"Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ili legis estis la "Daily Telegraph" kie oni trovis la sekvantan mallongan kritikajxon "Its meagre scant array of words Could puzzle no beginner; Untutored cannibals by herds, Would learn them ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various
... or angels, and doll-like child-Christs in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are very curious and interesting for their ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... creature present. She was about to smite on both cheeks him she loved, as well as the woman she despised and had been foiled by. Still she had the consolation that Rose, seeing the vulgar mother, might turn from Evan: a poor distant hope, meagre and shapeless like herself. Her most anxious thoughts concerned the means of getting money to lockup Harry's tongue. She could bear to meet the Countess's wrath, but not Evan's offended ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Bishop died while the question was yet sub judice, and, as most persons of taste must feel, counsels less wise prevailed. The present structure of brick has been called a barn; it is of no architectural pretensions; the tracery of the windows is of the most meagre description. The ground around it is too limited to be used for burial, although the churchyard of St. Andrew is rapidly filling, and at no distant date ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... religious is individual and personal; the riches collective. It is the physical person that is poor; the moral being has the wealth. Men may club together, put their means into a common fund, renounce all personal claim thereto, live on a meagre revenue and employ the surplus for various purposes other than their needs. The personal poverty of such as ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... it shall deter one young man from the example of those miserable dilettanti, who in books and sermons are whimpering meagre second-hand praises of celibacy—depreciating as carnal and degrading those family ties to which they owe their own existence, and in the enjoyment of which they themselves all the while unblushingly indulge—insulting thus their own wives and ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... benches which slope up from the centre, crowd the floor space, while the galleries for the press at one end, for strangers at the other, and for the use of the Lords and the Diplomatic corps at the sides give only meagre accommodation. I passed into the building at nightfall, getting soul-stirring glimpses into the great area of Westminster Hall, in which burned only one far-away light. Its grandeur was more impressive in the dimness than in the glare. The lofty associations of the spot, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... conveyed by her presence. Her carriage was erect to the verge of stiffness, and her step too firm to be quite soundless. Advancing years had not produced any unseemly embonpoint, nor had her figure fallen into the opposite extreme, and sharpened into meagre angularity; its outline retained sufficient roundness not to lose the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... historians. Tillemont and Dupin are very full and very learned. But a truly immortal history of the church, exhaustive yet artistic, brilliant as well as learned, is yet to be written. The ancient historians, like Eusebius and Socrates and Zosimus, are very meagre. The genius and spirit of the early church can only be drawn from the lives ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... our fellows took hold, and hearing no word from them for a long time and then but a meagre one, it may be that many a citizen on this side ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... house in Corn Street, in consequence of his dislike and harshness, and he had looked into her chamber in just the same way. The present room was much humbler, but what struck him about it was the abundance of books lying everywhere. Their number and quality made the meagre furniture that supported them seem absurdly disproportionate. Some, indeed many, must have been recently purchased; and though he encouraged her to buy in reason, he had no notion that she indulged her innate passion so extensively in proportion to the narrowness of their ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... began in the foyer, which troubled me very much. Mlle. Brohan was to play the part of the Marquise de Prie. At this time she was so fat as to be almost unsightly, while I was so thin that the composers of popular and comic verses took my meagre proportions as their theme and the cartoonists as ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the youngest man, and the one on whom the labouring oar ought to fall, now took the key, applied it to the lock, turned it without difficulty, and then lifted the lid. Disappointment appeared on every face but that of the deacon, at the meagre prospect before the company. Not only was the chest more than half empty, but the articles it did contain were of the coarsest materials; well worn sea-clothes that had seen their best days, ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... projects in his mind, To build a college, or to found a race, A hospital, a church,—and leave behind Some dome surmounted by his meagre face: Perhaps he fain would liberate Mankind Even with the very ore which makes them base; Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation, Or revel in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a good warm mantle, but the fool who carried her off had no cloak, even of the most meagre kind, to keep off the piercing cold, which was increased by a keen wind blowing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... were approximate merely, it being impossible to secure full returns. It was found that three and a half per cent of the population of Massachusetts were in the factories, and nearly the same proportion in Connecticut and Rhode Island; but details were of the most meagre description, and conclusions based upon them were likely to err at every point. Its value was chiefly educative, since the failure it represents pointed to a change in methods, and more preparation than had at any time ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a bank ever since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said, "O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or for a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the best of everything that was ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... to let Aunt Kathryn pass in before me, which she did without a word. We both stood before the fire, holding out gloved hands to the meagre blaze, while little Airole ran about, whimpering and examining everything ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of the Neapolitan wars of Louis XII. are extremely meagre, and few in number. The most striking, on the whole, is D'Auton's chronicle, composed in the true chivalrous vein of old Froissart, but unfortunately terminating before the close of the first campaign. St. Gelais ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... remembering my own poor efforts, The wretched work I had done, And, even when trying most truly, The meagre ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... at first, although she had chosen her own career in Bavaria as the subject in which to make her debut. She waited with considerable tact till she was approaching those scenes in which the mob triumph over order; and then, pretending to discover a cabal in the meagre applause she was receiving, she stopped in the middle of her acting, and, her eyes flashing fire, her face beaming brass, and her voice wild with well-assumed indignation, she cried—"I'm anxious to do my best to please the company; but if this cabal ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... of the movements of the Prince in 1749? Curiously enough, Mr. Ewald does not seem to have consulted the 'Stuart Papers' at Windsor, while the extracts in Browne's 'History of the Highland Clans' are meagre. To these papers then we turn for information. The most useful portions are NOT Charles's letters to James. These are brief and scanty. Thus he writes from Avignon (January 15, 1749), 'We are enjoying here the finest weather ever was seen.' He always remarks that his health 'is perfect.' He orders ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... points, one from the south, one from the north, and one from the west; but they converged as they drew near to St. Francis, joined hands, and came directly to him. The midmost of the three was like a young queen; she on the side nearest the sea was bold and meagre; the third was lovely, but disfigured by a scar. When they were come before St. Francis, after reverences, they knelt down on his right hand and his left, and the queenly woman in front of him. To her, courteously, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... her romantic arrival into this gloomy and distressed home brought with it a sudden gleam of happiness, the great question as to how they were to live had still to be solved. They were absolutely without means, and they could only hope to meet their meagre expenses by the sale of the house in ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... for the most part cancelled by ten years of heroic work. Balzac appears not to have been extravagant; he had neither wife nor children (unlike many of his comrades, he had no illegitimate offspring), and when he admits us to a glimpse of his domestic economy, we usually find it to be of a very meagre pattern. He writes to his sister in 1827 that he has not the means either to pay the postage of letters or to use omnibuses, and that he goes out as little as possible, so as not to wear out his clothes. In 1829, however, we find him in correspondence with a duchess, Mme. d'Abrantes, the widow of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... doubly I'm a beggar: Undone by fortune, and in debt to thee. Want, worldly want, that hungry, meagre fiend, Is at my heels, and chases me in view. Canst thou bear cold and hunger? Can these limbs, Fram'd for the tender offices of love, Endure the bitter gripes of smarting poverty? When banish'd by our miseries abroad (As suddenly we shall be) to seek ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... them. The ouananiche are much longer in proportion to their weight than trout, and a novice almost always overestimates them. But the guides were not deceived. "This one will weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and this one four pounds, but that one not more than three pounds; he is meagre, M'sieu', BUT he is meagre." When we went ashore and tried the spring balance (which every angler ought to carry with him, as an aid to his conscience), the guides guess usually proved to be within an ounce or two of the fact. Any one of the senses can be educated ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... entrance examinations. Surrounded, as we in cities are, by schools especially planned, especially equipped, to make children ready for college, we may well wonder how country children in rural district schools, with their casual schedules and meagre facilities, are ever so prepared. By visiting even a few district schools we may ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... consents to take as his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of the artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American, and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the longing, the passion and the tragedies of life and its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his existence, a beautiful bit ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... on plinths. The spandrels of the arches bearing the cupola present panels containing shields and foliage of unmeaning form. The pilasters at the chancel end and the brackets on the side wall are also condemned. The windows in the clerestory are mean; the enrichments of the meagre entablature clumsy. The fine cupola is divided into panels ornamented with palm-branches and roses, and is terminated at the apex by a circular lantern-light. The walls of the church are plain, and disfigured," says Mr. Godwin, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... direction, and setting your face towards the Capitol, you perceive extended in dotted lines, the thinly-furnished streets of the city: viewed from here, the meagre supply of buildings in proportion to its extent is made obvious; each separate house may be traced out; and, in their irregular and detached appearance, all design becomes confounded. It seemed to me as though some frolicsome fairy architect, whilst ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... good progress till dinner, which, like the help we employed, we now had at twelve o'clock. Bagley and his children sat down to their lunch under the shade of an apple-tree at some distance, yet in plain view through our open door. Their repast must have been meagre, judging from the time in which it was despatched, and my wife said, "Can't ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... of cotton, sugar, gold. And the native discrimination was not altogether unpraiseworthy, if the later French missionaries can be exonerated from national prejudice, when they declare that the Caribs said Spaniards were meagre and indigestible, while a Frenchman made a succulent and peptic meal. But if he was a person of a religious habit, priest or monk, woe to the incautious Carib who might dine upon him! a mistake in the article of mushrooms were not more fatal. Du Tertre relates that a French priest was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... heat. Night after night Merryon lay on his veranda, smoking his pipe in stark endurance while the dreadful hours crept by. Sometimes he held a letter from his wife hard clenched in one powerful hand. She wrote to him frequently—short, airy epistles, wholly inconsequent, often provocatively meagre. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... on a visit not long after, to help his mother settle up the family estate. Her means were very meagre, and her family unusually large. In addition, his father's affairs had become involved. He had been advanced some money by the French Government to plant mulberry trees, in connection with the silk-worm industry, and a part of this advance ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... military in its neatness. Battersleigh, bachelor and soldier, was in nowise forgetful of the truth that personal neatness and personal valour go well hand in hand. The bed, a very narrow one, had but meagre covering, and during the winter months its single blanket rattled to the touch. "There's nothing in the world so warm as newspapers, me boy," said Battersleigh. Upon the table, which was a box, there was displayed always an invariable arrangement. Colonel Battersleigh's riding whip (without which ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... time Thress had been subsisting on the meagre diet permitted to a man in his condition, but his stomach rebelled even at that. He had heard of the Dewey fasting cure and its boasted efficacy against all human ills, and, though he had little faith, death was already looming before him, and he knew ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... movement which, carried out legitimately, should command the fullest sympathy of every Christian heart, degenerating into the rejection of all the supernatural elements in the nature and work of our Lord, and leaving us with a meagre human Christ, shrunken and impotent. The Christ of the Gospels, by all means; but let it be the whole Christ of all the Gospels, the Christ over whose cradle angels sang, by whose empty grave angels watched, whose ascending form angels beheld and proclaimed that He should come again ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Hawkesby's niece, was a young woman of some little importance in the world. The patrons of the circulating libraries knew her as Ena Dunkeld, and shook their heads over her. The gentlemen who add to the meagre salaries they earn in Government offices by writing reviews knew her under both her names, for no literary secrets are hid from them. They praised her novels publicly, and in private yawned over her morality. Many people, her aunt Lady ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... taste quickly became distaste. If, however, in literature it was crude, in the arts properly so-called, in those of the hand and the chisel, the sixteenth century, even in France, is, in the quality of taste, far greater than the two succeeding centuries: it is neither meagre nor massive, heavy nor distorted. In art its taste is rich and of fine quality,—at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern, special to itself and original. In the region of morals it is unequal and mixed. It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all their crudity, an age of philosophy ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... "There earned I, above all men, what no more Time nor yet Death from me shall take away; And it behoved our Lord, of whom I bore Such testimony, so my paints to pay. It grieves me much for them, on whom her door Courtesy closes on a stormy day; Who meagre, pale, and worn with hopeless suit, Knock night and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... and some dog harness hung on the wall at one side. Everything was spotlessly clean. The floor, the table—innocent of a cloth—the shelves, benches and chests were scoured to immaculate whiteness with sand and soap, and, despite its meagre furnishings the room was very snug and cozy and possessed an atmosphere ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... treatise, we have upwards of forty pages of elementary instructions, definitions, and concise treatises, copiously interspersed with musical illustrations; whereas the engraved treatises are generally meagre in their instructions, from the difficulty of punching text illustrations. The article on accentuation is, we are told, the first successful attempt in any elementary work on the Flute, to define this important subject. It is written ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... law, as in posting, the natives pay much less; and here is an instance of double-dealing which does not harmonise with the renowned honesty of the Norwegians. At the Belle-Vue, we were furnished with three very meagre meals a day, at the rate of two dollars and a half. The attendance was performed by two boys of fourteen or fifteen, whose services, as may be supposed, were quite inadequate to the wants of near twenty persons. The whole business ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Undoubtedly he was a pious man. Often he kept fasts; and once, for three whole days, he allowed himself not a morsel of food, but spent the time in prayer and religious meditation. Many a live-long night did he watch and pray. These fasts and vigils made him meagre and haggard, and probably caused him to appear as if he ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hardly that your dependent should come to disturb me," says Luttrell, reproachfully. "What have I done to him, or how have I ingratiated myself, that he should forsake you for me? I did not think even a meagre bird could have shown such outre taste. What fancy has he ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... saved from being distasteful to the listener by the fact that it was given with a melancholy despairing gesture, which to a less serious person than Ringfield might have been amusing. But his sense of humour, originally meagre, was not developing at St. Ignace as fast as it might, and he saw nothing humorous in this view of madame's immunity from disease. Before he could frame a reply, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Eldest sons have been known to send their brothers and sisters out into the world penniless, and sell from over their mothers' heads the homes in which they had hoped to die, obliging them to subsist or starve, as they might, upon their meagre "thirds." Whether justice to mother or children was done or not, depended entirely upon this one boy. And this was the brightest side of primogeniture. In cases of entailed property, very often the entail specified that it was to go to the heir male for all time. A father in this case, dying ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... about lighting fires and boiling water for tea, and frying a meagre bacon ration in their mess-tin lids, preparing and eating their breakfast. The meal over, they began on their ordinary routine work ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... still for the same reason, and had at last camped in a bare room over a store, and lived on shreds of food costing a few cents a day, that he might still grease the wheels. Abner Linthicum was hard upon him, and was not in the least touched by seeing his meagre little face grow sharper and his garments hang looser upon ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... scanty records, and casual notices of characteristic events, which biographers are often too indolent or injudicious to collect, and which the peaceful life of a man of letters usually supplies in little abundance. The published details of Schiller's history are meagre and insufficient; and his writings, like those of every author, can afford but a dim and dubious copy of his mind. Nor is it easy to decipher even this, with moderate accuracy. The haze of a foreign language, of foreign manners, and modes of thinking strange to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the mind is naturally inclined to melancholy; we foster the pleasing delusion, it grows up with our frame, and becomes a part of our being; long have I laboured under the influence of that passion; long vented my grief in unavailing sighs. Besides, your thin meagre man is always the most violent lover; a thousand delusions enter his paper-skull, which the man of guts never dreams of. In vain does Cupid shoot his arrows at the plump existence, who is entrenched in a solid wall of fat: they are buried like shrimps in melted butter; ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... possess'd his Mind, that all that could be said of him, had no Influence upon him, to make him doubt of the Matter; and he dreamt of nothing but Spectres and Devils: The very Habit of his Mind was got into his Face, that he was so pale, and meagre and dejected, that you would say he was rather a Sprite than a Man: And in short, he was not far from being stark mad, and would have been so, had it not been ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... criticisms on its taste and justice (for which, however, a historical subject is given as an alternative); the Greek chorus, and choric metres. Now such an examination is, in the first place, a most meagre view of literature: it does not necessarily exercise the faculty of critical discernment. In the next place, it is chiefly a matter of compilation from English sources; the actual readings of the candidate in Greek and Latin would be of little account in the matter. Of course, the choric ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... as the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition. The Ensign was a little meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she would have been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation of cheap plush ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... villainous cast in one of them. Some accident had carried Nature's work even further, for one swarthy cheek was divided from temple to chin by a dirty white scar. He wore a pair of black-and-white checked trousers, which, once Nick's, hung strangely on his meagre frame. He was absurdly proud of this garment. His outer wear was completed by a black cotton shirt, and the inevitable stiff-brimmed hat, without which no brown youth feels himself a man. Xavier's face wore an expression of blankness verging on idiocy; but he was ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... meagre enough. Her mother died when Mary Ann was a child; her father when she was still a mere girl. His affairs were found in hopeless confusion, and Mary Ann was considered lucky to be taken into the house of the ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... had but meagre fare, as no meat had as yet been obtained, but mealy cakes and bowls of tea were sufficient to satisfy their hunger for the present. Scarcely had they begun breakfast, however, when Umgolo, who had gone to the top of a slight elevation in the neighbourhood, came ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... London is meagre. Seventeen years after the building of the Citadel, on the rebellion of Boadicea, the Roman general Suetonius abandoned the place, as unable to defend it. All those who remained were massacred by the insurgents. After this, so far as we know, for history is silent, there was peace in ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... personage, scouted the idea, and thought the matter settled, by pointing to two or three young camels and asking the editor if he thought any man, Turk or Christian, would think of eating one so lank, meagre, and uninviting, as himself, when they had so much capital food of another sort at their elbow. "Take your share of the liquor while it is passing, man, and set your heart at ease as to the dinner, which I make no doubt will be substantial and decent. Had ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... her to 41, the corner house. The thin passage and the meagre staircase confirmed Esther in the impression she had received from the aspect of the street; and she felt that the place was more suitable to the gaunt woman with iron-grey hair who waited in the passage. ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... with something weighing very heavily on her mind. Her testimonials of character were ample and of a very high order but they did not enlighten me with any great freedom as to her past history, and she for her part appeared by no means eager to supplement the meagre information furnished by them. However, people have a right to keep their own counsel if they please, and there was no sin in the woman's reticence. We happened to be very short of efficient nurses at the time and she was at once taken upon trial; her somewhat ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... of any one being contented with such a meagre share of the good things of life, when she was unsatisfied in spite of the rich store showered upon her. She could not understand it, and fell asleep wishing every one could be comfortable,—it was so annoying to see them grubbing in kitchens, teaching ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... poverty, the feebleness, the political insignificance of Scotland, and of the indignities which she had suffered at the hand of her powerful and opulent neighbour. When he talked of her wrongs his dark meagre face took its sternest expression; his habitual frown grew blacker, and his eyes flashed more than their wonted fire. Paterson, on the other hand, firmly believed himself to have discovered the means of making any state ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you know, my precious,' said her father, with much gentleness, 'for our looking very poor and meagre at home, and being at the best but very uncomfortable, after Mr ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... easily see why some men are able to take out from the world's common stock of product so large an amount, while most men can take but a meagre allowance. By the law of supply and demand the price is far higher for the service which one man renders to the world than another. Let us take the operation of a large machine shop, for instance. Only one superintendent is needed, and he should ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... of Carillon on Lake Champlain and of Niagara on Lake Ontario were both in the hands of the English. A portion of the Canadians had left the camp to try and gather in the meagre crops which had been cultivated by the women and children. In the night between the 12th and 13th of September, General Wolfe made a sudden dash upon the banks of the St. Lawrence; he landed at the creek of Foulon. The officers had replied in French ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... said to have taken place in the character and habits of the people.[123] Recent inquiry has discovered that even there, in districts once famous for fine men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated into a meagre and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hillsides fronting the sea, the faces of their famished children are as thin and pale as they could be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley.[124] Still more deplorable ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... some of the blame at the door of the literary historians who have, until recent days, placed the English Mandeville nearly half a century too early, postponed the consideration of the dramatic productions till they reached the middle of the sixteenth century, when they gave a meagre summary of 'earlier attempts,' and chronicled the industry of translators, which had been in full swing ever since about 1380, as a special feature of the sixteenth century, helping thus to account for the great Elizabethan outburst of original work. No poor period of literature was ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... to Susie, that with her mother's death all the world had come to an end for her. Undemonstrative as they were, and meagre as had been any spoken words of affection, the bond of natural love between them had seemed strong and unbreakable until Smith's coming. They had been all in all to each other in their unemotional way; and now ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... police work, and have a reputation to enhance or lose as the result might decide. Suddenly a name occurred to him. A short time ago his friend the President had been telling him the inner story of a very intricate case which had involved a scandal of two Courts. Only the most meagre details had obviously been permitted to appear in the papers, but His Lordship had told him that it had been solved and settled almost entirely by the skill and diplomacy of a M. Nicol Hendry, who held the little advertised but highly ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the great actress' demise it would seem that none of her successors ventured to attempt the title-role, hence the piece soon fell out of the repertory. In 1783, however, an alteration, made by Cooke the barrister for Mrs. Abington, was produced with great success at Covent Garden. In this meagre adaptation the Curate disappears. Shanks originally acted this part, but Lacy was the acknowledged 'Sir Roger' in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... on anthropology has told us that 'to develop soul is progress', and he has followed the clue through the meagre relics of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. So does the last science of the nineteenth century throw light on the dim recesses of the past. For unquestionably psychology is the characteristic science added to the hierarchy in our period; it has crowned biology and is exercising ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... who was dead, for the woman said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air. On the left from this kitchen was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I call on the richest Jews as witnesses of my veracity. Why do they carry on so many different industries? Why do they send men to work underground and to raise coal amid terrible dangers for meagre pay? I cannot imagine this to be pleasant, even for the owners of the mines. For I do not believe that capitalists are heartless, and I do not pretend that I believe it. My desire is not to accentuate, ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... afternoon dragged to a close. They ate their supper, without appetite—which was a pity, since the meagre store of food in the mess had been recklessly ransacked, to give them a good send-off. Then another hour—muttering good-byes now and then, as they prowled about; and finally, to bed, to lie there for hours of darkness and silence. Gradually the noise of the camp died down. From the guard-room ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... of their misfortunes the routine of the McTeagues was as follows: They rose at seven and breakfasted in their room, Trina cooking the very meagre meal on an oil stove. Immediately after breakfast Trina sat down to her work of whittling the Noah's ark animals, and McTeague took himself off to walk down town. He had by the greatest good luck secured a position with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... devotedness to the interests of the United States, and with a warm and undeviating attachment to the rights and liberties for which they were contending. Congress seem not to have well understood the extent or merits of his labors. He was obliged often to complain of the meagre compensation he received, and of the extreme difficulty with which he and his small family contrived to subsist on it. Both Mr Adams and Dr Franklin recommended him to Congress as worthy of better returns, but with little effect. This indifference to his worth and his services while living ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... that Hubbard and George thought was two miles long shortened down, when we actually came to it the next morning, to less than half a mile, affording us only a meagre opportunity to make use of the canoe. For a little distance we again bucked the rapids, and then left the river for a rough portage of a mile and a half over the hills on the shore. Again at night we were exhausted, but again we had a fine camp on a point overlooking the river. The crisp air came ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... safe chance to see her. Selwyn was in New York, and the absolute certainty of his personal safety attracted him strongly, rousing all the latent tyranny in his meagre soul. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... stood in the shanty, with a pine table and some stools. Upon the stove was a metal lamp burning dimly and emitting a cloud of smoke. One end of the table held a tin candlestick, where a meagre tallow-candle swaled away in the socket, and the table was littered with fragments of food in little round pans. An iron spoon or two, with three or four tin cups, lay amid this confusion. Around this table hovered half a dozen women nearly intoxicated with brandy supplied ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... taste it undoubtedly is—which I must not omit mentioning. It relates to the representation of our Saviour. Whether as a painting, or as a piece of sculpture, this sacred figure is generally made most repulsive—even, in the cathedral. It is meagre in form, wretched in physiognomical expression, and marked by disgusting appearances of blood about the forehead and throat. In the church of St. Mary, supposed to be the oldest in Vienna, as you enter the south door, to the left, there is a whole ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... food to George Balt; no man dares to give him a bed, no cannery will let him work. He has to take a dory to Dutch Harbor to get food. He doesn't dare leave the country and abandon the meagre thousands he has invested in buildings, so he has stayed on living off the country like a Siwash. He's a simple, big-hearted sort of fellow, but his life is centred in this business; it's all he knows. He considers himself the father of this section; ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... single original. Some of the MSS. are parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in place names ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... Paris, I never heard any but dull, lifeless music, watered down, as it were, in women's throats, or utterly disfigured by the choir schools. In most of the churches I found only a colourless ceremonial, a meagre form ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... into the winter fields and gathered the small white everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... back into the house. It was a smallish house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door below. Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows to the windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised porch, up which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. To the left of the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in between the hill, against which the house was set edgeways, and the rest of the flat space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the cart-shed and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... benefit of my country[40]—a history of what might have been, of what should be, at least in modern warfare, and, alas! often is not. Pardon me. The copy of the tracts from which I have compiled this meagre narrative, is in existence, and in the British Museum. It was written on vellum, about the year 1460, by Gilla-Riabhach O'Clery; but there is unquestionable authority for its having existed at a much earlier period. It is quoted by Cormac ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... he was a bank clerk; it had a poor and meagre sound. It was not for him that she had been trained. She had been made to slave for herself, and was to make a "continental" marriage with the highest bidder. Eve's heart had been pretty well schooled out of her, and yet, before dinner came to an end, she found herself ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... to those white cheeks, the security to the quivering mouth. This was the first favour she had ever asked at his hands, the first time she had thrown herself, as it were, on his mercy; and he must refuse her even the meagre boon she asked ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... upon her duties, and discharged them with such zeal, such docility, that her mistress never tired of lauding her. She was a young woman of rather odd appearance; slim and meagre and red-headed, with a never failing simper on her loose lips, and blue eyes that frequently watered; she had somehow an air of lurking gentility in faded youth. Undeniable as were the good qualities she put forth on this scene of innumerable domestic failures, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... in public any particulars of the narrative related at the Rectory. Still, he had not got over his first dread that she might one day be traced, claimed, and taken away from him, if that narrative, meagre as it was, should ever be trusted to other ears than those which had originally listened to it. Still, he kept the hair bracelet and the handkerchief that had belonged to her mother carefully locked up out ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... no soldier shouts of triumph over a defeated foe, no bells in ancient belfrys rang, no Te Deums were sung, and no preacher mounted the rostrum to eulogise the victors or to point the moral to the multitude. A small, almost meagre procession, consisting of the Commander-in-Chief and his Staff, with a guard of honour, less than 150 all told, passed through the gate unheralded by a single trumpet note; a purely military act with a minimum of military display ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... inscriptions of the first eleven dynasties are very few, and their contents are meagre and unimportant. As specimens of historical documents of the twelfth dynasty ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... natural to him as the other. Even with his friends he kept them separate, seldom speaking of Stokebridge when at Birmingham, save to answer Mr. Merton's questions as to old pupils; and giving accounts, which to Nelly Hardy appeared ridiculously meagre, of his Birmingham experience to ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... different; he could not have borne for twenty-four hours the idea that she was in uncertainty as to money. But that had all been settled long ago. From the first she had had the administering of their modest fortune. On their marriage Nick's own meagre income, paid in, none too regularly, by the agent who had managed for years the dwindling family properties, had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present he could make. And the wedding cheques had of course all been deposited in her ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... information. So far as that evidence is sound, we have to thank France for producing it; but, on the other hand, should it prove that a whole city of invention has been constructed, "with all its spires and gateways," upon a meagre basis of fact, it is just that French imagination should have full credit for the decorative art which has adorned ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... was touring in England, he came with it if his health allowed, to watch the performances in London, Manchester or Edinburgh, wherever they might be. His life was always mainly within himself; the record of these years is very meagre, all that can be said of them is that he passed them mostly in Ireland, writing and re-writing, in failing health and with increasing purpose. His general health was never robust, and for at least the last six years of his life his throat troubled him. He used to speak of the trouble as ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... of each parish being separately shown, only the totals of the hundreds and similar county divisions, and of a few principal towns, were given. In subsequent "Parish Register Abstracts" down to that of 1841, the same meagre information has been afforded by an adherence to this ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... fourteen: that he escaped to Prussia, to Belgium, to England; for six years always a wanderer and a fugitive: that he was wrecked on this dear coast and, penniless, started life anew here on his little accomplishments: that he made out a meagre existence, and late in the order of years (he was fifty) married an expatriated countrywoman, who died—George, my mother died when I was seventeen months old—and that is where I stop. My good, big father—so lonely, so poor, and so silent! He tells me ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... entered a small hot room lighted by two oil lamps and a candle. Three officers, at two large map tables, were working on sheets of figures. Two wooden bunks, one above the other, and two posts supporting the low ceiling completed the meagre furnishings of the room. A young officer looked up from his work, O'Neil ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... an existing political emergency. If a classical education, designed as it is in England to promote 'character' rather than 'intellect' (a vicious distinction which leaves no room for such a quality as intellectual integrity) often leaves behind it but a meagre residuum of knowledge and ideas, it should at least cause the public school man of yesterday and the London clubman of to-day to realize the limitations of his field of study and to abstain from confident political generalization. The ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... very rapidly, and at not infrequent intervals they overpopulate the island, and then perish by hundreds of starvation and the diseases which follow a too meagre diet. They are of all colors, and though descended from some pairs of tame white rabbits, seem to have reverted in color to the wild race ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... definitely installed as the singer of Adelaide. The story is improbable, as the troubadour's rewards naturally depended upon the favour of his patrons to him personally; it is probably an instance of the manner in which the biographies founded fictions upon a very meagre substratum of fact, the fact in this instance being a passage in which Arnaut declares his timidity in singing the praise of so great a beauty ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... say, "I beg your pardon!" until it had uttered the words more than once. Then Horace looked round. He saw a tall and very pale young man, neatly though poorly dressed in dark trousers and a thin loose black coat that might have been made of alpaca, and fitted badly. This man's face was gaunt and meagre, the features were pointed, the mouth was piteous. His eyes blazed with some terrible emotion, it seemed, and when Horace looked round a sudden patch of scarlet burned on his white and bony cheeks. Horace's attention was pinned by his appearance, which was at the same time dull and piercing, as ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... himself that he did no other good than that of keeping away some person more objectionable than himself. He was however prepared to repeat this self-sacrifice in a spirit of patriotism for which he received a very meagre meed of eulogy from Miss Jack, and an amount of self-applause which ...
— Miss Sarah Jack, of Spanish Town, Jamaica • Anthony Trollope
... taking advantage of the managing editor's absence, he published articles on prohibited subjects, which lost the paper half its subscribers, and him his situation. When next heard of, he was gaining a meagre subsistence by writing theatrical puffs,—employment for which he was indebted to the kindness of a certain influential ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... sanguine of success," the law-clerk resumed. "There is but a meagre chance. And yet I feel a sort of presentiment that—Ah, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... of some of these multitudes of women gainfully employed? What do they give in their work? What do they get from it? Clearly ascertained information on those points has been meagre. ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... allowance be no more than one small ounce of mouldy bread and half a pint of standing water, for each day's support, till his now blooming skin be withered, his flesh be wasted from his bones, and he dwindle to a meagre skeleton.' So saying he left them, as he hoped, to bewail each other's sad condition. But the unhappy Fidus, bereft of his Amata, was not to be appalled by any of the most horrid threats; for now his only comfort was the hopes of ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... mask sanctimonious, [3] Their rigs prove to judge that their phiz is erroneous. [4] Twig lank-jaws, the miser, that skin-flint old elf, From his long meagre phiz, who'd think he'd the pelf. Tol de ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... grammarians, whose authority varies greatly in value; or through incidental statements and expressions of the classic writers themselves; or from monumental inscriptions. Of these three, the first is inferior to the other two in quality, but they in turn are comparatively meagre in quantity. ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... observes a difference underfoot from what has gone before: scraps of Roman tile and stone chippings protrude through the grass in meagre quantity, but sufficient to suggest that masonry stood on the spot. Before the eye stretches under the moonlight the interior of the fort. So open and so large is it as to be practically an upland plateau, and yet its area ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... whitened hair was arranged with a high comb. She was the only one without spectacles or eyeglasses. Henry looked older and feebler than any of the company. His scant hair hung in thin and long white locks, and his tall, slender figure had gained a still more meagre effect from his dress, while his shoulders were bowed in a marked stoop; his gait was rigid and jerky. He assisted himself with a gold-headed cane, and sat in his ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh [72] might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... supposes a previous existence. This they felt, and had something to say about an earth anterior to this of ours, but one without light or human inhabitants. A lake burst its bounds and submerged it wholly. This is obviously nothing but a mere and meagre fiction, invented to explain the origin of the primeval ocean. But mark it well, for this is the germ of those marvellous myths of the Epochs of Nature, the catastrophes of the universe, the deluges of water and of fire, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... give to Christ; yet it is a comfort to know that our friendship really is precious to him, and adds to his joy, poor and meagre though its best may be—but he has infinite blessings to give to us. "I call you friends." No other gift he gives to us can equal in value the love and friendship of his heart. When Cyrus gave Artabazus, one of his courtiers, a gold cup, he gave Chrysanthus, his favorite, only a kiss. ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... perfume; And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil: hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science: blinds The eyesight of Discovery; and begets, In those that suffer it, a sordid mind Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit To be the tenant of man's noble form. Thee therefore still, blameworthy as thou art, With all thy loss of empire, and though squeez'd By public exigence, till annual food Fails for the craving hunger of the state, Thee I account still happy, and the chief Among the nations, seeing ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... gained the ear of the House, he gave a free rein to his prodigious powers of satire, which he used to the full in his attacks on Peel. In point of fact, vituperation and sarcasm were his chief weapons of offence. He spoke of Mr. Roebuck as a "meagre-minded rebel," and called Campbell, who was afterwards Lord Chancellor, "a shrewd, coarse, manoeuvring Pict," a "base-born Scotchman," and a "booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie." When he ceased to be witty, sarcastic, or vituperative, he became ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the Clyde, laughing at me all the time. Gresson, too, had known. Now I saw it all. He had tried to drown me between Colonsay and Mull. It was Gresson who had set the police on me in Morvern. The bagman Linklater had been one of Gresson's creatures. The only meagre consolation was that the gang had thought me dangerous enough to attempt to murder me, and that they knew nothing about my doings in Skye. Of that I was positive. They had marked me down, but for several days I had slipped clean ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan |
