesque, inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... will buy a costly picture when his house-rent is unpaid; that he will give his wife a guitar when she wants a gown; and buy his children a rocking-horse when they are without stockings. His house and family are altogether in an inelegant state of elegant disorder; and with really a comfortable income, if properly managed, he is eternally ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... were men whose minds had been trained in a world which had passed away. They gave place in no long time to a younger generation of wits; and of that generation, from Dryden down to Durfey, the common characteristic was hard-hearted, shameless, swaggering licentiousness, at once inelegant and inhuman. The influence of these writers was doubtless noxious, yet less noxious than it would have been had they been less depraved. The poison which they administered was so strong that it was, in no long time, rejected with nausea. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... must learn to walk"—and the joys of the dinner-party are not to be partaken of without a long preliminary course of training, as many a young man has learned to his sorrow when he discovered that his inelegant use of knife and fork was causing humorous comment up and down the "board" and was drawing upon himself the haughty glances of an outraged hostess. The first requisite of success in dining out is the possession of a complete set of correct ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... aloof from the common herd, and looks out of his window upon the poor man, and says—"Put that dirty wretch off my steps immediately!" On Sabbath days he finds the church, but mourns the fact that he must worship with so many of the inelegant, and says, "They are perfectly awful!" "That man that you put in my pew had a coat on his back that did not cost five dollars." He struts through life unsympathetic with trouble, and says, "I cannot be bothered." Is delighted ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... entered. He was a shortish man of about fifty, with a paunch, but not otherwise fat; dressed like a sportsman. He trod very lightly. The expression on his ruddy face was amiable but extremely alert, hardening at intervals into decision or caution. He saw before him a nervous, frowning girl in inelegant black, and Miss Ingate with a curious look in her eyes and a sardonic and timid twitching of her lips. For an instant he was discountenanced; but he at once recovered, accomplishing a ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the boats, behind lay all our loves and fortunes—was ever Highland heart but swelled on such a time? Sturdy black and hairy scamps the Irish—never German boor so inelegant—but venomous in their courage! Score upon score of them ran in on us through the Arches. Our lads had but one shot from the muskets, then into them with ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the professor's class had used the figures of speech too frequently employed by Rosamond, he would have received a dignified rebuke for "hyperbolical and inelegant language;" but it never occurred to the deluded man that anything but pearls of thought and diamonds of speech could fall from those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... are critics stupid enough to say that Balzac knew nothing of the art of painting young girls; they make use of the inelegant, unpolished word rate to qualify his portraits of this genre. To be sure, Balzac's triumph is, we admit, in his portraits of mothers or passionate women who know life. Certain authors, without counting George Sand, have given us sketches of young girls far superior ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... stiff!" shouted Harold. Afterwards it occurred to me that this inelegant appellation may have been meant for his father, but at the time I took it to be ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... majestic forms which stood in the shrines of ancient Greece. All is hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble. As this superstition is of all superstitions the most irrational, and of all superstitions the most inelegant, so is it of all superstitions the most immoral. Emblems of vice are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you one example of affronted that, which may serve as a caution. The tutor said, in speaking of the word that, that that that that that lady parsed, was not the that that that gentleman requested her to analyze. This sentence, though rendered inelegant by a bad choice of words, is strictly grammatical. The first that is a noun; the second, a conjunction; the third, an adjective pronoun; the fourth, a noun; the fifth, a relative pronoun; the sixth, an adjective ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... what a predicament your precious advice has brought me; how much more practical my own arrangement was! The handkerchief looked inelegant, if you like, but it would have prevented me this trouble. Why did I swerve from my principles? Why was I led astray by ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... which was imputed to him as a crime, was his bad English. He spoke our language, but not well. His accent was foreign: his diction was inelegant; and his vocabulary seems to have been no larger than was necessary for the transaction of business. To the difficulty which he felt in expressing himself, and to his consciousness that his pronunciation was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... objections against them are, that they are supposed to have passed through the earl of Morton's hands, the least scrupulous of all Mary's enemies; and that they are, to the last degree, indecent, and even somewhat inelegant, such as it is not likely she would write. But to these presumptions we may oppose the following considerations: 1. Though it be not difficult to counterfeit a subscription, it is very difficult, and almost impossible, to counterfeit several pages, so as to resemble exactly the handwriting ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... lower lip drawn down,[1] is that preliminary to vomiting. We eject or retract when disgusted; we are not afraid nor are we angry. We say "he—or she, or it—makes me sick," and this is the stock phrase of disgust. Inelegant as it is, it exactly expresses the situation. Disgust easily mingles with fear and anger; it is often dispelled by curiosity and interest, as in the morbid, as in medical science, and it of ten displaces less intense curiosity ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... lady's waist, not holding her too close, but firmly holding her right hand with his left one; the lady turns the palm of her right hand downward; her right arm should be nearly straight, but not stiff. The gentleman's left arm should be slightly bent, his elbow inclined slightly backward. It is very inelegant, however—indeed, vulgar—to place the joined hands against the gentleman's side or hip; they should be kept clear of the body. The step should be in unison; if the gentleman bends his right elbow too much, he draws ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of the upper petticoat, the suncurinu, when they go abroad, and bringing it over the head and shoulders, so as to form a sort of hood. So far from this fashion giving them, as might be supposed, a dowdy appearance, it is not inelegant when the garment is gracefully arranged. It has generally broad stripes, and is often of silk or a fine material. The under-petticoat, of cloth, is either of a bright colour, or dark with a bright-coloured border. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative,—such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appealing lines, as if he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari' Harris to be a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet. He sat looking at me expectantly. I could not help thinking that, with his queer head and length of thinness, he was made to hop along the road of life rather than to ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... made a ten-strike, I hear," he volunteered, in an expressive, if inelegant, idiom of the money game; "there's a story going the rounds that Mills and Severance have been gunning together and that some one else got burned. Anyway, I hear they've lined their pockets. Severance is ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... have lamented the loss of a chapter of which the title only has descended to us. That chapter would have demonstrated what happens to all languages, that some neologisms, which at first are considered forced or inelegant, become sanctioned by use, and in time are quoted as authority in the very language which, in their early stage, they were ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Theatrical Committee are looking up amateurs for a farce. Readings from Dickens are also spoken of. An occasional whale is seen blowing in the distance, and many grampuses come rolling about the ship,—most inelegant brutes, some three or four times the size of a porpoise. Each in turn comes up, throws himself round on the top of the sea, exposing nearly half his body, and then rolls ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... of an old-fashioned inn, or rather at the porch thereof; for the door itself, with a retiring modesty, stood at some distance back, while an impudent little portico with carved oak pillars, of quaint but not inelegant design, stood forth into the road, with steps leading down from it to the sill of the sunk doorway. An ostler ran out to take the horse, and helped the boy down tenderly and carefully. Sherbrooke himself then dismounted, looked at his ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... that comes from a too rapid drop in an elevator. So Henry had come to her at the first possible moment to protest against "this Tom Reynolds." "He has had a bad recitation," she thought, "and now he is going to take it out on me," and then she called her brother a hard and inelegant name, as people will when angry with their dearest relatives. Had Nancy been of a satirical nature she might have made something of her brother's adoption of Freudian methods; but she was not, and she knew only ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... half-a-dozen, of our servants, who were squatting down, on their hams, ready to receive her. She then took each by the head and neck, and pressed their heads between her legs—they sitting, she standing—not in the most decent way, and made over them, with her whole body, certain inelegant motions, not to be mentioned. She then put their hands and arms behind their backs, and after several other wild cries and jumps, and having for a moment thrown herself flat upon the ground, she declared to each and all ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... all ages, who were taking their morning dip. It was most absurd to see entire families, from the bald-headed and spectacled grandfather to the baby who could scarcely walk, all disporting themselves in the water together, many of them supported by the very inelegant-looking bladders I have mentioned. There was a little delay in mounting our horses, under the shade of the fig-trees; but when we were once off, a party of eleven, the cavalcade became quite formidable. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... Marie Louise 500,000 francs for her toilet, but she never spent the entire amount. She had little taste in dress, and would have made a very inelegant appearance had she not been well advised. The Emperor was present at her toilet those days on which he wished her to appear especially well, and himself tried the effect of different ornaments on the head, neck, and arms of the Empress, always selecting something ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... tomb, and here, on prescribed days, the memorial ceremonies took place. The statues of the double were rude and clumsy, the coffins heavy and massive, and the figures with which they were decorated inelegant and out of proportion, while the stelae are very rudely cut. From the time of the VIth dynasty the lords of the Said had been reduced to employing workmen from Memphis to adorn their monuments; but the rivalry between the Thebans and the Heracleopolitans, which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... carcase of Robert Louis Stevenson, An active, austere, and not inelegant writer, who, at the termination of a long career, wealthy, wise, benevolent, and honoured by the attention of two hemispheres, yet owned it to have been his crowning favour TO INHABIT ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... account for these rock-hermits and their inelegant habits? How explain this poisoning of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... certain small words are in the language for a purpose. "And," "a," "the," are important, and their elimination often makes a letter bald, curt, and distinctly inelegant. ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... reversed. The etching of him by Loys Delteil is thus described by a sympathetic commentator: "Daumier was very broad-shouldered, his head rather big, with slightly sunken eyes, which must, however, have had an extraordinary power of penetration. Though the nose is a little heavy and inelegant, the projecting forehead, unusually massive like that of Victor Hugo or of Beethoven and barred with a determined furrow, reveals the great thinker, the man of lofty and noble aspirations. The rather long hair, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of Donne, on the last night of the year, have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant: ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... he-camel turned to a she," cried the boy, and the phrase became proverbial to express inelegant transition (Arab. Prov. ii. 246). The uncle bade his nephew put out his tongue and seeing it dark-coloured said, "That black tongue will be thy ruin!" Tarafah, who was presently entitled Ibn al-'Ishrin (the son of twenty years), grew up a model reprobate who cared nothing save ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... am. Upon your first perusal of this poem, you have taken notice of some words which I have innovated (if it be too bold for me to say refined) upon his Latin; which, as I offer not to introduce into English prose, so I hope they are neither improper, nor altogether inelegant in verse; and, in this, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... to march into battle with colours flying and bands playing: the old brave way was impossible in the face of machine guns. The pomp and pageantry of battle had departed and there was nothing left but for the attacking party to crawl in a most inelegant fashion upon ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... saints with preternaturally large eyes, more nearly resembling advertisements for a hair dye or complexion bleach than ecclesiastical subjects. Around the main altar stood armoured soldiers of Biblical antiquity, squat, inelegant figures that had first been painted on canvas and were afterward cut out like gigantic paper dolls, being put into wooden ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... struggle. Cornelia had applied the match, and the tow blazed. Elma laughed again, and seated herself beneath the tree. Cornelia had tossed her hat on the ground and clasped her hands round her knees in comfortable, inelegant position. Elma did the same, and the American girl, watching her, was at a loss to account for the reckless radiance of her smile. The sunshine flickered down between the branches on the sweet pink and white ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... carrying its music with it back and forward,—why should she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... frail bridges of hewn timber accorded with the reminiscence of the missionary pioneer who discovered and named the picturesque waters more than an elaborate and ancient causeway. Even those long, inelegant structures which lead the pedestrian over our own Charles River, or the broad inlets of the adjacent bay, have their peculiar charm as the scene of many a gorgeous autumnal sunset and many a patient "constitutional" walk. It is a homely, but significant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... their business to control the arts, literature and society. And those who do this are for the most part unbearable. After swearing by Voltaire they have gone back to spirituality and mysticism, the last drawing-room craze. Now that a firm faith in science is regarded as brutish and inelegant, they fancy that they rid themselves of their caste by feigning amiable doubt, and ignorance, and innocence. What they most fear is that they may carry a scent of the schools about with them, so they put on extremely Parisian airs, venture ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had guitars. One of the girls sang a solo very well, the rest of the band joining in an extravagantly wild, fantastic chorus; the leader, meantime, skipping and turning and twisting about in the most absurd and inelegant manner. They sang several songs in the same style, some more wild and extraordinary than the first, certainly not suited to a refined taste. Yet this place was evidently a fashionable resort; the entrance-money was very high,—a silver rouble and a quarter,—and the company were all well-dressed, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... part of the city, which rises to the summit of a hill, where stand the cathedral and many elegant private houses. The city is, in general, tolerably well built; but many of the streets have domes, or arcades of wood, which are frequently fifty or sixty feet in height, and which have an inelegant appearance, but are useful in the winter, and under some of them are rows of shops, Containing every article of luxury or utility, in equal perfection with those that are to be met with in ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... Calendar' was entirely overlooked by the public and the press. And it could not well be otherwise. The book, instead of in morocco, was bound, or rather stitched, in coarse blue cardboard; the paper was not only not 'toned,' but rough and inelegant in the extreme; and the edges, which, ought to have been smooth and gilded, were rugged and uneven like a ploughed field. It was hopeless to expect that a most discerning public should pay six shillings ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... abaft the bridge deck frame held the Union Jack, the yacht ensign and the club burgee. All in all, the Adventurer was a smart and finely appointed craft, and a capable one, too. Steve's father had had her built only a little more than a year ago and she had seen but scant service. In the inelegant but expressive phraseology of Perry, "she was a rip-snorting corker of a boat." The consensus of opinion was to the effect that Mr. Chapman was "a peach to let them have it," and there was an unuttered impression that that kind-hearted gentleman ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them, their ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... Benvenuto, designs for palaces by Michael Angelo, frescoes by Raphael, busts, mosaics, and gems just dug up from among the ruins of ancient temples and villas, these things were the delight and even the serious business of their lives. Letters and the fine arts undoubtedly owe much to this not inelegant sloth. But when the great stirring of the mind of Europe began, when doctrine after doctrine was assailed, when nation after nation withdrew from communion with the successor of St. Peter, it was felt that the Church could not be safely confided to chiefs whose highest praise was that they ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... trick of striking attitudes, Inelegant for men to see, Will, to be candid, foster feuds Between yourself and me. On manners of the best this sport, By right of glory, makes a call, And he who will not as he ought Should never ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... the possibility ... that the.—It will probably seem to a modern reader that either 'that' or 'the' has crept in improperly. It might be so; but Burke still maintained the authoritative but rather inelegant tradition by which 'that,' like the French que, could replace any such antecedent ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... checked his love for Greece and the Orient, which resulted finally in his mania of everywhere imitating the example of Asia and of taking up again, though to be sure less wildly, the policies of Caligula. Tacitus tells us that she continually reproved Nero for his simple customs, his inelegant manners, and his rude tastes. She held up to him, both as an example and as a reproach, the elegance and luxury of her husband, who was indeed one of the most refined and pompous members of the degenerate ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... one 'good for sore eyes,' as you sometimes say;" and with this inelegant remark Miss Alfaretta walked away while laughing, happy Jim sped downwards to the vine-wreathed lodge at the great entrance gate. He had been happy all that summer, never more so; yet happier than ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... half in diameter. Part of the walls only of the building are standing. In the wall opposite the entrance are two niches, one above the other. Not far from this building, toward its western side, I found, lying upon the ground, the trunk of a female statue of very inelegant form and coarse execution; my companion the priest spat upon it, when I told him that such idols were anciently objects of adoration; by its side lay a well executed female foot. I may here mention for the information of future travellers in these parts, that on ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... for woman; why apply that name to one of the gentle but occasionally obstinate sex? The answer was that a woman is (sometimes) more mulish than a mule. Please observe that I did not like the poor pun very well, and thought it rather rude and inelegant. So I left it on the blotter, where it was standing when one of the next numbers of "Punch" came out and contained that very same pun, which must have been hit upon by some English contributor at just about ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Fly, And sung by the myriads that sport through the sky. The Quadrupeds listen'd with sullen displeasure, But the tenants of air were enraged beyond measure. The PEACOCK display'd his bright plumes to the Sun, And, addressing his Mates, thus indignant begun: "Shall we, like domestic, inelegant Fowls, [p 4] As unpolished as Geese, and as stupid as Owls, Sit tamely at home, hum drum with our Spouses, While Crickets and Butterflies open their houses? Shall such mean little insects pretend to the fashion? Cousin Turkey-cock, well may ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... sensational in-door costumes would be to some of us. In order to establish herself in the estimation of the average Persian, as all that a woman ought to be, the European lady would have to conceal her face and cover her shapely, tight-fitting dress with an inelegant, loose mantle, whenever she ventured outside her own doors. With something of a penchant for undertaking things never before accomplished, I proposed one morning to take a walk around the ramparts that encompass the Persian capital. The question arose ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... after the night romance of Paris, the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still a brilliant verity. The phrase is "une belle poire." And ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... which contained quite cold vegetables, were cracked and did not match; the bread was of the commonest kind, that which is called "household;" the knives were badly cleaned, and the plate was worn off the forks and spoons. It was considered inelegant to have gas in the dining-room, therefore a cheap paraffin-lamp was in the centre of the table, and was more liberal of scent than light. The curtains to the window were of that annoying red which shrieks down any other colour near it; they made Ida's ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... come from folks don't step so lively as they do up here, and old Colonel Tayloes, he used to say there ain't nothin' so inelegant as hurry, lessen 'tis worry. But of course I shouldn't have had no discussion in my mind about that bell. I got a bad way ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... Parkhurst says that in manhood, as much as in house-building, the foundation keeps asserting itself all the way from the first floor to the roof. The stones laid in the underpinning may be coarse and inelegant, but, even so, each such stone perpetuates itself in silent echo clear up through to the finial. The body is in that respect like an old Stradivarius violin, the ineffable sweetness of whose music is outcome and quotation from the coarse fibre of the case upon which its strings are ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... was seated in his study, his day's work over, his feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which Sir Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old Reports. He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but honest, and therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others. He had a great belief in his young partner's ability, and, though he knew him to be astute, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the interview Sopater succeeded in convincing the Singhalese monarch of the greater power of Rome as compared with that of Persia, by exhibiting the large and highly finished gold coin of the Roman Emperor in contrast with the small and inelegant silver money of the Shah. This story would, however, appear to be traditional, as Pliny relates a somewhat similar anecdote of the ambassadors from Ceylon in the reign of Claudius, and of the profound respect excited in their minds by the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... usual, inelegant and cumbrous. This Letter is a faultless composition with exception of the one ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... coarse-looking dame of about forty, and while all her aim is to appear an elegant woman of fashion, all her success is to seem an ordinary woman in very common life, with fine clothes on. Her habits are bustling, her air is mock-important, and her manners very inelegant.” ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... music is like the mighty Frederick of Prussia's taste in painting: we are told that he frequently admired what the connoisseurs decried, and always without any hypocrisy confessed his admiration. I am sensible that my taste in music must be inelegant and vulgar, because people of undisputed and cultivated taste can find no merit in my favourite tunes. Still, because I am cheaply pleased, is that any reason why I should deny myself that pleasure? Many of our strathspeys, ancient and modern, give me most ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a place-name is correct which makes bad grammar of the original. The apparatus of Indian synthesis was cumbersome and perhaps inelegant, but it was nicely adjusted to its work. The grammatical relations of words were never lost sight of. The several components of a name had their established order, not dependent upon the will or skill of the composer. When we read modern advertisements ...
— The Composition of Indian Geographical Names - Illustrated from the Algonkin Languages • J. Hammond Trumbull
... sight? In any case nothing apparently occurred to disturb the amiability of either monarch. It was doubtless agreed that they should form a dual alliance, absolute and exclusive.[9] "I have often slept two in a bed," the suave but inelegant Napoleon was heard to say at a subsequent meeting, "but never three." Savary declared that the smiling and complacent young Czar thought the remark delightful. The meaning of the riddle, if riddle there be, was, of course, that Austria could no longer count as an equal in the Continental Olympus, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a young gentleman at the University in Cambridge asked of a Collegian the loan of his Wirgil. The inelegant pronunciation of the word Virgil was burlesqued by the young Collegian in the following story, with which his invention readily supplied him:—Lately (says he) I set out on a woyage to Wersailles, with one Captain Winal, in a British wessel called the Wiper; but we soon met with ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... of one square yard. To the left, surrounding a grass stem, will be seen an object which is unpleasantly familiar to most country folks—that salivary mass variously known by the libellous names of "snake-spit," "cow-spit," "cuckoo-spit," "toad-spit," and "sheep-spit," or the inelegant though expressive substitute of "gobs." The foam-bath pavilion of the "spume-bearer," with his glittering, bubbly domicile of suds, is certainly familiar to most of my readers; but comparatively few, I find, have cared to investigate the mysterious mass, or ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... structure, of which the chief object was the large figure of S. Mary, often mentioned in the Rolls of the Custos Capellae, and which must have occupied a canopied niche, blocking up the whole of the middle light from sill to transom."[10] The design of the east window is inelegant, the transom is heavy, and the tracery in the large circle at the top spoils the effect of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use of the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first act of Antony ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... civil engineer, found them in the great doorway of the flat mansions, Redwood holding out the damp pink paper, and Bensington on tiptoe reading over his arm. Cossar was a large-bodied man with gaunt inelegant limbs casually placed at convenient corners of his body, and a face like a carving abandoned at an early stage as altogether too unpromising for completion. His nose had been left square, and his lower jaw projected beyond his upper. He breathed audibly. Few people considered ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... body in that fashion which her culture demanded. His simple and primitive views of life—as natural as the instinct which governs all creatures in his God-cultivated world—were now unrefined, ignoble, inelegant. His fine nature and unembarrassed intelligence, which found in the wealth of realities amid which he lived abundant food for his intellectual life, and which enabled him to see clearly, observe closely and think with such clean-cut directness, beside ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Rubric.—The Maryland Committee is quite right in remarking that the language of this important rubric, as set forth by the Convention of 1883, is "inelegant and inaccurate," but another diocese has called attention to the fact that the substitute which Maryland offers would, if adopted, enable any rector who might be so minded to withhold entirely from the non-communicating ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Waterloo Bridge, walked a good way on to the Surrey side of the river; a coarse, dingy, disagreeable suburb, with shops apparently for country produce, for old clothes, second-hand furniture, for ironware, and other things bulky and inelegant. How many scenes and sorts of life are comprehended within London! There was much in the aspect of these streets that reminded me of a busy country village in America on ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it. Harlan was the proprietor and bartender of the Oasis and catered to the excessive and uncritical thirsts of the ruck of range society, and he had objected vigorously to the placing of the second sign in his place of business; but at the close of an incisive if inelegant reply from the marshal, the sign went up, and stayed up. Edwards' language and delivery were ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... different shrubs and flowers; and on a pedestal of artificial rock, in one of the walks close to it, is placed a clay vessel of an elegant form, full of water, with a wooden ladle swimming on the top. On a frame near one of the out-houses, hangs a large bell, three feet high, of an inelegant shape, resembling a long bee-hive; the sides are two inches thick, and richly ornamented: its tone is ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... mother raspingly, with a pathetic note of pleading, 'haven't I always taught you to say preserve?' She was not pleading against the inelegant word, but ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... other, by Badius Ascensius, is somewhat more commonly known. A century elapsed before this work was deemed deserving of republication; when the country that had given birth to, and the university that had directed the studies of, its illustrious author, put forth an inelegant reprint of it in 4to. 1599—from which some excerpts will be found in the ensuing pages—but in the meantime the reader may consult the title-page account of Herbert, vol. iii. p. 1408. Of none of these latter editions were the sharp eyes of Clement ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... go-as-you-please looking bunches of poor taste knotted, cascaded, and festooned over mantels, pictures, and chair backs, we have outgrown, confining our efforts in this line to the silk draught curtain to conceal the inelegant yawn of an open grate; and even this is being ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... in Poetry, is not inelegant nor injudicious, and has something of vigour beyond most of his other performances: his precepts are just, and his cautions proper; they are, indeed, not new, but in a didactick poem novelty is to be expected only in the ornaments and illustrations. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... converted into a drinking-cup. This whim has been commemorated in some well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... out a sickly existence, too poor to live, too good to die, might have become vigorous branches in the tree of knowledge. What have we in return for the outlay? A series of structures concerning which the most ardent friend of the system cannot but admit that they are inelegant, uninspiring and unpractical. Some of the newer dormitories at Harvard and Yale, it is true, are decided improvements. They are well built and supplied with many conveniences that will serve to make student life less heathenish. But ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... Fanny sniffed, if that very inelegant word may be applied to any action performed by ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... weigher's scales standing conveniently. To stand on the elevated deck or rail of a ship, and look up the wharf, you see the whole space of it thronged with trucks and carts, removing the cargoes of vessels, or taking commodities to and from stores. Long Wharf is devoted to ponderous, evil-smelling, inelegant necessaries of life—such as salt, salt-fish, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... over many instances of similar misunderstanding of Benvenuto's easily intelligible though inelegant Latin, to a blunder which would be extraordinary in any other book, by which our translator has ruined a most characteristic story in the comment on the 112th verse of Canto XIV. of the "Purgatory." We must give here the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... enriched himself prodigiously in the wars, was always told by his friends that his country was eternally indebted to his disinterested exertions! The party, however, extended to a yet greater number: for although, critically speaking, it was, at one time, thought inelegant among the Romans to entertain less than three or more than nine at their banquets, yet this rule was easily disregarded by the ostentatious. And we are told, indeed, in history, that one of the most splendid of these entertainers ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... can pick up," declared John, dropping calmly into the inelegant expression, "he told 'em to ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... house." Scarlet-coated horsemen, and high-born maids and matrons, with all the medley of the Hunt in their train, cantered along the winding road—a mirthful, laughter-loving company. There were the General, stout and inelegant, wont to take his fences carefully, who changed his weight-carrying mount thrice during the day, and liked a gateway better than a thorny hedge, and for the last fifteen years had never been in at the death; and his wife, the leader of fashion, but not yet the leader of ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... with pillows of the same material, to wear none but low shoes; to make their simple dress without plaits, and as scant as convenience for working would allow; not to be ashamed of patches, no matter how numerous or inelegant; to eat only broken bread; in short to live in every respect like the poorest classes of society. These, and innumerable other practices of mortification, were constantly observed by the greater part of the community ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... domestic, inelegant Fowls, As unpolish'd as Geese, and as stupid as Owls, Sit tamely at home, hum-drum with our Spouses, While Crickets and Butterflies open their houses? Shall such mean little Insects pretend to the fashion? Cousin Turkey-cock, well may you be in a passion! If I suffer such insolent airs ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... A.M. The route is along the margin of the Nile, to which the desert extends. A fringe of stunted bushes, and groves of the coarse and inelegant dome palm, mark the banks of the river by a thicket of about half a mile in width. I saw many gazelles, and succeeded in stalking a fine buck, and killing ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... does his writing with reed pens, drinks his water out of a bell-metal vessel, and works at night in the light of an old-fashioned castor-oil lamp. But this dull, milk-and- water Swadeshi of his never appealed to us. Rather, we had always felt ashamed of the inelegant, unfashionable furniture of his reception-rooms, especially when he had the magistrate, or any other European, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... I admit," went on Jennie. "Everything in the shell, girls? Now! up with it. Come on, little Trix," she added to the coxswain. "Don't get your tiller-lines snarled, and bring your 'nose-warmer'"—by which inelegant term she referred to the megaphone which, when they were really trying for speed was ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... haste She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent. What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order, so contrived, as not to mix Tastes, not well join'd, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... confess it, these two inelegant objects on a very elegant piece of furniture are the hero and heroine of ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... inherent deftness she copied the garb, the hair dressing, even the manner and speech, of such worthy models as came within her range of vision—like her daughter, she had an eye for fitness and beauty; that which was merely fashionable though truly inelegant, did not appeal to her. She was swift to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... approach the age of puberty, seem possessed with the idea that the unfrequent action of the bowels is a desirable habit. They do not associate with the duty a proper regard for health, but consider it as an inelegant and repugnant practice. The consequence is, that at this susceptible period, constipation, induced by neglect, arouses a latent hepatic or pulmonary disease which has been lurking in ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the stiffest and best behaved of the first division, and might be ranked with Grosvenor Square or Lancaster Gate. There were rooms on the second floor where girls of the second and third division herded in inelegant obscurity, the Bloomsbury and Camden Town of the mansion. On this story, too, slept the rabble of girls under twelve—creatures utterly despicable in the minds of girls in their teens, and the rooms they inhabited ranked as low as ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of which stands Booth, and in the other Edmund Kean. To the mind of the satirist there appears to be no difference in the abilities of the two performers, as the scales exactly balance. On the right, the portico of Covent Garden is overshadowed by the inelegant but massive proportions of Drury Lane; the intervening space being occupied by various figures and details, among which is a "patent clapping machine." An advertisement board carried by one of the figures clearly shows that the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... was the spirit of scurrility incarnate, that was, as people say, innate; and by virtue of those moulding forces he was doing his best to be an English gentleman. That mysterious impulse which compels the young male to make objectionable imputations against seemly lives and to write rare inelegant words upon clean and decent things burnt almost intolerably within him, and equally powerful now was the gross craving he had acquired for personal association with all that is prominent, all that is successful, all that is of good report. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... not horror of death at all; it is that the skeleton reminds him that his appearance is shamelessly grotesque.' But he sees no objection to this at all. After all, he says, the frog and the hippopotamus are happy. Why, then, should man dislike it that his anatomy without flesh is inelegant? ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... must have been penetrated with the same sentiment, for he rode up close to the cart and grasping the mud guard, turned on his saddle and wistfully shaking his bead, gave vent to his feelings by the following very inelegant but ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... to Koontie Mamadie's account, eleven thousand inhabitants. It has no public buildings, except the mosques, two of which, though built of mud, are by no means inelegant. The market place is a large square, and the different articles of merchandize are exposed for sale on stalls covered with mats, to shade them from the sun. The market is crowded with people from ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... the inelegant remark many times. All this happened almost within sight of the quay on which Sanders and Hamilton were waiting. It was a very important young man ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... forms of utensils, weapons, canoes and boats, tools, etc., amongst savages. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a fashionable attitude or pose in standing for women, in which the abdomen was thrown forward. It is often seen in pictures and portraits.[403] It is inelegant and destitute of meaning. The Venetians were luxurious and frivolous, jealous and distrustful of women, and fond of pleasure and fashion. From the end of the sixteenth century a shopkeeper in the Merceria adopted a custom of showing the new fashions of Paris on Ascension Day by ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... impressions of Mark; on board that very ship she had been married; and now it formed her home, temporarily, if not permanently. Bridget had been living so long beneath a tent, and in savage huts, that the accommodations of the Rancocus appeared like those of a palace. They were not inelegant even, though it was not usual, in that period of the republic, to fit up vessels with a magnificence little short of royal yachts, as is done at present. In the way of convenience, however, our ship could boast ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... provided was already filled by guests previously asked. The result was what might be expected, and it was often simply bare good fortune if everybody had enough to eat. But, "though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few," the talk was always pleasant, and no invitations to dine were more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... replied Edna, with inelegant emphasis. "If I had my way, the tide shouldn't go out but once a day, and that's at night. These ugly old mud-flats that have to be seen some time during every day are the one thing that spoil Marbury. It's so pretty when the bay is full. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... master treat him almost as an equal. He was exacting ever larger pay for taking care of the voters and keeping them fooled; he was getting rich, and had as yet vague aspirations to respectability and fashion. He had stopped drinking, had "cut out the women," had made a beginning toward a less inelegant way of speaking the language. His view of life was what is called cynical. That is, he regarded himself as morally the equal of the respectable rulers of society—or of the preachers who attended to the religious part of the grand industry of "keeping the cow ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... with her, for she was an impulsive little woman; but at whatever opening in the crowd she and her friend presented themselves, they were sure to find the diver's ridiculously broad and now inelegant back turned ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... courtiers, came riding to my hut, and told me to follow them. I readily complied. But here a new difficulty occurred. The Moors, accustomed to a loose and easy dress, could not reconcile themselves to the appearance of my NANKEEN BREECHES, which they said were not only inelegant, but, on account of their tightness, very indecent; and as this was a visit to ladies, Ali ordered my boy to bring out the loose cloak which I had always worn since my arrival at Benowm, and told me to wrap it close round me. We visited ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Grimace was never carried far enough to disfigure him; his gayety was so much the more piquant because he always restrained it within the limits of perfect good taste, holding at a suspicious distance all that could wound the most fastidious delicacy. He never made use of an inelegant word, even in the moments of the most entire familiarity; an improper merriment, a coarse jest would have been ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... of the most inelegant of the genus, being of a dull grey colour, and not particularly graceful in its form. Its plumage, moreover, does not consist of webbed feathers, but rather more resembles hair; nor does its voice make up for the plainness of its appearance, as is the case with some birds. On the contrary, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... pig's foot," was the inelegant response. "That was just me a-talking to you all the time. You all time think you talking to little girls and all time 'tain't nobody ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... wonders. But the attention excited to these striking novelties gradually became enlightened; a more familiar acquaintance disclosed their genuine properties, and the purposes to which they might be applied at home;—Raleigh introduced the potatoe on his Irish estates;—an acceptable however inelegant luxury was discovered in the use of tobacco; and somewhat later, the introduction of tea gradually brought sobriety and refinement into the system ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Laconicam;" literally, "the Laconian key." This was a kind of key originally invented by the Spartans, by means of which a door could be locked from the outside, but not from within. According to some, this key was called "Laconica," from its rough appearance, in allusion to the inelegant exterior of the Spartans. In his Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes informs us that these keys had ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... her cool comment stung her mother to fury. The poor lady pointed a finger at Ruth, and spluttered (there is no more elegant word for the very inelegant exhibition),— ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... a very fine plan! By the way, let us hope this Graevenitz girl talks a little better French than does her sister-in-law. I verily believe Madame Friedrich de Graevenitz prefers peasant German to our own speech, and at court no word of that inelegant language ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... when the last note had soared up and died, the old man folded his hands and began to pray. It was an old-fashioned prayer, such as the girl had never heard from the Bishop's lips; ungrammatical, inelegant, and long. A quiet talk with God, manly in its straightforward confession of short-comings, childlike in its appeal for guidance, fervent in its gratitude for all good gifts, and the crowning one of loving children. As if close intercourse had made the two familiar, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... Club always held its August meeting at the Beauforts'. The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... to "Messrs. Herapath and Oakshott," and was signed by Wake of the Fifth, although written in the inelegant hand of Master Jukes ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... separate meals or attendance, and Jane and Elsie began as they meant to go on, and shared the homely meals in the homely home. They had never thought that they had any luxurious tastes; but the very plain fare and the inelegant service seemed to take away even the natural healthy appetite of youth. The noise of the children, and the querulous voice of their grandfather, with Peggy's sharp, decisive remarks, were all different from the respectful silence with which they had ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... Anciently the site of palaces inhabited by the Kings down to Francis I., afterwards the meeting place of the Parliaments of Paris, it has been repaired and rebuilt since 1831 at a cost of nearly 1,000,000l. The courts of law open from the vast but inelegant Salle des Pas Perdus, which answers to our Westminster-hall. One of these courts was the Chamber of the Tribunal Revolutionnaire, and communicated by a small door with the Conciergerie Prison. In the precincts of the Palais stands, or stood, the Sainte Chapelle, ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... filled every corner of this awkward treasury. What of all its baubles pleased me most was a large coffer of some precious wood, containing enamelled flasks of oriental essences, enough to perfume a zenana, and so fragrant that I thought the Mogul himself a Dutchman, for lavishing them upon this inelegant nation. If disagreeable fumes, as I mentioned before, dissolve enchantments, such aromatic oils have doubtless the power of raising them; for, whilst I scented their fragrance, scarcely could ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... and not many kinds are found. There is no silver, zinc, or platinum; but only gold, copper, tin, lead, and iron. Gold is found in beads, ear-rings, and other ornaments, which are in some instances of a fashion that is not inelegant. [PLATE XVI., Fig. 3.] Copper occurs pure, but is more often hardened by means of an alloy of tin, whereby it becomes bronze, and is rendered suitable for implements and weapons. Lead is rare, occurring only in a very few specimens, as in one jar or ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... Archbishop Markham whom he met; he is mentioned by Boswell in his Hebrides, post, v. 37. In spite of the 'elaboration of homage' Johnson could judge freely of an archbishop. He described the Archbishop of Tuam as 'a man coarse of voice and inelegant of language.' Piozzi Letters, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... person, of course you are ill-dressed: your coat is dusty, your boots speckled with mud, your hair uncombed, you exhale a strong odour of tobacco. At first glance, such things seem rather disagreeable, common, and inelegant. No such thing: this is exactly the most fashionable style we have; it seems to say: "I have just dismounted from the finest horse in Paris. I am a man of fashion, of that distinguished position in society, that I can go in a morning to call on a duchess, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... "unsophisticated" are frequently confused. The former suggests a type of behavior which is artless, spontaneous, and free from the restraints of custom. The latter implies fully as great lack of knowledge of social usage, and, in addition, conduct which is primitive and perchance inelegant. Thus, the.................. youth was the first to enter the car, and his.................. little sister warmly kissed him in the presence of the king. We may also say that a country boy is.................. with respect to city life ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... spectators, who had received the blunders of Sir Martin Mar-all with such unbounded applause, might have taken some interest in those of poor Benito. Perhaps the absurd and vulgar scene, in which the prince pretends a fit of the cholic, had some share in occasioning the fall of the piece. This inelegant jeu de theatre is severely ridiculed ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... looked like one of the under dogs, whose time had not come yet, would, indeed, never come. He looked, however, a gentleman, which, in the usual sense of the word, he was not. He was of middle height, slim and not inelegant of build; his trousers, though shiny, were creased in the right place; his coat fitted him though it lacked two buttons, and he dangled a monocle, which he screwed impartially now into one brown eye, now into the other. If any one would know, as they very properly might, whether Henry was ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... about the canoes before we go any further. Among the Society Islands, the art of building them, like all native accomplishments, has greatly deteriorated; and they are now the most inelegant, as well as the most insecure of any in the South Seas. In Cook's time, according to his account, there was at Tahiti a royal fleet of seventeen hundred and twenty large war canoes, handsomely carved, and otherwise adorned. At present, those used are quite small; nothing more than logs hollowed ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Jerry's relieved, inelegant comment to Susan Atwell, as she moved to the right. Susan stifled an irrepressible chuckle and sobered her face for what was ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... reverence England as once we reverenced her, this is what I would say:—"Upon my country do not visit my sins. Upon my country's fame let me fasten no blot. Wherever I am wrong, inelegant, inaccurate, provincial, visit all your reprobation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his own poems, as being "a chain of extremely valuable thoughts," applies no doubt to the Resolves, which, except in elegance, rather resemble the better-known of Cicero's philosophical works. Moreover, though possessing no great elegance, they are not inelegant; though it is difficult to forget how differently Bacon and Browne treated not dissimilar subjects at much the same time. So popular were they that besides the first edition (which is undated, but must have appeared in or before 1628, the date of the second), eleven others were ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... The front towards the court is adorned with eight coupled ionic columns, and above are figures of Justice, Prudence, Hope and Abundance. A new chapel was built in 1823, which belongs to the convent, it is of the ionic order throughout, and though not particularly striking, is not inelegant, and remarkably neat; it may be seen on application at the porter's lodge, but from the nunnery strangers are most rigidly excluded. There was a tower belonging to this building, where the unfortunate Louis XVI was confined, as also ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... his address from Bedford Square to South Kensington, and has been educated at a Public School and at a University. Young, tall and fair-haired, there is nothing to suggest that he will ever have that inelegant paunch which prevented the father, even in his loftiest moments of moral indignation, from being dignified. Of course he is a soldier, for the army is still the only profession for a gentleman, and England's hero is that above all things. His morals are unexceptional, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... confusion. And again, there was taking the hand or hands off the handlebar, a thing simple in itself, but complex in its consequences. This particularly was a feat Mr. Hoopdriver desired to do, for several divergent reasons; but at present it simply led to convulsive balancings and novel and inelegant modes of dismounting. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... playful and jocular, guard carefully that your wit be not sharp, so as to, give pain to any person; and before You write a sentence, examine it, even the words which it is composed, that there be nothing vulgar or inelegant in them. Remember, my dear, that your letter is the picture of Your brains; and those whose brains are a compound of folly, nonsense, and impertinence, are to blame to exhibit them to the contempt of the world, or the pity of their friends. To write a letter ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... there will be any Protestants left among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as Theosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whites of her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James in human immortality, and I do not see why that lady should stick at one dogma amidst the present quite insatiable ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... languishing eyes, and full, pouting mouth, there is something voluptuous and bold. The forehead is broad, but low; and the wavy hair, with its tendril curls, comes down almost to the fine arched eyebrows, and then, falling into masses, sets off white shoulders which seem to designate an inelegant amount of embonpoint. There is nothing elevated in the whole countenance, as Lely has painted her, and her history is a disgrace to her ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... beauties and elegancies of style, to the strongest matter in the world, ill-worded and ill-delivered. Your business is negotiation abroad, and oratory in the House of Commons at home. What figure can you make, in either case, if your style be inelegant, I do not say bad? Imagine yourself writing an office-letter to a secretary of state, which letter is to be read by the whole Cabinet Council, and very possibly afterward laid before parliament; any one barbarism, solecism, or vulgarism in it, would, in a very few days, circulate ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... up elegant, to fit the name. The name grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and allowed her to lapse indolently ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... "Your language is inelegant, friend Blenham," he said slowly. "Like yourself it is better withdrawn from public notice. As to your meaning—why, by thunder, I half believe you are right! And I ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... accessories, would have been regarded and inveighed against as a popish and superstitious innovation; and a charge of this kind was at a later period preferred against Archbishop Laud. Parochial churches were, therefore, now repaired when fallen into a state of dilapidation, in a plain and inelegant mode, in complete variance with the richness and display observable in the style just ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... folds of Memmi's drapery cast with unbroken grace and complete gradations of shade, while Taddeo's are rigid and meagre; also in the heads, generally Taddeo's type of face is square in feature, with massive and inelegant clusters or volutes of hair and beard; but Memmi's delicate and long in feature, with much divided and flowing hair, often arranged with exquisite precision, as in the finest Greek coins. Examine successively in this respect only the heads of Adam, Abel, Methuselah, ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... coming up from Bhamo, each laden with bales, a Chinaman to every three ponies. At the end stalks a lean Indian. I suppose he owns the show—his wife follows, a very black thing, a Madrassee, to judge by her not very white and inelegant hangings. They drink and spit at the spring, and he sees us and salaams, and looks in to see the durwan, who is one of ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... sentence is as open to blame as that of the professor who told his pupils "You must not use a preposition to end a sentence with.") Though I have sat under an army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and then it was only by a lady who wrote that ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... contemporaries, to judge by their style, and nothing harder or less accommodating to the love of ease ever entered surely a cabinetmaker's brain. The wood of which they were made had, however, come to be of a soft brown colour, through the influence of time, and the form was not inelegant. The floor was bare and painted, and upon it lay here an old rug and there a great thick bearskin; and on the walls there were several heads of animals, which seemed to Esther very remarkable and extremely ornamental. One beautiful deer's head, with elegant horns; and one elk ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... something very romantic in the style of its architecture, and by no means inelegant; perhaps it is better suited for the peculiar situation of this marine palace than a more classical or accredited order would be. It has been likened, on its first appearance, to a chess-board; but, in my thinking, it more nearly resembles that soul-inspiring scene, the splendid banquet ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... nor too hastily, nor as if gulping the wine, nor too frequently, nor without water—as drunkards do. Wipe your lips before and after drinking, and do not breathe too loudly then or at any other time, for that is very inelegant. ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "it speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... substituted for the sunflower, in the children's esteem, and there is generated a taste for the exquisite. The copy of the masterpiece of art supplants the bizarre chromo; correct forms of speech take the place of incorrect forms; the elegant usurps the place of the inelegant; and the inartistic gives place to the artistic. The circle of their wants is extended until it includes their needs, and these, in turn, are transformed into wants. Thus all the pupils ascend to a higher level of appreciation of the things that make for a more comfortable ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... a festooned hearse. A French bedroom is a bitter mockery—a ghastly attempt to serve two masters which succeeds in being agreeable to neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions, constructed on the assumption that it is inelegant to be known to wash or to sleep, and yet pervaded with suggestions of uncleanness compared with which a well-wrung bathing sponge, well en evidence, is a delightful symbol of purity. This comes of course from that supreme French ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... examples to show you the near alliance between actors, ( ,) and actions; or agents, actions, and objects. Such expressions as the above are inelegant, because they are uncommon; but for no other reason, for we, in numberless cases, employ the same word for agent and verb; as, painters paint buildings, and artists paint paintings; bookbinders bind books; printers print books, and other prints. ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... my dear, seemed to me generally very ugly. The very few exceptions are bad copies of us. Heaven knows what evil genius has inspired their costume; it is amazingly inelegant compared with those of former generations. It has no distinction, no beauty of color or romance; it appeals neither to the senses, nor the mind, nor the eye, and it must be very uncomfortable. It is meagre and stunted. The hat, above ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... letter which he dictated, finding it better than any I had sent; for, though here and there a little ungrammatical or inelegant, each sentence came to me briefly worded, but most expressive; full of excellent counsel to the boy, tenderly "bequeathing mother and Lizzie" to his care, and bidding him good-by in words the sadder ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp his former powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression or variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyrics that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his "Epistle to Curio," he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson |
