"Lax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... line lay at convenient distances, some with their coats off, others lying under the shade of trees or in the corners of a fence, all unconscious of an approaching enemy. The Federals had surveyed the field, and seeing our pickets so lax, and in such bad order for defense, undertook to surprise them. With a body of cavalry, concealed by the forest in their front, they made their way, under cover of a ravine, until within a short distance of the unsuspecting pickets. Then, with a shout and a volley, they dashed upon the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... from its base, and in diameter generally exceeding that of the filament which bears it. This branch is soon arcuate or bent, and often elongated in describing a spiral, the irregular turns of which are lax or compressed. At the same time its interior, at first continuous, becomes divided by transverse septa into eight or ten or more cells. Sometimes this special branch terminates in a crozier shape, which is involved ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... any chance distrusts the girl who is to become his wife; and just the same may be said of the German of the better classes. In both countries you will find sections of society above and below where morals are lax and manners corrupt. German professors write sketches of London in which our busy grimy city is held up to a virtuous Germania as the modern Sodom and Gomorrah; and the Continental Anglophobe likes nothing better than to entertain you ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes half-shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs lax ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bankers' equal. On my coming to London, he was kind enough to procure me invitations to some of Lady Anne Newcome's evening parties in Park Lane, as likewise to Mrs. Newcome's entertainments in Bryanstone Square; though, I confess, of these latter, after a while, I was a lax and negligent attendant. "Between ourselves, my good fellow," the shrewd old Mentor of those days would say, "Mrs. Newcome's parties are not altogether select; nor is she a lady of the very highest breeding; ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this working-girls' home. Most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad." When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed. And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the frightful testimony of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... but surely undermining the virtues on which strength is based. They did not seek to prevent irreligion, luxury, slavery, and usury, the encroachments of the rich upon the poor, the tyranny of foolish fashions, demoralizing sports and pleasures, money-making, and all the follies which lax principles of morality allowed. They fed the rabble with com and oil and wine, and thus encouraged idleness and dissipation. The world never saw a more rapid retrograde in human rights, or a greater prostration of liberties. Taxes were imposed according to the pleasure or necessities ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... started and got under way, the fathers of the Province assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole course ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... who, after many adventures in dodging about the village, and seeing Jacques and the two women servants safely past the lax cordon of rebels, without taking advantage of the situation to take refuge in the Fort himself, had come back to his beloved dogs with a presentiment that something had gone wrong with the others, and that his services might be required. He was ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... Lax Precautions. The New York "Tribune" Dispatch. Montgomery Murmurs. Troops en route, and their Feelings. The Government on Wheels. Kingsville Misnomer. Profanity and Diplomacy. Grimes' Brother-in-law. With ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... regrettably been evidenced that Nature is a sot at heart, by reason of her deplorably lax morals. Painful as it is to make the admission, there are many of her apparently innocent fruits and plants that are susceptible, by the unlawful processes of fermentation and effervescence, of transformation into alcoholic liquid. Science tells us that ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... I thought, he has been beforehand with us. Also, daughter, surely your discipline is somewhat lax if you suffer knights thus to invade your chapel. But lead ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... heart—"Cela se peut," thought I; but somehow or other "Je ne le crois pas," for I have heard some little anecdotes of her mother, in which, whatever may be her theoretical views of mysticism, her practical opinions are rather more lax than Fenelon's. Much against my will I took my leave, willing to hope that Mme. S. spoke the truth when she said how glad she should be to see me if I visited Paris during the winter; she is off to Switzerland in a few days. The French say we have ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... the corn agitation, (obstinately pursued through the session,) we may remark—and we do so with pain—that all laws whatsoever, strong or lax, upon this question are to be regarded as provisional. The temper of society being what it is, some small gang of cotton-dealers, moved by the rankest self-interest, finding themselves suffered to agitate almost without opposition, and the ancient landed interest of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must remember that the morality was lax—that other gentlemen besides himself took the road in his day—that public society was in a strange disordered condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost—the bells rung in William's victory, in the very same tone ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... unconscious, he was doing a good job of feigning it. Gefty looked at the pale, lax face, the half-shut eyes, shook his head and left the cabin, locking it behind him. It mightn't be Maulbow's doing, but having the big snake loose in the storage could, in fact, make things extremely awkward now. He didn't think his gun ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, and which ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... felt his soul suddenly become incoherent, lax. This was followed by a brief flaring up within him, whereupon his eyes were filled with hot, burning tears. He resigned himself to the situation without audible display of grief; he felt all of a sudden that he had now for the first time in his life really sensed ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Prussian envoys to inform them that the utterances of Prince Bismarck were without any actual importance, as he was now only a private man. This only made matters worse; for the substance of the despatch quickly became known (another instance of the lax control over important State documents which we so often notice in dealing with German affairs), and only increased the bitterness of Bismarck, which was shared ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... inaugurated by Bismarck as a defense and check against Russia, has always been keen on the friendship and good will of the Turk for reasons which will be obvious enough later. During the Caprivi Chancellorship, the relation between the two empires became rather lax. Wilhelm II with his keen farsightedness set about to remedy this. In his usual spectacular, but in most cases efficient, manner, he went with his royal consort in state to Palestine, calling first on the Sultan. The tremendously ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... stable and highly developed civilization is a common faith in some central rightful authority competent to demand and enforce equal obedience from all classes; in other words, faith in God. A band of savages might be held in a lax social union by the common fear of some brawny chief, but in civilized communities it is the real divinity that doth hedge about the king or other civil head that gives cohesion to the social mass. As a political force, therefore, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... coherent and one. You hear of even immoral or irreligious books being written by men of decent character; there is a late writer who says that David Hume's sceptical works are not at all the picture of the man. A priest might write a treatise which was really lax on the subject of lying, which might come under the condemnation of the Holy See, as some treatises on that score have already been condemned, and yet in his own person be a rigorist. And, in fact, it is notorious ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... when the bleared eyes saw that instead of water there was but blazing hot sand. The Indian made no other sound but merely rolled over on his back and lay very still, eyes shut, jaw dropping, hands lax ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... The lax figure stirred and Alden's blonde head was raised slowly. "I don't know." His voice came very thickly. "I—I'm ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... discipline as compared with that of the Jains was much more lax, for instance, in the eating of meat. Buddha himself died of dysentery brought on by eating pork. The later Buddhism interprets much more strictly the rule of 'non-injury'; and as we have shown, Buddha entirely renounced austerities, choosing the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... and had taught to boil the pot au feu, came to him from many previous experimental marriages. They were externals of his life, much as hounds, boats, or guns. He could give them all rich dowers, and divorce them easily any day to a succeeding line of legal Abenaqui husbands. The lax code of the wilderness was irresistible to a Frenchman; but he was near enough in age and in texture of soul to this noble pagan to see at once, with her eyesight, how he had degraded the very vices of ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... people rather than in governmental England, a feeling was beginning to manifest itself that the Ministry had been lax in regard to the Alabama, and as news of her successes was received this feeling was given voice. Liverpool, at first almost wholly on the side of the Lairds and of Southern ship-building, became doubtful by the very ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... forms one of the conditions of the contract with Government under which proprietors in the permanently settled province of Benares hold their lands. The extreme abuses of which the system is capable under a lax and corrupt native Government are abundantly illustrated in the author's Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh. 'The System of Purveyance and Forced Labour' is the subject of article xxv in the Hon. F, J, Shore's curious book, Notes on Indian Affairs (London, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... currency in Virginia until she resorted to the printing press during the French and Indian War. By the end of the eighteenth century the reputation of the inspectors and the value of the tobacco notes began to decline, due primarily to lax inspecting. Exporters and manufacturers frequently demanded that their tobacco be ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon
... Walker admits that "the fortunes which have been made are seen to have been the result of dealings in stocks and in titles, the consequences of which, if involving wrong, are rightly charged against the lax legislation which has made such operations possible." "Every person seeking for the services of a common carrier is entitled to know that he is charged no more than his neighbor who obtains the same service under the same conditions." "The theory that any unjust discrimination ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... is just, and Diderot might have verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing years of the old regime was undoubtedly the lax and shifting interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse before a habit of loosely superseding principles in individual cases produces widespread demoralisation, but the result is inevitable, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... which gave an elaborate description of the Sunday shooting-party of the emperor at Rominten, while in a parallel column was a proclamation just issued by the civil governor of the province of Westphalia, calling attention to the lax observance of the Sunday laws, and reiterating the pains and penalties that are prescribed by statute for those who shoot, sing, dance, play skittles or indulge in any recreation, whether in public or in private, that is inconsistent with ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the whip, slipped from his seat to the very front end of the box; and letting the lines lie lax began to lash and yell. The mules bolted free, twitching the wagon ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... and egress was free; nevertheless, there was a sentry on duty, an arquebusier, who paced slowly up and down whistling the "Rappel d'Aunis," stopping only to exchange some barrack-room badinage with every serving-wench who, as she went out or came in, found a moment or so to spare for him. It was a lax enough watch, and it was clear that guard duty at the wicket was not so dull a matter ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... me in the days when I was at an art school. An art school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class; and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... examples about to be given, it will be observed that That is never used, whether it correspond to the quod or the ut of the Latin. Nee eme vitzn, nap hibe, I see that you are lax; Nee aguteran, Domincotze amo misa ea vitzaca, I know that you have not heard mass Sunday; where vitzaca or vitzcauh is passive perfect, and the literal rendering is, I know, on Sunday your mass was not heard. I desire that you may live here, ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... revenue from saloons existing in defiance of law. The prohibition law is still upon the statute-books. The chief weaknesses in the colonial administration of the territory, particularly prior to 1900—-but only to a slightly less extent since—-have been decentralization and a lax civil service. The concomitants of these have been irresponsibility and inefficiency. The governor has represented the president without possessing much power; the department of war has had illdefined duties; the department of justice has, in theory, had charge ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... seldom much of suffering and almost never death prematurely. But we have changed all this. We have violated gentle Nature's laws in our ways of living, and inasmuch as we have done this, we have lost, to such extent, her soft protecting hand. We breathe too little of the pure air; we are lax in physical effort, and, even though the individual man or woman be wise, he or she must bear the burden of the errors of an ancestry or the evils of the present. So, to the woman gentle-bred there comes a risk in the undergoing of that which ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the other hand, plants raised from sweet-peas grown near Darjeeling in Upper India, but originally derived from England, can be successfully cultivated on the plains of India; for they flower and seed profusely, and their stems are lax and scandent. In some of the foregoing cases, as Dr. Hooker has remarked to me, the greater success may perhaps be attributed to the seeds having been more fully ripened under a more favourable climate; but this view can ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... I brought Dick," Lance replied. "He believes in tension. But I wonder whether your notion of relaxing is getting lax?" ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... mist which gave them a unity and a general dignity and purpose independently of their separate significance. The ugly cumbersomeness of the furniture alone impressed her now. Her attitude had become very lax and despondent when the typewriter stopped in the next room. Mary immediately drew up to the table, laid hands on an unopened envelope, and adopted an expression which might hide her state of mind from Mrs. Seal. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a ranchman's horse might not only cause him great annoyance, but even put his life in danger, and accordingly the rascals who engaged in this form of crime ranked as the worst of all and received no mercy when they were caught. If the sheriff of the region was lax, the settlers took the matter into their own hands, enrolled themselves as vigilantes, hunted the thieves down, hanged those whom they captured, and shot at sight those who tried to escape. It happened that the sheriff, in whose ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two instruments with a single voice. Something more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found himself once more alone,—alone, save ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the world there remained not one living soul who through ties of kinship was authorised to properly control these children. Nor could they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a pleasant legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded stories told them by Kathleen Severn and by Anthony ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the governor as to the mode in which the money should be raised; and so no assistance was furnished to Washington from that quarter. The youthful commander had here a foretaste, in these his incipient campaigns, of the perils and perplexities which awaited him from enemies in the field, and lax friends in legislative councils in the grander operations of his future years. Before setting off for Redstone Creek, he discharged Trent's refractory men from his detachment, ordering them to await Colonel Fry's commands; they however, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... by gain. In fact, "it is not dire necessity which impels them;" they make a speculation of cupidity, a new sort of illicit trade. An old soldier, saber in hand, a forest-keeper, and "about eight persons sufficiently lax, put themselves at the head of four or five hundred men, go off each day to three or four villages. Here they force everybody who has any wheat to give it to them at 24 livres," and even at 18 livres, the sack. Those among the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the strict discipline which is now maintained on board a troop ship. It was true that the vessels in which the expedition was being carried belonged to the royal navy; but even here the discipline was but lax. There were many good sailors on board; but the bulk of the crew had been pressed into the service as harshly and tyrannically as were the soldiers themselves, and the grumblers of one class found ready ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... who is a great lover of painting, had occasion once (and only once) to change trains at Basle, in the course of a journey from Lucerne to Heidelberg. He had to wait two hours at this railway junction; and this time he pleasantly expended in eating many dishes at a restaurant, and amusing the lax porters by teaching them a method of economizing energy in shifting trunks. It should be noted that this friend of mine was not trying to "kill time;" for, like all genuine humanitarians, he of course regards that tragic process ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... most naturally for the broken order and lax coherence of this letter, by the suggestion that, as St. Paul dictated it, there was present with him a sense of almost nervous hesitation. He has exactly a gentleman's reluctance to do an ungracious action: while he knows that it is his duty to warn the Colossians ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... the late Ministry, but had somewhat out-Heroded Herod in his Conservatism, so as to have been considered to be unfit for the Coalition. Of course, he was proud of his own staunchness, and a little inclined to criticise the lax principles of men who, for the sake of carrying on her Majesty's Government, could be Conservatives one day and Liberals the next. He was a laborious, honest man,—but hardly of calibre sufficient not to regret his own honesty in such ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... are apt to forget justice and mercy. If Jesus were to return, after all these centuries, and were only to do and say just what he did and said about the Sabbath when he was here before, there are many pious Protestants who would think him rather lax in his religious principles. How long he has been with us, and yet we ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... terrible cry from Hutchinson! He made one last convulsive effort and it doomed him. Slowly he lost his balance. Cordts's dark, evil, haunting face swung round. Both men became lax and plunged, and separated. The dust rose from the rough steps. Then the dark forms shot down—Cordts falling sheer and straight, Hutchinson headlong, with waving arms—down and down, vanishing in the depths. No sound came up. A little column of yellow dust curled from the fatal ledge and, catching ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... when—suddenly a sharp crack like a pistol shot cut the air. The music ceased—one of the violin strings had snapped. At another time the great man would have finished the number on the three remaining strings, but the heat, the lax practice of a holiday season—something, or perhaps everything combined, for the instant overcame him. He stood like an awkward child, gazing down at the trailing, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... to you one simple question," said the other; "and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... offensive; and he complained of griping pains in his bowels. He had lost, before I saw him, by the direction of Mr. Hall, a surgeon of eminence in Manchester, eight ounces of blood from the arm, which was of a lax texture; and he had taken a saline mixture every sixth hour. The following draught was prescribed, and a dose of rhubarb directed to be ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... hold and proud man, disdained to please by such meretricious means as those of which Metastasio had availed himself: he was highly indignant at the lax immorality of his countrymen, and the degeneracy of his contemporaries in general. This indignation stimulated him to the exhibition of a manly strength of mind, of stoical principles and free opinions, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... presiding officer, and conducted to the Vice-President's chair, while that debonair man of the world took a seat on his right with easy grace. On Mr. Jefferson's left sat Chief Justice John Marshall, a "tall, lax, lounging Virginian," with black eyes peering out from his swarthy countenance. There is a dramatic quality in this scene of the President-to-be seated between two men who are to cause him more vexation of spirit ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... lax in his topographical notices of this famous expedition. The settlement of St Gil de Buena Vista, where Cortes now was, appears to have been at the bottom of the gulf of Amatique in the bay of Honduras, on the east side of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... for discussion during the afternoon—one, the fact that there are existing in all forms of society, barbaric, semi-civilized, civilized or enlightened, two separate codes of morals; the strict code to which women are held accountable, and the lax code which governs the conduct ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Allgemeinheit—generality or breadth, are, then, the supreme characteristics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with the lax observation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have sometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being "broad" or "general." Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions into ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life is notedly lax. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... honey or sugar. And it cometh of the dew of heaven that falleth upon the herbs in that country. And it congealeth and becometh all white and sweet. And men put it in medicines for rich men to make the womb lax, and to purge evil blood. For it cleanseth the blood and putteth out melancholy. This land of Job marcheth to the kingdom ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... irrevocably completed. When they die, a hatchet and a flint and steel are invariably buried with the defunct, in case he should find himself chilly on his long journey—an unnecessary precaution, many of the orthodox would consider, on the part of such lax religionists. When they go boar-hunting—the most important business in their lives—it is a sorcerer, with no other defence than his incantations, who marches at the head of the procession. In the internal arrangements of their tents, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... and purport; to have translated it into the same metre, would have been incompatible with a faithful adherence to the sense of the German, from the comparative poverty of our language in rhymes; and it would have been unadvisable, from the incongruity of those lax verses with the present state of the English public. Schiller's intention seems to have been merely to have prepared his reader for the tragedies, by a lively picture of the laxity of discipline, and the mutinous disposition of Wallenstein's ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... curriculum. The different States have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end. Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with the intellectual police of eight millions of children—the number said by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... say—which must have cost him dearly—withdrew from the bed where his grandson's body lay shrunken, lax, and grimy. To be sure that it was Firm, I gave one glance—for Firm had always been straight, tall, and large—and then, in a miserable mood, I stole to the Sawyer's side to stand with him. "Am I ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... keep a great part of the nation desolate. They hindered communication and destroyed industry. They had a trivial object, and most severe sanctions; for, as they belonged immediately to the king's personal pleasures, by the lax interpretation of treason in those days, all considerable offences against the Forest Law, such as killing the beasts of game, were considered as high treason, and punished, as high treason then was, by truncation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whose creed could be lax enough on occasion, had provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these awkward questions in casuistical divinity. He had hunted up recipes for spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis, just as doctors do for ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... aloofness, despite his studied politeness. Bryce stepped forward with extended hand, which the Colonel grasped in a manner vaguely suggestive of that clammy-palmed creation of Charles Dickens—Uriah Heep. Bryce was tempted to squeeze the lax fingers until the Colonel should bellow with pain; but resisting the ungenerous impulse, ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... hand a folded rectangle of coarse grey paper; and, opening it, found a small handbill with the crudely reproduced photograph of a man's head with a long, drooping nose, sleepy eyes in thick folds of flesh, and a lax under-lip with ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... warfare as we have been, but they gave the franc-tireur, or the man who was found cutting the wire of the line, very short shrift; whereas we have never put to death a single bona-fide Boer for this offence. Possibly it was not that the Germans were too severe, but that we were too lax. In any case, it is evident that there was nothing offensive in the statement, and those who have been well informed as to the doings of the British soldiers in the war will know that any troops in the world might be proud to be classed with them, ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... probably not contribute any more to his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there was little enough that was public ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... our chief officials are men of great wealth, and indeed, a grand master, or the bailiff of a langue, is expected to spend, and does spend, a sum vastly exceeding his allowance from the Order. The great body of knights are equally lax as to some of their other vows, and carry this to a length that, as you know, has caused grave scandal. But I see not that it is in any way incumbent on us to give up all the pleasures of life. We are a military Order, and are all ready to fight in defence of Rhodes, ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... forbid I should suspect thee of any heretical taint; but this smells very like it. If thou hast it now, tell me honestly. I mean, hold thy tongue. Florentines are rather lax. Even Son Cosimo might be stricter: so they say: perhaps his enemies. The great always have them abundantly, beside those by whom they are served, and those also whom they serve. Now would I give a silver rose with my benediction on it, to know of a certainty what became of those poor creatures ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... me securely, but in a way which made it easy for me to turn. I slept soundly and awoke late. When I sat up Stockton stood by his saddled horse, and was giving orders to the men. He spoke sharply. He made it clear that they were not to be lax in their vigilance. Then, without a word to Dick or me, he rode down the gorge and disappeared behind a ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... with their political inheritance, should have consented even by a small majority to abandon their traditional lax government, remains one of the most remarkable political decisions in history. It depended upon the concurrence of circumstances which, for the moment, forced all persons of property and law-abiding instincts to join together in all the States to remedy an intolerable situation. {144} ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... everywhere else; they acknowledged by a present the trouble they gave, or the benefit they gained. It may be that Bacon's known difficulties about money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, his easiness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, encouraged this profuseness of giving. And Bacon let it be. He asked no questions; he knew that he worked hard and well; he knew that it could go on without affecting his purpose to ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... many:—the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... thrust at an unpopular Swiss overseer in the academy. It is probable, however, that it was in no way malicious, but merely a thoughtless jest at the expense of a canton which had actually got a bad reputation for lax enforcement of the law. Be this as it may, the passage gave offence to a patriotic Swiss named Amstein, who aired his grievance in print and demanded a retraction. When Schiller paid no attention to this, Amstein appealed to one Walter, a fussy official living ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Roman governors who, when put in charge of conquered states, used their offices only to plunder the helpless inhabitants and to return to Rome after their terms were finished, laden with ill-gotten gains. Roman morals, which formerly were very strict, began to grow more lax, and in general the Roman ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... With that consistency of mind and fixedness of purpose for which he was remarkable, our canine hero stubbornly persisted in making it manifest that he was not a dog to be whistled, rubbed, and patted into winking at a measure so lax as that of allowing a red "varmint" to run at large in their midst, without even so much as a block and chain to hamper the freedom of his movements, or some sign to bespeak his inferiority to men ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... was still further increased by the wasteful and lax use of public funds. The money which was wrung from the poor people by these unequal taxes, was seldom wisely or economically expended. Much was squandered upon foolish projects, costly in the extreme, and impossible of accomplishment. ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... of organized religious life have their difficulties: the one, the martinet superior and the routine subject; the other, the capricious subject and the lax superior. In one kind the bond of union as well as the stimulus of endeavor is mainly obedience, fraternal charity assisting; in the other it is mainly fraternal charity, obedience assisting; each has to overcome obstacles peculiar ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... John. Well, you couldn't come to a more charming place than this, Miss Worsley, though the house is excessively damp, quite unpardonably damp, and dear Lady Hunstanton is sometimes a little lax about the people she asks down here. [To SIR JOHN.] Jane mixes too much. Lord Illingworth, of course, is a man of high distinction. It is a privilege to meet him. And that member of Parliament, Mr. ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... effect have so long been convertible, that it is often difficult to know one from the other. The prevalence of brigandage demands measures on the part of the government compared with the severity of which martial law is lax and mild; and the crime which provokes these harsh measures has revived again from the disaffection which they produce. All authorities on the subject are agreed that brigandage finds its shield and support in the fears of the people, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... France, 1548. This is a common plant in English gardens, bearing yellow Pea-shaped flowers, that are succeeded by curious reddish bladder-like seed pods. It grows to 10 feet or 12 feet in height, and is usually of lax and slender growth, ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... rushing from the Forum to the field, to battle with ferocious and demi-nude savages, whom ever subduing they carried home captives chained to their triumphal chariots; but it does seem to be uncommonly applicable to a time when many a priest, whose writings manifest a lax habit of thinking and betray a levity, indeed, licentiousness, ill according with a religious turn of mind, rose to the position of a great dignitary of the Church and a powerful arbiter of the destinies of his kind. As that was an age when Alexander VI. was a Pope, and Lucretia Borgia the daughter ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... and liveliness with which he explained his views, speedily introduced him to the notice of statesmen. The government found in him at once an enlightened adviser and an unscrupulous slave. For with his rare mental endowments were joined lax principles and an unfeeling heart. When the Tory reaction was in full progress, he had consented to be made Sheriff for the express purpose of assisting the vengeance of the court. His juries had never failed to find verdicts ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the burden of its paupers, insane, dependents, and delinquents by shipping them to the United States. This was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, especially in the case of local and municipal governments. Our laws were lax, and for a time nearly everybody, sane or insane, sound or diseased, was passed. The financial gain to the exporting government can be seen in the fact that it costs about $150 per head a year to support dependents and delinquents ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... to matters nearer at hand, and allowed his gaze to wander over the galleon's spacious decks. They were disgracefully dirty, speaking of the lax discipline that had been permitted to prevail by the easy-going officers of the ship, and he gave a sharp order which presently brought all hands on deck, considerably refreshed, as he could see, by even the short spell of rest which they had enjoyed. ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... Paris, the Rationalists, the Gallicans, and not a few of the doctors of the Sorbonne, though divided on nearly every other issue, made common cause against the Society. They were assisted in their campaign by Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress, for whom the Jesuit theology was not sufficiently lax, and by the Duc de Choiseul, the king's prime minister. The well-known Jesuit leanings of Louis XV. and of the royal family generally, imposed a certain measure of restraint upon the enemies of the Society, until the famous La Valette ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... did not suspect you of any improper idea, when you offered to share my uncertain fortunes. Render me, I pray you, the same justice at this moment. My moral principles are very lax, it is true, but I am as proud as yourself. I never shall reach my aim by any subterfuge. No; strive to study art. I find you beautiful and seductive, but I am governed by sentiments superior to personal ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... possessed a national poem at all. Her people—who claim affinity with the Magyars of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of population—had remained untouched by foreign influences since their conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... new ones have been continually added, further to exasperate these people, render them desperate, and drive them, if possible, into open rebellion." It had been a vexatious circumstance, too, that not long before this time he had received a rebuke from the Massachusetts Assembly for having been lax, as they fancied, in notifying them of some legislation of an injurious character, which was in preparation. "This censure," he said, "though grievous, does not so much surprise me, as I apprehended all along from the beginning that between the friends of an ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... courage lax was) They discharged while they were able: Tolerated thus the tax was, Till ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... comparatively new and since gradually limited, of asking questions on foreign and colonial affairs, with the object of embarrassing Ministers, and without regard to the consequences abroad. It gradually became a dangerous growth, greatly facilitated by the lax procedure, as it then existed, of the House of Commons in regard to supplementary questions. This procedure often allowed question time to degenerate into a sort of ill-regulated debate. Mr. Gladstone's habit of allowing himself very frequently to be drawn into giving a further answer, after the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... He grew lax in his tasks; he dragged his feet and there were even times when he was not hungry. When his mother noticed the latter circumstance she knew surely that the boy was ill, but her ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... up the child, limp with sleep, from its crib, and began to dress it. Idella cried, and fought away the hands that tormented her, and made herself now very stiff and now very lax; but Annie and Mrs. Bolton together prevailed against her, and she was dressed, and had fallen asleep again in her clothes while the women were putting on their hats and sacks, and Bolton was driving up to the door with ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... organizations operate out of Istanbul; laboratories to convert imported morphine base into heroin are in remote regions of Turkey and near Istanbul; government maintains strict controls over areas of legal opium poppy cultivation and output of poppy straw concentrate; lax enforcement ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... from the corner of his eye. He was apparently unconscious of Antone's approach as he quietly replied to Halliday, but his fingers tightened on the bridle, and the horse, answering a closer pressure of heel and knee, suddenly lifted its head and stiffened its lax muscles into alertness. ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... born poor—activity, pluck, application, dogged obstinacy, alert mentality. To these qualities he added what his father sorely lacked—a high notion of honour, a keen sense of right and wrong. He had the honest man's contempt for meanness of any description, and he had little patience with the lax so-called business morals of the day. For him a dishonourable or dishonest action could have no apologist, and he could see no difference between the crime of the hungry wretch who stole a loaf of bread ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... co-operate in he stands aloof from, and satisfies his unhappy disposition with carping criticisms and ungenerous censures. A neighbour who does not reach his standard of moral excellence in character and action he pronounces lax in principles and delinquent in life. One who does not agree with him in his peculiar views of some disputed doctrine of Christian faith or principle of Church discipline he judges to be little better than a heretic ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... whom fear and not affection had kept in quiet, there is danger that in giving time to an enemy who can send reinforcements of regulars faster than we can raise them, they may strengthen Canada and Halifax beyond the assailment of our lax and divided powers. Perhaps, however, the patriotic efforts from Kentucky and Ohio, by recalling the British force to its upper posts, may yet give time to Dearborn to strike a blow below. Effectual possession of the river from Montreal to the Chaudiere, which is practicable, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the already familiar episode of Francesca, that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... an awful pleasure bland Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing, gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feather'd neck, Nestling nearer to Jove's feet; While o'er his sovran eye The curtains ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... shall presently prove. Take the easy course, and leave the obligation out of count? This principle is more nearly correct than the other: but it needs interpretation, else it may prove dangerously lax. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... to be done with such a rag-bag, moralistic ass as this? In spite of all his philanderings, and the resultant qualms due to his fear of being found out, he prospered in business and rose to some eminence in his own community. As he had grown more lax he had become somewhat more genial and tolerant, more generally acceptable. He was a good Republican, a follower in the wake of Norrie Simms and young Truman Leslie MacDonald. His father-in-law was both rich and moderately influential. Having lent himself ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... had been changed while MacMaine was in the prisoner's cell, and he was relying on the lax discipline of the soldiers to get him and Tallis out of the cell block. With luck, the guards would have failed to listen too closely to what they had been told by the men they replaced; with even greater luck, the ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... was a little band that went toward the Alamo, and there were three women and three children in it, but since they knew definitely that Santa Anna and his great army had come there was not a Texan who shrank from his duty. They had been lax in their watch and careless of the future, faults frequent in irregular troops, but in the presence of overwhelming danger they showed not ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and horses, hawks and hounds—even fine new ships, were bestowed by him, from the wealth of the old merchant Gilbert, as well as from the revenues of his archdeaconry, and of several other benefices, which the lax opinions of his time caused him to think no shame to keep ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... glared at him with tiger eyes, Spat in his face, and then, without a word, Drew his two-hilted sword and smote, but missed His father flying backwards. Then the boy, Wroth with himself, poor wretch, incontinent Fell on his sword and drove it through his side Home, but yet breathing clasped in his lax arms The maid, her pallid cheek incarnadined With his expiring gasps. So there they lay Two corpses, one in death. His marriage rites Are consummated in the halls of Death: A witness that of ills whate'er befall Mortals' unwisdom is the ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... hundred miles across the North Sea was a bold venture and one that the British had not believed the Germans would attempt at that time. British vigilance had been lax or the German fleet could never have gone so far from its base without discovery; and this laxity proved costly for the British; and might even have proven more ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... of the country are interested in canning mountain trout and others live where there is an abundant supply of either fresh-water fish or salt-water fish. Heretofore we have been wasteful and lax about the fish supply. But as we have learned to can vegetables and meats so we are going to learn to can fish. Fish is really canned the same in every step after preparation as peas and corn ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... royal master, Lord Dorset had travelled; and when made a gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II., he was not unlike his sovereign in other traits; so full of gaiety, so high-bred, so lax, so courteous, so convivial, that no supper was complete without him: no circle 'the right thing,' unless Buckhurst, as he was long called, was there to pass the bottle round, and to keep every one in good-humour. Yet, he had misspent a youth in reckless immorality, and had even been in Newgate ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... stand self-contempt and ineffable ennui so long—you will leave him, resume your present name—the name by which Europe knows you—and return to us. But it may be too late. Vienna would still be laughing. The Viennese are a light-hearted race, and a lax, but when they laugh they cease to take seriously the subject of that good-natured amusement. . . . It is not aesthetic, you know, it is not aesthetic. Are you really ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... best book that ever was written upon good breeding, Il Corteggiano, by Castiglione, grew up at the little court of Urbino, and you should read it.' I am glad always to have his opinion of books. At Mr M'Pherson's, he commended Whitby's Commentary, and said, he had heard him called rather lax; but he did not perceive it. He had looked at a novel, called The Man of the World, at Rasay, but thought there was nothing in it. He said to-day, while reading my Journal, 'This will be a great treasure ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... inspector, who on hearing the news, hurriedly walked towards the police station. Here they found that the news was true. The constable left in charge of the office was greatly agitated, as it seemed he had been lax in doing his duty. But ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... and Mark was still staring at her, still smiling. But now he toppled slowly toward her and stumbled, and as his body, with a hideous, slithering sound, slipped down to the floor, his arm fell lax, and the still smoking revolver slid ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... is ruptured there is no change in the position of the foot but the fetlock joint is slightly lowered. The pathognomonic symptom is the lax tendon during weight bearing, which may be felt by palpation of the tendon along its course ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... see who was coming. Then he hastened back to Menelaos and told him that two strangers of princely bearing were at the palace gate, and asked if he should unharness their horses or send them on their way. Menelaos was vexed that any of his servants should be so lax in hospitality, and told him he had acted like a foolish child, and reminded him of the gifts that had been showered on them when they wandered so long in foreign lands. And he bade him hasten to unharness the steeds, ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... Dick's position, which is so very peculiar. Could any one blame him? What could he do otherwise? I hope I am not lax—and I hate the very name of divorce as much as any one can: but ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... excellent person in every way—and won the respect even of MRS. GRUNDY, She was a good housewife, too, and wouldn't have wasted a penny if she had owned the Koh-i-noor. She was just as strict as he was lax in her observance of Sunday, And being a good economist, and charitable besides, she took all the bones and cold potatoes and broken pie-crusts and candle-ends (when she had quite done with them), and made them into an excellent soup ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert |
