"Plebeian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties, retired on the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at ten. She never read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as they were with unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends, regarding Alexina's gay disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old Maria," and sympathetic with youth, would have been ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... mind loves not this conceited affectation, nor can it either conceive or bring forth, unless it has been steeped in the vast flood of literature. Every word that is what I would call 'low,' ought to be avoided, and phrases far removed from plebeian usage should be chosen. Let 'Ye rabble rout avaunt,' be your rule. In addition, care should be exercised in preventing the epigrams from standing out from the body of the speech; they should gleam with the brilliancy woven into the fabric. Homer is an example, and the lyric poets, and ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... be derived from the same source as the exaggerated statement of Archbishop Des Ursins, that on another occasion Henry promised that his plebeian soldiers should be ennobled and invested with collars of SS. This cannot be taken directly from Des Ursins, whose history of the reign of Charles VI., though written in the fifteenth century, was ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... men of his own class, he was too well bred to do so with me. But in my anger I saw nothing but the words, "not a gownsman." Why should he see that I was not a gownsman? Because I was shabbier?—(and my clothes, over and above the ducking they had had, were shabby); or more plebeian in appearance (whatsoever that may mean)? or wanted something else, which the rest had about them, and I had not? Why should he know that I was not a gownsman? I did not wish, of course, to be a gentleman, and an aristocrat; but I was nettled, nevertheless, at ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... where all his hopes lay irretrievably buried. He walked on—majestic as he had never been before, in the brilliant throne-room of the Tuileries or the mystic vastness of Notre Dame when the Imperial crown sat so ill upon his plebeian head. . . . He walked on—silent, exalted and great—great through ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... I will deliver your reply; It cannot much import—he's a plebeian, The master of a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Dialis) preceded by a lictor, and entitled by his office to the entrance of the senate, at first the especial dignitary of the patricians, was subsequently the choice of the people. The less national and less honored deities were usually served by plebeian ministers; and many embraced the profession, as now the Roman Catholic Christians enter the monastic fraternity, less from the impulse of devotion than the suggestions of a calculating poverty. Thus ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... consecutively—just as Canter and Canterbury gallop, of which the one was at first the mere shorthand expression of the other, were at one period interchanged, and for the same reason. The abbreviated form wore the air of plebeian slang at its first introduction, but its convenience favoured it: soon it became reconciled to the ear, then it ceased to be slang, and finally the original form, ceasing to have any apparent advantage of propriety or elegance, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... it. Wherein was the object of keeping it open for Belle Todd and himself when more and more he wished for semi-solitude? Noise and crowds and luxuries irritated him. He liked meals such as the one he had ordered, the plebeian joy of taking off tight shoes and putting on disreputable slippers, sitting in an easy-chair with his feet on another, while he read detective stories or adventurous romances with neither sense nor moral. He liked to ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... river, too, dwelt the lordly waterbuck, magnificent and proud as the stags of Landseer; and the tiny steinbuck and duiker, no bigger than jack-rabbits, but perfect little deer for all that. The incredibly plebeian wart-hog rooted about; and down in the bottom lands were leopards. I knocked one off a rock one day. In the river itself dwelt hippopotamuses and crocodiles. One of the latter dragged under a yearling calf just below ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget that there was a large class excluded ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... graceful bearing of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the Revolution was to me one of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which discountenances all employment that is of the nature of productive effort is still at hand, and will ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... plebeian splutter of rage from our well-bred friend there," said Mackworth, pointing contemptuously at Kenrick, who stood with dilated nostrils, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... undone, and die with thee! Thou art the last of all thy race! With thee a noble name expires, And vanishes from the earth's face The glorious memory of thy sires! She is a peasant. In her veins Flows common and plebeian blood; It is such as daily and hourly stains The dust and the turf of battle plains, By vassals shed, in a crimson flood, Without reserve, and without reward, At the slightest summons of their lord! But thine is precious, the fore-appointed Blood ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... states. The ancient kings of Teneriffe, if they could not find mates of equal rank, married their sisters to prevent the admixture of plebeian blood.[1687] In the Egyptian mythology Isis and Osiris were sister and brother as well as wife and husband. The kings of ancient Egypt married their sisters and daughters. The doctrine of royal essence was very exaggerated, and was applied with quantitative ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... least half of Dr. Karl Pearson. She gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity. In a few weeks the very name of a professor was a matter for hissing and low plebeian mirth. The very name of Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy. A new mood came upon the whole people; a mood of marching, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... splendours towards purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God. His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into higher glory in his soul. The bloom and the richness ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... insinuate. It impresses me as a cowardly and contemptible bit of plebeian practice that found favor after the royal purple was trailed in agrarian democratic dust; and lest you should unjustly impute abhorred innuendoes to me, I will say perspicuously, that the most attractive and beautiful woman I have ever seen is not your fair friend Miss Sutherland, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Mutterrecht only in the succession to the kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... speaker? His cap is in his hands, so you can see the bullet head of crisp brown hair and the wrinkled forehead, as well as the high cheek bones, the short square face, the broad temples, the thick lips, which are yet firm as granite. A coarse plebeian stamp of man: yet the whole figure and attitude are that of boundless determination, self-possession, energy; and when at last he speaks a few blunt words, all eyes are turned respectfully upon him;—for his name is ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... were there,—a growth of trees in which the Warwick family take an hereditary pride. The two highest towers of the castle heave themselves up out of a mass of foliage, and look down in a lordly manner upon the plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are slate-covered (these are the modern houses), and a part are coated with old red tiles, denoting the more ancient edifices. A hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, a great ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... aristocratic community did not exist on the Pacific Coast. Visit the Pikes when you would, you could never see any one working. Of churches, school-houses, stores and other plebeian institutions, there were none; and no Pike demeaned himself by entering trade, or soiled his ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... The tobacco scattered before it fell, but I sat at the window gloating over the packet, which lay a dirty scrap of paper, where every cab might pass over it. What I call the street is more strictly a square, for my windows were at the back of the inn, and their view was somewhat plebeian. The square is the meeting-place of five streets, and at the corner of each the paper was caught up in a draught that bore it ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... folly, sudden as splashes, the law formulated by an oath, and flowers of eloquence on the lips of some soldier-boy, with a shoulder-belt strapped over his bare, shirtless chest. Sometimes, too, a gentleman made his appearance—an aristocrat of humble demeanour, talking in a plebeian strain, and with his hands unwashed, so as to make them look hard. A patriot recognised him; the most virtuous mobbed him; and he went off with rage in his soul. On the pretext of good sense, it was desirable to be always disparaging the advocates, and to make use as often as possible of these ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments, and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine: and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... These are plebeian models, but sometimes artists' friends recommend amateur models—a broken-down gentleman or some other poor relation—and when you are drawing social modern subjects, of course these are really of more use than the badly-dressed ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... was therefore alone to-day; it was unnecessary for her to submit to the restraint of etiquette, and she yielded with genuine relief to an unwonted freedom. She was in her sitting-room, busily engaged in taking from a large basket, the plebeian appearance of which contrasted strangely with the magnificent Turkish carpet on which it stood, the folded clothes which the washerwoman had just delivered. The appearance of Madame Mere herself was also in some contrast with the gorgeous ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... who writes in the prim style resembles a man who dresses himself up in order to avoid being confounded or put on the same level with a mob—a risk never run by the gentleman, even in his worst clothes. The plebeian may be known by a certain showiness of attire and a wish to have everything spick and span; and in the same way, the commonplace person ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Jean repelled at every point. Years had not refined, they had vulgarized him. His clothing careless and not quite fresh, offended her taste; in fact, his whole appearance was of that shabby genteel character, which is far more mean and plebeian than can be given by undisguised working apparel. As Jean was taking note of these things a girl, with a flushed, angry face, spoke to him. She was evidently making a complaint, and Gavin answered her in a manner which made Jean burn from head to feet. The disillusion ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... respective orders. These nuns are called Commendadoras, and none can be admitted into their numbers but ladies who are descended from an ancient nobility, preserved for many generations from any mixture of plebeian blood. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... I love next, consist of a child of a year old, a tiger, a spaniel formerly attached to Lady Shelburne—at present to my Lord—besides four plebeian cats who are taken no notice of, horses, etc., and a wild boar who is sent off on a matrimonial expedition to the farm. The four first I have commenced a friendship with, especially the first of all, to whom I am body-coachman ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... willing to do, since to him, good simple man, the welfare of the ancient house of Monk, of which his only sister had married the head, was a far more important thing than parting with a certain number of thousands of pounds. For birth and station, in his plebeian humility, John Porson had a reverence which was almost superstitious. Moreover, he had loved his dead sister dearly, and, in his way, he loved her son also. Also he revered his brother-in-law, the polished and splendid-looking ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... ancestors—Frenchmen. Poets and romancers, ye whose imaginations delight to dwell upon sudden downfalls and rapid rises, mark well that little lad at play upon the Sicilian shore near the town of Mazzara! Springing from the lowest of the plebeian class, his family have not even a surname. He is the son of one Pierre, a fisherman, whose humble hut stands yonder beneath the cliff. But a day will come when that lowly-born lad, joining his baptismal name to that of the town which sheltered his cradle, will become Jules de Mazarin, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... supervitality—you cannot judge of other nations who have not. You had a magnificent system of government. It took you about eight hundred years to build up, and it was the admiration of the world—and now you are allowing your Socialists and ignorant plebeian place hunters to pull it all to pieces and throw it away. That is more foolish surely, than even ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... this young woman had never moistened the selvedge edge of her soul with a less plebeian tipple than champagne, had a marked and subduing effect on Harris. He believed she belonged to the royal family. But ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... though they were of different religious beliefs; and they went driving or shopping together, the younger woman a little critical and ashamed of the elder because of her poor grammar, her Irish accent, her plebeian tastes—as though the Wiggins had not been as plebeian as any. On the other hand the old lady, as she was compelled to admit, was good-natured and good-hearted. She loved to give, since she had plenty, and sent ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... so great and good! Hail, ye plebeian underwood! Where the poetic birds rejoice, And for their quiet nests and plenteous food ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... of coral. In the first place it was coral itself, then the reefs which surrounded it were coral, and the rocks were coral, and the sand was composed of bits of coral. The palace of the king was built of coral, and so were the houses of the people, only his was red, which is scarce, and theirs of plebeian white. It had a very pretty effect, I can assure you. The chairs and tables would, I doubt not, have been made of coral, only they did not use them; in fact, their notion of furnishing a house is very different to ours. A few mats, and baskets, ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... at first administered by certain patrician families, and this was continued till B.C. 300, when plebeians were allowed to enter the sacred colleges. A plebeian became Pontifex Maximus, for the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and characteristic ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... territory, must in any age ensure. Of Charlemagne, in an age when as yet the use of infantry was but imperfectly known, it may be said symbollically, that he found the universal people, patrician and plebeian, chieftain and vassal, with the left foot [Footnote 11] in the stirrup—of Napoleon, in an age when the use of artillery was first understood, that he found every man standing to his gun. Both, in short, found war in pro-cinctu—both found the people whom they governed, willing ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw at that moment was so novel, and made ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... And then the country was suddenly hurried through two more social revolutions of the most extraordinary kind,—signalized by the abolition of the daimiates, the suppression of the military class, the substitution of a plebeian for an aristocratic army, popular enfranchisement, the rapid formalism of a new commonalty. industrial [446] expansion, the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and popular representation in government! Old Japan had never developed a wealthy and powerful middle ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... is unnecessary to consider the state of things in other European countries. The aristocratic conditions of former days are the plebeian conditions of to-day. So far as England is concerned, such documents as Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain (1842) sufficiently illustrate the ideas and the practices as regards personal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fashionable street was dark, and that the dingy light did not show off their goods to advantage; the surgeon could not see to draw his patient's teeth; the lawyer had to ring for candles an hour earlier than he was accustomed to do when living in a more plebeian street. In short, by mutual consent, the whole front of one side of the street was pulled down, and rebuilt in the flat, mean, unrelieved style of George the Third. The body of the houses was too solidly grand to submit to alteration; so people were occasionally surprised, after passing through a ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... I: "do you think I could ever wear a watch? I know nothing so plebeian. What can any one, but a man of business, who has nine hours for his counting-house and one for his dinner, ever possibly want to know the time for? An assignation, you will say: true, but (here I played with my best ringlet) ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the citizen with distant politeness, expressing that sort of reserve by which those of the higher ranks are sometimes willing to make a plebeian sensible that he is an intruder. But Master George seemed neither displeased nor disconcerted. He assumed the chair, which, in deference to his respectable appearance, Lord Nigel offered to him, and said, after ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... laid out in the middle of the courtyard, and there was mourned not by her and his kinsfolk alone, but publicly by well-nigh all the women of the city, and not a few men; and shouldered by some of the noblest of the citizens, as it had been the remains of no plebeian but of a noble, was borne from the public courtyard to the tomb with exceeding ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... to the stern old Roman with his Saturnalia, when for once in all the year the slave and the plebeian might ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... he too had thought it "mere vanity." Love then was nowhere—neither in his heart nor in hers. . . . Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but there was no doubt what he would have done, "had our brute been Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it right that he should earn what ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,—the Plebeian's scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the Aristocrat's ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... found save weeds and empty beer bottles, dead men denied decent interment. Behind the cabin was the dust-heap, an interesting and historical mound, an epitome, indeed, of the 'Bishop's' gastronomical past, that emphasised his descent from Olympus to Hades; for on the top was a plebeian deposit of tomato and sardine cans, whereas below, if you stirred the heap, might be found a nobler stratum of terrines, once savoury with foie gras and Strasbourg pate, of jars still fragrant of fruits embedded in liqueur, of bottles that had contained the soups that a divine loves— ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... morning rush was over, and there was moment's breathing space, Hiram went to the door to re-arrange the trays of vegetables which were his particular care. Hiram had a knack of making a bank of the most plebeian vegetable and salads look like the display-window ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... the hand holding some object now lost, which was probably a mirror. The left arm is raised, and with the left hand she presses a lotus lily to her breast. The body is easy and well formed, the figure indicates youth, the face is open, smiling, pleasant, and somewhat plebeian. To modify the unwieldy mass of the headdress was beyond the skill of the artist, but the bust is delicately and elegantly modelled, the clinging garment gives discreet emphasis to the shape, and the action ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Licinius Stolo put himself at the head of the plebeians in their great quarrel with the Senate. They demanded that consuls should be re-established, one of whom should always be a plebeian, and that they should never both be patricians. Tribunes of the people were appointed, but the people would not suffer any election of consuls to be held. As this want of chief magistrates seemed likely to lead to still greater disorders, the Senate, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... was condemned to be sold and broken up by the Parliament, but was buried and saved by the brazier who purchased it, and so reappeared after the Restoration. To the left, the familiar words "Morley's Hotel" designate an edifice about half windows, where the plebeian traveller may sit and contemplate Northumberland House opposite, and the straight-tailed lion of the Percys surmounting the lofty battlement which crowns its broad facade. We could describe and criticize ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... is with many a secret vexation and shame. People boast here of the equality of our institutions, and then try their best to break up the social level. In a genuine Aristocracy, where they have endeavored to preserve a gulf-stream of noble blood in the midst of the plebeian Atlantic, and a man holds his distinction by the color of the bark on his family tree, and the kind of sap that circulates through it, there is no danger of any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, and nobody will suspect ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... The vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.—If you would see how Shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with Mrs. Quickly. On the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that Shakspeare's ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... writing a book about them, is unbounded, and they put him down (why, it is difficult to say) as the aristocratic, and therefore impartial champion of Demus. Whenever we fell into the bilious moods to which our plebeian nature is addicted, we were gravely admonished of his bright example, and assured that to speak evil of the Republic was the infirmity of vulgar minds. There is, it would appear, a sympathy betwixt "great ones;" a kind of free-masonry ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... not only be impertinent on my part to relate particulars of our army, but I should undoubtedly do as Mrs. Partington did—"open my patrician mouth and put my plebeian foot in it." The first thing I did on arriving at Iloilo was to call mess "board" and go to bed instead ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... burst from Lucy's lips, accompanied with the words, "I wonder who she thinks wants to associate with that plebeian!" ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... of Pierre Delarue, who had just taken honors at the Polytechnic school, and who seemed to have a brilliant career before him. This woman, humbly born, was proud of her origin, and sought a plebeian for her son-in-law, to put into his hand a golden tool powerful enough to move ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... When clarinets are used, they are a part of the first group. This pretty arrangement has, unfortunately, not been followed in the modern editions of these symphonies. In the works written in London the clarinet has utterly forgotten its origins. It has left the somewhat plebeian world of the brasses and has gained admittance to the more refined society of the woods. Haydn, in his first attempts, took advantage of the beautiful heavy tones, "chalumeau," and the flexibility and marvellous range of a ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... to me by the character and proceedings of this assemblage—first, that of the eminently popular and plebeian origin and impulse of all the great Reform Movements of our age. Every great public assemblage in Europe for any other purpose will be sure to number Lords, Dukes, Generals, Princes, among its dignitaries; but none such came near the Peace Congress; very few ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... aesthetic side. Smartness and beauty were essential to yachts, in my mind, but with the best resolves to be pleased I found little encouragement here. The hull seemed too low, and the mainmast too high; the cabin roof looked clumsy, and the skylights saddened the eye with dull iron and plebeian graining. What brass there was, on the tiller-head and elsewhere, was tarnished with sickly green. The decks had none of that creamy purity which Cowes expects, but were rough and grey, and showed tarry exhalations round the seams ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... anything but deep-rooted, for I fancied God would send many more, but it was not so; and now the title I so desired must go to the child of a woman—Oh, Rose, how I do hate her!—a woman who publicly thanks God that no plebeian blood will disgrace my husband's title and her family. I would peril my soul to cause her the ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... sheets of the very best notepaper, with Norbert's respectable address handsomely stamped in red at the top. (The other missive was on paper less fashionable, with the address, sadly plebeian, in mere handwriting.) Having read to the end, Rosamund finished her dressing and went down to the sitting-room. Breakfast was ready, but, before giving her attention to it, she penned a note. It was to Warburton. Briefly she informed him that she had decided to join her sister ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... young man with his distinguished manner; she did her best to please—and nothing came of it. Why? she asked herself afterward. He had held her hand and talked about "the woman who gives purpose to a man's life" and all that. (Alas, that plebeian ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... came to Washington. She made Fanchon take her across the city in one instead of calling a carriage as they always do. They have a garage full of machines at home, and I don't know how many horses. She said it in a way to make people who had always ridden in public conveyances feel mighty plebeian and poor-folksy, although she insisted that street-cars are lots of fun. 'They give you a funny sensation when they stop.' Those ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... telephone lines, trying to walk a tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Mr. Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,—"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day. To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... dinner clothes of civilisation. The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities of oratory he made up in sturdy common sense. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her "plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... artisan, strongly marked with smallpox, and with sunken, heavy eyes—a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely. There was a woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with her one eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian, and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was something beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thou shake? Dishonour not the vengeance I designed: A queen, and own a base Plebeian mind! Let it drink deep in thy most vital part; Strike home, and do me reason ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... the Muses, on his estate at Casinum was not unlike that of Cicero at his native Arpinum, which he described (de Leg. II, 3) agreeably as on an island in the cold and clear Fibrenus just above its confluence with the more important river Liris, where, like a plebeian marrying into a patrician family, it lost its name but contributed its freshness. The younger Pliny built a study in the garden of his Laurentine villa near Ostia, which he describes (II, 17) with enthusiasm: "horti diaeta est, amores mei, re vera amores": and here ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... for her! She smiled, considering him. The events of the night had not ruffled him; his blonde face was still mild, insignificant, plebeian. Of such men slaves are made; their part is to obey orders, to be without responsibility, to be guided, governed, and protected by their betters. Miss Gregory, sister of a Major-General, friend of Colonial Governors, aunt of a Member of Parliament, author of "The Saharan ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... was indignant, however, at an implied comparison between himself and the plebeian Marquis de Vandriere. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sixty were of the family of Heremon, settled in the northern part of the island; twenty-nine of the posterity of Heber, settled in the south; twenty-four of that of Ir; three issued from Lugaid, the son of Ith. All these were of the race of Miledh; one only was a firbolg, or plebeian, and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... to get Mary and Maud as good husbands as they deserve." And Mary and Maud took the same view. It was in this plebeian household that Rickie spent part of the Christmas vacation. His own home, such as it was, was with the Silts, needy cousins of his father's, and combined to a peculiar degree the restrictions of hospitality with the discomforts of a boarding-house. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... first theater in the United States which boasted a tier composed exclusively of boxes. This was the second balcony. The parterre was entered from the first balcony, a circumstance which redeemed it from its old plebeian association as "the pit," in which it would have been indecorous for ladies to sit. The seats in the parterre were mahogany chairs upholstered in blue damask. The seats in the first balcony were mahogany sofas similarly upholstered. The box fronts had a white ground, with emblematic ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... surpassed in the coming battle of the Publishers, though it is a somewhat curious sight to see this haughty house, after having used its privileges to the last moment, descend now suddenly from its high monopolistic stand into the arena of competition, and compete for public favor with its plebeian rivals. Availing itself of the advantage which the monopoly hitherto attached to it naturally gives it, the house has just commenced issuing a cheap edition of the German classics, under the title 'Bibliothek fuer Alle. Meisterwerke deutscher Classiker,' in weekly parts, 6 cts. each; containing ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... copied was a woman in a brown jacket and a red petticoat with big feet showing underneath, sitting on a tub and cutting up some vegetables. She had her hair bunched up like an onion, a fashion which, as we all know, appealed to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, or at any rate to the plebeian Dutch. I must also tell you the name of this squire before I go any further: his name was Hammer—Paul ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... a patrician has stolen ox, sheep, ass, pig, or ship, whether from a temple, or a house, he shall pay thirtyfold. If he be a plebeian, he shall return tenfold. If the thief cannot pay, he ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Death with impartial summons knocks at the cabin of the poor and the palace of the wealthy; but in the undertaker's interest the equality of the grave must not be conceded. The plebeian who commits felo de se is served properly if he is hidden at the cross-roads by night and a stake driven through his body. The lunatic King who drowns himself, and drags his doctor to the same fate—who is a suicide duplicated with ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... must have been the ironical name of "Friend Haskall." The mother and child were now separated. The boy was levied to a Virginian named Freeland, who bore the military title of Major, and carried on the plebeian business of a publican. This man was of an extremely brutal disposition, and treated his slaves with most refined cruelty. His favourite punishment, which he facetiously called "Virginian play," was to flog his slaves severely, and then expose their lacerated flesh to ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... elm-shaded walks were the pride of the town. There was a trellised band-stand for summer concerts, and a tiny pond that accommodated a few boats in summer and a limited number of skaters in winter. Perhaps, most important of all, the common divided the plebeian East Side from the more pretentious West. James Blaisdell lived on the West Side. His wife said that everybody did who WAS anybody. They had lately moved there, and ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... dig up one coffin in order to lower another. Those thus disinterred are thrown in a heap in a corner of the cemetery, where skulls and bones are piled up like a haystack. As we were passing, Zarco and I looked at the skulls, wondering to whom they could have belonged, to rich or poor, noble or plebeian. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... church of San Sebastian—set up from the iron plates made in Belgium—and the churches of the various religious orders. Magnificence and show appeal most strongly to the Filipino. He is taught to look down on the Protestant religion as plebeian; the priests regard the Protestant with condescending superciliousness. Until the transportation facilities can be extended there will be no general coming together of Americans even on Sunday morning, as ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to me rather a plebeian action, to attack a man's castle, and then, if captured, crawl behind a drastic ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... conversation with one of them, I found that he as well as several others of them had served under Napoleon, and had even been patronised and promoted by him; but I suppose that being the sons of the ancient noblesse they thought that gratitude to a parvenu like him was rather too plebeian a virtue. Some of them, however, with whom I conversed after dinner seemed to regret the step they had taken. "If we are successful," said they, "it can only be by means of the Allied Armies, and who knows what conditions they may impose on France? If we should be unsuccessful, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... attendant. They never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening both were thoughtful. Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts much to heart. She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it. If pressed to explain ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the head of the family, supports me, as is his duty. Your philosophy is pretty enough, but it is not practical. The whole fault lies in our old-fashioned system of inheritance, the elder male of a family getting all the estate and the younger ones nothing at all. Here, in this crude and plebeian country, I believe it is the custom to provide for all one's children, and a father is at liberty to do so because his estate is ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... termed the very matins of Cupid. Hard and inexorable was the fate that sent thee thither, Piercie Shafton, to waste thy wit upon country wenches, and thy valour upon hob-nailed clowns! But that insult—that affront—had it been offered to me by the lowest plebeian, he must have died for it by my hand, in respect the enormity of the offence doth countervail the inequality of him by whom it is given. I trust I shall find this clownish roisterer not less willing to deal ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... without knocking; she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of high tea at six was allowed to ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... I have not seen him, but hear often of him from Alsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week. I can hardly take so fast as he gives. I have almost forgotten Butcher's meat, as Plebeian. Are you not glad the Cold is gone? I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be, when "winter bleak had charms for me." I cannot conjure up a kind similitude for those snowy flakes—Let them keep ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... themselves with the sacred things, that they might secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were received with hospitality ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... Moses family were at present interested, a man of fashionable exterior—a baronet at the very least. He had a martial air and bushy whiskers—his movements all the ease of nature added to the grace of art. The plebeian Moses felt an involuntary respect for the august presence, and, in the full gladness of his heart, took off his hat in humble reverence. We promised the reader one glimpse of the incomparable Warren de Fitzalbert. He has obtained it. That mysterious individual ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Mutines and such others as had rendered any services to the Roman people were introduced into the senate, and all received honorary rewards in fulfilment of the consul's engagement. Mutines was also made a Roman citizen, a proposition to that effect having been made to the commons by a plebeian tribune, on the authority of the senate. While these things were going on at Rome, Marcus Valerius Messala, arriving on the coast of Africa before daylight, made a sudden descent on the territory of ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... passed the mile-stone of criticism; and still others had left the earth and were floating in full azure of intoxication. Of the many wedding parties that sat down to breakfast, we soon made the commonplace discovery that the more plebeian the company, the more certain-orbed appeared to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the end of his term. Cincinnatus gave it up at the end of eight days. The dictator was forbidden to dispose of the public funds without the authority of the Senate, or to go out of Italy. He could not even ride on horseback without the permission of the people. He might be a plebeian; Marcius Rutilus, and Publius Philo were dictators. That magistracy was created for very different objects: to organize fetes for saints' days; to drive a sacred nail into the wall of the Temple of Jupiter; on one occasion to appoint the Senate. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... vitals were pierced by laws which Collins escaped—yet both committed the same offence. In later times Gibbon traced the rise of Christianity, and about the same time Paine accomplished another portion of the same risk—and the Government which prosecuted the plebeian, flattered the patrician. But Collins's time was rapidly drawing nigh. On the 13th of December, 1729, he expired, aged fifty-three years; and to show the esteem in which his character was held, the following notice was inserted in the newspapers of the day—all hostile to his views, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Peers should be added, and the peerage then remain fixed; the crown being restrained from making any new lords, but upon the extinction of families. This gave a great alarm to the nation, and many papers were wrote with spirit against it; amongst the rest, one called the Plebeian, now known to have been Sir Richard Steele's. In answer to this came out the Old Whig N deg.. 1. on the State of the Peerage, with some Remarks on the Plebeian. This controversy was carried on between the two friends, Addison and Steele, at first without any knowledge ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... plebeian rabble Dare assail my name at Rome, Where my noble spouse, Octavia, Weeps within her widowed home, Seek her; say the gods bear witness— Altars, augurs, circling wings— That her blood, with mine commingled, Yet shall ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... it does to some particularly favored mortals. There was no family, aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father had been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a fierce struggle to complete a college education. In the summer-time he had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter's tuition. He had worked as clerk in summer hotels, as a surveyor's assistant in laying street-railways, he had ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... visited by great numbers of persons, bringing chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one, which did not make the scene by any means less strange and weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... divided into these two sections is known. What is not known is how, besides this primary division of patres and clientes, there arose a second political class in the State, namely the plebs. The client as client had no political existence. [Sidenote: The plebeians.] But as a plebeian he had. Whether the plebs was formed of clients who had been released from their clientship, just as slaves might be manumitted; or of foreigners, as soldiers, traders, or artisans were admitted into the community; or partly of foreigners and partly ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... the Prince d'Athis, sir,' replied Raymond, with a plebeian's satisfaction in uttering the word 'prince.' 'He has been taking douches for some time past, and generally comes in the morning. But he is later to-day, on account of a burial, so he ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Cato was born in 234 B.C.[29] at the ancient Latin town of Tusculum. Little is known of his family except that it was plebeian, and possessed a small patrimony in the territory of the Sabines, close to the farm of M'. Curius Dentatus, one of Cato's great heroes and models. The heads of the family, so far as memory extended, had distinguished ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... that Mrs. Clinch once more brought the plebeian aroma of heated tram-cars and muddy street-crossings into the violet-scented ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... only plebeian envy, and I dare say, if I were a lovely duchess of the realm, I would ride in a coach-and-six, with a coronet on the top of my bonnet and a robe of velvet and ermine even in ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the persons of kings divine, and their right to reign indefeasible. He was an Emperor. But he saw around him a mother, brothers and sisters, not ennobled; whose humble state reminded him, and the world, that he was born a plebeian; and he had no heir to wait impatient for the imperial crown. He scourged the earth again, and again fortune smiled on him even in his wild extravagance. He bestowed kingdoms and principalities upon his kindred—put away the devoted wife of his youthful days, ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... Dukes, marquises, counts, with their duchesses, marchionesses, and countesses, waited in the streets for hours every day before Mr. Law's door to know the result. At last, to avoid the jostling of the plebeian crowd, which, to the number of thousands, filled the whole thoroughfare, they took apartments in the adjoining houses, that they might be continually near the temple whence the new Plutus was diffusing wealth. Every day the value of the old shares increased, and the fresh applications, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... affairs, that the principal event of that golden holiday-summer was the falling in love with each other of Everett's sister and Everett's friend. Agnes was the only daughter and special pride of a rich and well-born man. Barclay was of plebeian birth, with nothing in the world to depend on but his own talents, which he had abused, and the before-named patrimony, which was already nearly exhausted. It will at once be seen that there could hardly be a more felicitous conjunction of circumstances to make everybody miserable by one easy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... dear old Dake, the noble Newfoundland which H. gave us, look as intensely black and as grandly aristocratical as ever. He is the only high-bred dog on the river. There is another animal, by the plebeian name of John (what a name for a dog!), really a handsome creature, which looks as if he might have a faint sprinkling of good blood in his veins. Indeed, I have thought it possible that his great-grandfather was a bulldog. But he always ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... happiness. Optimism had been born in him in a twinkling, and set aside a knowledge of his parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this—the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never tolerate a daughter-in-law of such origin; would ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... extensively worn in Southern than in Northern Europe; more, as it is, in Southern England than in Northern Scotland. Hence, although we find many iron skull-caps, like hats, used by the military in the fifteenth century; and although we find traces of hats even in the plebeian costumes of the middle ages—yet we look upon the Spanish and Italian hat of the sixteenth century, as the more immediate origin of its degenerate successor, the actual chapeau. We need not trace the variations of its form through the seventeenth century, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... conquered such suspicion as contemptible, and cast out the passing weakness. The bare memory of it angered her now, causing her to fire a volley of yellow corn at a lordly peacock, which sent him scuttling down the steps on to the gravel in most plebeian haste. Yes, she had speedily cast out her weakness, thank heaven! What was all the pother about after all? This was not the first time she had played merry games with the affairs and affections of men. Madame de Vallorbes smiled to herself, recalling certain episodes, and shook her charming ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... stand at ease, or exchange the full suit for the undress coat and fatigue jacket. Wherever too there is mystery there is importance; there is no knowing for whom I may be mistaken; but let me once give my humble cognomen and occupation, and I sink immediately to my own level, to a plebeian station and a vulgar name; not even my beautiful hostess, nor my inquisitive friend, the Clockmaker, who calls me "Squire," shall extract that secret!) "Would ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... pen and the robe people, on the other hand, were exalted; so that now things have reached such a pretty pass that the greatest lord is without power, and in a thousand different manners is dependent upon the meanest plebeian. It is in this manner that things hasten from ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... found, first of all, to be scrupulously neat. It stood on a knoll, as do most gulch cabins, in order that occasional freshets might pass below, and the knoll looked as though it had been clipped with a pair of scissors. Not a crooked little juniper bush was allowed to intrude its plebeian sprawl among the dignified pines and the gracefully infrequent bushes. In front of the cabin itself was a "rockery" of pink quartz, on which were piled elk antlers. The building was L-shaped, of two low stories, had a veranda with a railing, and possessed various ornamental wood edgings, all ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... inferiors, the representative of high caste feeling all the world over, either reading or absorbed, never taking any notice of the crowds and glitter which I find so fascinating. More men in red, and then the crowd closes up again, to be again divided by a plebeian chair like mine, or by pariahs running with a coffin fifteen feet long, shaped like the trunk of a tree, or by coolies carrying burdens slung on bamboo poles, uttering deafening cries, or by a marriage procession with songs and music, or by a funeral procession with weeping and wailing, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... he received lands and castles as security.[609] Fortunately the Royal Council included a number of Jurists and Churchmen who were good business men. One of them, an Angevin, Robert Le Macon, Lord of Treves, of plebeian birth, had entered the Council during the Regency. He was the first among those of lowly origin who served Charles VII so ably that he came to be called The Well Served (Le Bien Servi).[610] Another, the Sire de Gaucourt, had aided his ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Mordecai! How she looked! How she stamped the floor with her dainty foot when I hinted at the fact that my maternal grandfather was neither duke nor lord! How she hushed my 'impertinence,' as she styled it, with such invectives as 'fool, idiot, plebeian'! Heigho! But I felt that it was unmanly in me to provoke mother so, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... Ned,' returned his father, laying down the newspaper at which he had been glancing carelessly, and throwing himself back in the window-seat, 'I believe you know how very much I dislike what are called family affairs, which are only fit for plebeian Christmas days, and have no manner of business with people of our condition. But as you are proceeding upon a mistake, Ned—altogether upon a mistake—I will conquer my repugnance to entering on such matters, and give you a perfectly plain and candid ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... an important part. Addison, in one of his latest political and literary efforts, defended the proposed change. He described his pamphlet as the work of an "Old Whig." It was written as a reply to a pamphlet by Steele condemning the Bill, and signed "A Plebeian." Reply, retort, and rejoinder followed in more and more heated and personal style. The excitement created caused the measure to be dropped for the session, but it was brought in again in the session following, and it passed through all its stages in the Lords ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia; or, The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion, ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... of a Londoner discovering some new thing, fell into quick talk with Fenwick; looked him meanwhile up and down, his features, bearing, clothes; noticed his North-Country accent, and all the other signs of the plebeian. And presently Fenwick, placed at his ease, began for the first time to expand, became argumentative and explosive. In a few minutes he was laying down the law in his Westmoreland manner—attacking the Academy—denouncing certain pictures of the year—with a flushed, confident ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... where even the finest minds are apt to be afflicted by the disease of timidity, and was doubtless a leading cause of the cordial reception which in England the idea of women's political emancipation has long received among politicians. Bebel's book, speedily translated into English, furnished the plebeian complement to Mill's. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks." ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... well worth having, and indeed in itself contemptible, is above the material and titular; one cannot quite say how. There, however, is the flavour. Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of famous dishes; taken alone, the former would be nauseating, the latter plebeian. It is thus, or somewhat so, when you have a poet, still better a scholar, attached to your household. Sir Willoughby deserved to have him, for he was above his county friends in his apprehension of the flavour bestowed by the man; and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and we are anxious ourselves to contribute any thing in our power to the settlement of a point so obscure. What we have wished to protest against, is the spirit of partisanship in which this question has too generally been discussed. For, whilst some with a foolish affectation of plebeian sympathies overwhelm us with the insipid commonplaces about birth and ancient descent, as honors containing nothing meritorious, and rush eagerly into an ostentatious exhibition of all the circumstances which favor the notion of a humble station and humble connections; others, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Synod. First, occasional officiations of ministers outside their own churches were authorized; secondly, there was a movement to revive the authority and office of ruling elder and other officers; thirdly, "plebeian ordination," or lay ordination, ordination by the hands of the brethren of the church in the absence of superior officers, was no longer allowed;[d] and fourthly, there was a variation from the "personal and public confession" in favor ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... confusion into the luxuriance of the furnishings, yet will nonchalantly tolerate the incongruity of a miserable fragment of a library made up of the cheapest and meanest editions to be found in the market, such as would be scorned by those of the most limited means and plebeian tastes. These will be found inappropriately housed amid the most sumptuous surroundings. A single rug to adorn the floor, or a single vase resting on a mantle, will often be found to have cost ten times as much as the whole home library. And yet the intellects of these people ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... Mexicans, she had to proclaim a superiority not taken for granted, and the nice poise was gone. In her the generations—Henry IV., the Grand Monarch, and all of that stately line—in her they stooped. And an element of sheerest vulgarity, as plebeian as a Jew's diamond, crept in perforce. Poor tarnished escutcheon of Orleans! Poor princess of the Blood, become menial with scouring it! She was weary. Over this New World there floated too much of obscuring democratic dust. So she ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... two friendships: one, with the small daughter of our concierge and one with a little Russian princess, a month younger than himself. He calls them both 'boys,' having no idea yet of the less sublime sex, but he likes the plebeian best. May God make you happy on this ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... "vulgar," or "snobbish," and would have thought it especially unbecoming in him to exhibit the smallest degree of annoyance at any untoward event. It took a good deal to put him out of countenance, and he esteemed it rather plebeian to go his own errands, or, indeed, ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... felt also some resentment and curiosity to see the person whom the director of these Munich circeans considered in adequate succession to the peerless Stamboulane. The announcement had at least kindled the public: being plebeian, the promised aristocrat was already discussed. The family was existent, whether this variety vocalist was legitimately a daughter being another question. Vieradlers was a barony that had a right to fly its four eagles—as the name signifies—in the face ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... No evasion, miss. Were it not that you depend upon personal attractions, what in the world could induce you to reject a situation, the only one where you can acquire polish of manners and divest yourself of your plebeian prejudices? ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,' everyone would see ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton |
