"Rusticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neatness in Pastoral is not to be allow'd, so rusticity (I do not mean that which Plato, in his Third Book of a Commonwealth, mentions which is but a part of a down right honesty) but Clownish stupidity, such as Theophrastus, in his Character of a Rustick, describes; or that disagreeable unfashionable roughness which ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... somewhat warped; but of this perversion he has made very little use. The irregularities in sir Roger's conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity, and that negligence which solitary ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... occasion of keen controversy among the critics of the time. Entirely averse to the conventional method of idealizing the character of the country girl out of all semblance to nature, Malibran was essentially realistic in preserving the rusticity, awkwardness, and naivete of peasant-life. One critic argued: "It is by no means rare to discover in the humblest walk of life an inborn grace and delicacy of Nature's own implanting; and such assuredly is the model from which ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... general as Miss Rosey's compliment was, it had its full effect upon her father, who was at times dimly conscious of his hopeless rusticity and its incongruity with his surroundings. "Yes," he said awkwardly, with a slight relaxation of his aggressive attitude; "yes, in course it's more bang-up style, but it don't pay—Rosey—it don't pay. Yer's the Pontiac that oughter be bringin' in, ez ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... thirteenth century Gothic, with a series of Romanesque windows in the apse. Here, too, the country immediately environing Auvers and Mery is of the order made familiar by Daubigny and his school. French farmyards, stubble-thatched cottages, and all the rusticity which is so charming in nature draws continually group after group of artists from Paris to this particular spot at all seasons of the year. The homely side of country life has ever had a charm ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... against the excess that provokes and the excess that avenges. The revolt against the ancien regime in letters made possible the Ode that is the high-tide mark of modern English inspiration, but it was parodied in page on page of maundering rusticity. Byron saw the danger, but was borne headlong by the rapids. Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories and his performance. Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by Rousseau; but the former is, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... fellow. He was a tall, gaunt, long-headed man, with large features and spectacles, and a deep, internal voice, with a twang of rusticity in it; and he goggled over his plate, like a horse. I often thought that a bag of corn would have hung well on him. His laugh was equine, and showed his teeth upward at the sides. Wordsworth, who notices similar mysterious manifestations on the part of donkeys, would have thought ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... breeding up their sons to the liberal professions: and they are conscious that the company, the language, and the style of life, which their children would be accustomed to at home, are beneath what would be suited to their future professions. Public schools efface this rusticity, and correct the faults of provincial dialect: in this point of view they are highly advantageous. We strongly recommend it to such parents to send their children to large public schools, to Rugby, Eton, or Westminster; not to any small school; much less to one in their ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... the present day can scarcely be contented with tall, waving timothy in the front door-yard, and the rickety board-fence that enclosed a scene of almost primitive rusticity—the state of things in ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... massed in a sumptuous simplicity above a neck that would have made an average woman's fortune. This glowing description, however, must be lowered or heightened in tone by the association of these characteristics with an undefinable simplicity of mien, a certain slight rusticity of effect. The town spoke in her well-cut gown and a few simple adornments, but the ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... The first instance we shall mention is that of Battista Mantovano, whose eclogues, once much read and still worth reading, appeared among his earliest works about 1480. They are a mixture of real and conventional rusticity, but the former tends to prevail. They represent the mode of thought of a well-meaning village clergyman, not without a certain leaning to liberal ideas. As Carmelite monk, the writer may have had occasion to mix freely ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... his daughter's summons, and greeted her friend with much cordiality, while Peggy was agreeably surprised to note the easy self-possession with which Esther sustained her part in the conversation. Contact with the world had rubbed away the rusticity of manner which still characterised Mellicent, and though by no possibility could Esther be called pretty, there was an undeniable attractiveness about the tall, neat figure and intellectual face. Peggy knew that her father was agreeably impressed, for the colonel had a tell-tale expression, and ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Casa is evidently no longer a cottage; perhaps the estate attached to a villa. There is probably still a flavour of rusticity about it.] ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Shore towns. Her perfection of idyllic rusticity ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Martin was becoming moulded like pliant wax, the boy of the greenwood was losing all his rusticity, and yet, retaining his keen love of nature, was learning to look beyond nature to nature's God. At times Martin was very weary of Kenilworth, and almost wished himself back in the greenwood again, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... been," and that "the progress of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive social and political changes which have transformed ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... plainness of his attire, and a certain not unpleasing rusticity of air, Sir Francis comprehended at once that he was fresh from the country; but he also felt satisfied, from his bearing and deportment, that he was a gentleman: a term not quite so vaguely applied then, as it is now-a-days. The ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... addicted in war: a treacherous, deceitful, and inconsistent system of politics prevailed; and even those small remains of fidelity and honor, which were preserved in the councils of the other European princes, were ridiculed in Italy, as proofs of ignorance and rusticity. Ludovico, duke of Milan, who invited the French to invade Naples, had never desired or expected their success; and was the first that felt terror from the prosperous issue of those projects which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; but, withal, a dignity in his large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which give him ease and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... displayed their different hues over the hills and fields. The scene was in every way pleasing to the eyes of the spectators. The number of the carriages of Hitachi's party was about ten in all, and the style and appearance of the party showed no traces of rusticity of taste. It might have been imagined that the party of the Saigu journeying towards or from Ise, might be something similar to ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... one or the other. I thought Rose the most graceful of the two in her carriage, but there could be no doubt as to Helen's being the most dignified; both girls were almost rustic in their manners, but rusticity and vulgarity are very distinct in their feelings and attributes. They could not do or say aught that was vulgar or at variance with the kindnesses of life—those tender nothings which make up so large a something in the account of every day's existence. Similar, withal, ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... still proceeding at the Meeting House. The valley was quiet. Scarcely a sound broke the perfect peace of the Sabbath morning. The sun blazed down, a blistering fragrant heat, and the laden atmosphere of the valley suggested only the rusticity, the simple innocence of a ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... rusticity—domestic Arcadia on a small scale," said John; "I should like to invite myself to tea with them. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... have made so much, the larkspur, which is a pretty cornfield weed, and the scarlet field-poppy, which flowers all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening grain—have not immigrated to our shores. Like a certain sweet rusticity and charm of European rural life, they do not thrive readily under our skies. Our fleabane has become a common roadside weed in England, and a few other of our native less-known plants have gained a foothold in the Old World. Our beautiful jewel-weed has recently ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Parisians find enjoyment. The contrast in the neighbourhood of London, is most striking. It is easy to laugh at the dulness and vulgarity of a London citizen, who divides his time between his counting-house and his villa, or at the coarseness and rusticity of an English country squire; but there is no description of men to whom the national character of our country is more ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... treated in this course with much depth of philosophy. This kind of merit is often found among the German writers; but SCHLEGEL has no equal in the art of inspiring his own admiration; in general, be shows himself attached to a simple taste, sometimes bordering on rusticity; but he deviates from his usual opinions in favour of the inhabitants of the South. Their play on words is not the object of his censure; he detests the affectation which owes its existence to the spirit of society: but that ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... that high polish in America that is obtained by long intercourse with the great world, than is to be found in nearly every European country, there is much less positive rusticity also. There, the extremes of society are widely separated, repelling rather than attracting each other; while among ourselves, the tendency is to gravitate towards a common centre. Thus it is, that all things in America become subject to a mean law that is productive of ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... have been well known to be truly Splenatick, and that my Spleen arises from having contracted so great a Delicacy, by reading the best Authors, and keeping the most refined Company, that I cannot bear the least Impropriety of Language, or Rusticity of Behaviour. Now, Sir, I have ever looked upon this as a wise Distemper; but by late Observations find that every heavy Wretch, who has nothing to say, excuses his Dulness by complaining of the Spleen. Nay, I saw, the other Day, two ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... social animal has met with general assent; in fact, men do derive from social life much more convenience than injury. Let satirists then laugh their fill at human affairs, let theologians rail, and let misanthropes praise to their utmost the life of untutored rusticity, let them heap contempt on men and praises on beasts; when all is said, they will find that men can provide for their wants much more easily by mutual help, and that only by uniting their forces can they escape from the dangers that on every side beset them: not to say how much more excellent ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... up in their houses. Thus Verres possessed a whole gallery of objects of art which he had stolen in Sicily. Gradually the Romans assumed a gloss of Greek art and literature. This new culture was called "humanity," as opposed to the "rusticity" of the old ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in "Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white orchards, and golden harvests—the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... in truth a chapel at all, but a consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands, or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside were miracles themselves in that, with their ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... not called Do-funny for nothing, not even playfully and in the free vernacular of rusticity at its freest. ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... city, is a stream, or rather parent of many streams, that water the streets of their own free will, supplying thirsty beasts with copious draughts in torrid weather, and keeping up a perpetual air of rusticity ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... covered with the green weepings of four willows, which drooped over it, from their station, at each corner. At the opposite side of this Pierian reservoir, was a hermitage, or arbour of laurels, shaped in the stiff rusticity of the Dutch school, in the prevalence of which it was probably planted; behind this arbour, the ground, after a slight ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... direction,—a flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... over the banks the reins thrashed him. Resenting the insult, his heels flew high. The "pony dot" flew higher and jangled and screeched with accumulating vindictiveness. To what fearsome figure had this hasty flight transformed the mean little emblem of rusticity? A tipsy goblin? No—rather a limping aeroplane of the Stone Age; and it rattled like a belfry under the shock of bombardment. Could there be any crueller device to tie an unsophisticated horse to, and a horse whose single thought had been a merry morning? It would, when the crisis came, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... were not only trees, but bushes and even flowers. The narrow footway was bordered by little gardens, which, with their wooden palings and well-kept shrubs, gave to the place an air of quaint and sober rusticity; and even as I entered a bevy of work-girls, with gaily-coloured blouses and hair aflame in the sunlight, brightened up the quiet background like the wild flowers that ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... thousand navvies, the outsweepings of jails and the galleys, have come down to the works; a horde of contractors, sub-contractors, with the several staffs of clerks, inspectors, and suchlike, have settled on the spot, ravaging its beauty, uprooting its repose, vulgarising its simple rusticity, and converting the very gem of the Mediterranean into a dreary swamp—a vast amphitheatre, where liberated felons, robbing contractors, foul miasma, centrifugal pumps, and tertian fevers, fight all day for the mastery. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... situation that abounded with difficulties. She blamed herself, she blamed her father, she blamed Gilian for his inability to be otherwise than God had made him. In contrast to his gawky shyness—the rusticity of the farm and hill, rose up constant in her remembrance the confident young gentleman she had run away from without so much as a knowledge of his name. She cried, and the afternoon came, a blush of fire and flowing gold upon the hills, the purple of the steeps behind her darkened; upon ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... French one. French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... to pleasing effect, since its dull-brown hue composed well with the red and russet glow of the leaves about her, and its short waist, close sleeves, and scant skirt, reaching to the instep, the immemorial fashion of the hills, were less of a grotesque rusticity since there was prevalent elsewhere a vogue of quasi-Empire modes, of which the cut of her garb was reminiscent. A saffron kerchief about her throat had in its folds a necklace of over-cup acorns in three strands, and her hair, meekly parted on her forehead, ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... his being a runaway from justice. Its expression is open, frank, and manly; whatever of fear there is in it certainly cannot be due to any consciousness of crime. It is a handsome face, moreover, framed in a profusion of blonde hair, which falls curling down cheeks of ruddy hue. An air of rusticity in the cut of his clothes would bespeak him country bred, probably the son of a farmer. And just that he is, his father being a yeoman-farmer near Godalming, some thirty miles back along the road. Why the youth is so far from ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... ice-house that never failed. Beside all this, we had the pleasure of gathering our tomatoes from our own garden, and receiving our milk from our own cow. Our manner of life was infinitely more to my taste than before; it gave us all the privileges of rusticity, which are fully as incompatible with a residence in a little town of Western America as with a residence in London. We lived on terms of primaeval intimacy with our cow, for if we lay down on our lawn she did not scruple to take a sniff at the book we were reading, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... himseeming there proceeded thence a sweetness which fulfilled him with a pleasure such as he had never before felt. The young lady, seeing this, began to misdoubt her lest his so fixed looking upon her should move his rusticity to somewhat that might turn to her shame; wherefore, calling her women, she rose up, saying, 'Cimon, abide with God.' To which he replied, 'I will begone with thee'; and albeit the young lady, who was still in fear of him, would have declined his company, she could ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... heart by song and sacred poesy."(26) the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp, which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity, and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works, captivated his contemporaries ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... than courage, in some of their most celebrated actions. However that be, this is certain, that they were at first a nation of soldiers and husbandmen: roughness was long an applauded character among them; and a sort of rusticity reigned, even ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... broth which relished as if made of burnt wool, of flesh, which, in its sable and singed shape, seemed to put me on a level with Richard Coeur-de-Lion,—when he ate up the head of a Moor carbonadoed, and of other viands savouring rather of the rusticity of this ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... with the following just remonstrance:—"Let those who say the church has had no philosophers, nor eloquent and learned men, observe who and what they were who founded, established, and adorned it; let them cease to accuse our faith of rusticity, and confess their mistake." (Jer. Prol. in Lib. de Ser. Eccl.) Of these writers, several, as Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Bardesanes, Hippolitus, Eusebius, were voluminous writers. Christian writers abounded particularly about the year 178. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... of modern pantomime; another was a kind of pantaloon or charlatan, and much of the rest consisted of practical jokes, like that of the Italian Polincinella. After their introduction at Rome, they received many improvements; they lost their native rusticity; their satire was good-natured; their jests were seemly, and kept in check by the laws of good taste. They were not acted by common professional performers, and even a Roman citizen might take part in them without disgrace. They ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... me for some time that in this field we need to return in our study of varieties and strains of nut trees to the standards and ideals of the earlier and ruder period of American Pomology when rusticity of tree, including storm endurance, freedom from troublesome diseases and insect pests, as well as productiveness and dessert quality were the primary consideration next after satisfactory ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might have the atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should happen: that being graunted, he rested him on the floore, unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after entred a faire ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white asse, with a dwarfe behind her leading a warlike steed, that bore the armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes hand. Shee, falling ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... same as the walls and built up like them. Crudely chiseled, elaborately ornamental window casings, lintels and sills form a curious feature of this facade. Clothed as it is with clinging ivy and climbing roses, the house suggests an effect of both stateliness and rusticity. ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... here. The tone of the place is excellent, being equally free from rusticity, coarse egotism and affectation. There is little intimacy or geniality, but the conversation is dignified and elevated, with scarcely a trace of commonplace or gossip. It would be idle to look for anything like cordiality between ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... years ago a queer fellow from the country went to New York, and, among the sights and experiences he had planned for, he went to Barnum's Museum. Mr. Greenwood was then its manager, and noticed with some interest his patron's rusticity when he called for a ticket. He asked Mr. Greenwood, after having paid for the card of admittance, 'Where is Barnum?' As Mr. Barnum happened to be in sight on the entrance floor, Mr. Greenwood, pointing to him ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... repeat) we find in their early days no trace of any examination at all. To be sure—and as perhaps you know—the first archives of this University were burned in the 'Town and Gown' riots of 1381 by the Townsmen, whose descendants Erasmus describes genially as 'combining the utmost rusticity with the utmost malevolence.' But no student will doubt that Cambridge used pretty much the same system as Oxford, and the system was this:—When a candidate presented himself before the Chancellor for a License in Arts, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society; the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there, top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, cars, come tumbling in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewigkeit hin: From ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Rhine—but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting country—unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe—lies in a small triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... cynical philosopher, the reserved English gentleman, the gay man of the world, you are all of 'em by turns, aren't you, Carleton? he! has gone and made a very cavaliero servente of himself to a piece of rusticity, and spent all to- day in helping a ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of disappointment with the change which the intervening years had wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. However this may be, he found Burns, as he thought, not improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his potations, more coarse and gross in his talk, than when ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works. Those highly magnify him, whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... there, attended by a number of his people, who appeared to be true Flemings, and to have all the rusticity and unpolished manners of their country. The Bishop was of the House of Barlemont, one of the principal families in Flanders. All of this house have shown themselves Spaniards at heart, and at that time were firmly attached to Don John. ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... will spread, the net-work of communication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the daily paper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered, will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islands and inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that wider network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Corot, Daubigny, and in this very simplicity often lies their charm. No costume or grandiose outline is here as in Brittany, no picturesque poverty, no poetic archaisms; all is rustic and pastoral, but with the rusticity ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... stage triumph for Madame Sand. It helped to draw to her pastoral tales the attention they deserved, but had not instantly won in all quarters. Theophile Gautier writes playfully of this piece: "The success of Francois le Champi has given all our vaudeville writers an appetite for rusticity. Only let this go on a little, and we shall be inundated by what has humorously been called the 'ruro-drama.' Morvan hats and Berrichon head-dresses will invade the scenes, and no language be spoken but ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... faces, and a cynical humor, oftener than any other expression, in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; pretty young men,—the schoolmaster, the lawyer, or student at law, the shop-keeper,—all looking rather suburban than rural. In these days, there is absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor of the soil leaves its earth-mould on the person. There was likewise a considerable proportion of young and middle-aged women, many of them stern in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very definite line of eyebrow; a type of womanhood in which a bold ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rather plentifully; yet the valetudinarian (excuse my rusticity, for I rejoice at seeing it) appears to equal the traveller in appetite, and to be contented with ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... spacious room, fitted with luxurious rusticity. To the right of centre are a couple of broad windows, leading to a veranda. In the corner, right is a table, with a telephone. In the centre of the room is a large table, with a lamp and books, and a leather arm-chair at each side. To the ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... "I have so overcome her that she will woo me in season and out of season. I shall boast the most loving, patient spouse in Christendom. Mark, now, how my bird flies to a call. Come hither, rusticity." ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... could. His voice was good, frank, and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct, and forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him, businesslike, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said that he was a usually taciturn man, glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... account he determined on a journey to Paris, when Paris was the center of politeness; he there learnt to dress, to dance, and to move his hands gracefully in conversation; and returned a most consummate coxcomb. But after a very few years he relapsed into rusticity of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Rusticity, nature, sylvan solitudes, and all that, were exquisite bound in Russia, with gold lettering and tinted leaves; wonderfully alluring viewed at leisure with the gallery to one's self, and the light at the proper angle, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... Simple rusticity and ignorance are the chief characteristics of the country people. They used to follow and stare at me as though I were a visitor from Mars or some other planet. When I spoke to them in their language they were delighted, and respectfully hung on my words with bared heads. When, however, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... or two made up the company at Penshurst. The pages and the young gentlewomen (all under the eye of an aged majordomo) moved sedately in the old house, pacing soberly the gardens beneath the open casements; but when they reached the sweet rusticity of the outward ways, fruit-dropping orchards and sunny spaces, they were for lighter spirits, heels, and wits. With laughter young hand caught at young hand, and fair forms circled swiftly an imaginary May-pole. Tall flowers upon the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of public danger, provided for the defence both of the East and of the West. Maximian was born a peasant, and, like Aurelian, in the territory of Sirmium. Ignorant of letters, [7] careless of laws, the rusticity of his appearance and manners still betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction. War was the only art which he professed. In a long course of service, he had distinguished himself on every frontier of the empire; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Stainer's[33]{37} are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably delightful airs, and the words charm us moderns by their quaintness and rusticity, but they are far from the exquisite loveliness of the mediaeval |78| things. Gleams of great beauty are, however, sometimes found amid matter that in the process of transmission has almost ceased to be poetry. Here, for instance, are five ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... the place we lay at last night, to meet with a gentleman that had accoutred himself in a night-cap wig, a coat with long pockets and slit sleeves, and a pair of shoes with high scollop tops; but we soon found by his conversation that he was a person who laughed at the ignorance and rusticity of the country people, and was resolved to live and die ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Frederick, who happens to please him, he turns criticism into eulogy; and for a living poet like Wordsworth he tempers praise by spiteful criticism. [Footnote: Carlyle's praise of Wordsworth's "fine, wholesome rusticity" is often quoted, but only in part. If you read the whole passage (in Reminiscences) you will find the effect of Carlyle's praise wholly spoiled by a heartless dissection of a poet, with whom, as Carlyle confessed, he had very slight acquaintance.] He writes a score ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... opportunity of knowing the state of society and the character of man in retirement, must be aware that the amazing disparity subsisting between the extremes of rusticity and of polished life arises far less from original disproportions of capacity than from the accidental circumstances which attach to the two conditions. Education has a tendency to remove these ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... Point, in July, 1839, he was not a prepossessing figure of a young gentleman. The rusticity of his previous occupation and breeding was upon him. Seventeen years old, hardly more than five feet tall, but solid and muscular, with no particular charm of face or manner, no special dignity of carriage, he was only a common sort ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... I am quite inexcusable. You have been so kind as to send me some charming Lieder, and to accompany them with the most gracious lines in the world. How could I fail to thank you for them immediately? What rusticity!—Deign to think of this no longer, Princess; and permit me not to "judge" your songs,— magisterial competency would fail me utterly,—but to tell you that I have read them with much pleasure. The one of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manner was not prepossessing - scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or LANDERTNESS, so that when he said the music was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim. The Marble ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... way of enjoying itself. People built themselves elaborate palaces in the wilderness, and lived in a fantastic kind of rusticity, with every luxury of civilisation included. For this life one needed an entirely separate wardrobe, with doeskin hunting-boots and mountain-climbing skirts—all very picturesque and expensive. It reminded Montague of a jest that he had heard about Mrs. Vivie Patton, whose husband had complained ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... sister of Baden; nothing of the titled cocadetta, like her cousin of Monaco; Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the noble dames of the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... age. If it is not a well of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English, the vernacular of his age—sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength. ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... will distinguish a stranger in the streets of a large town. On mentioning this circumstance next day to ——, he said that the Londoners pretend to recognize a rustic air in a countess, if she has been six months from town. Rusticity in such cases, however, must merely mean a little behind ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity, and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of domestic life to exquisite ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... there was only one—were doing a rushing business. They were playing very successfully on that trait of human nature which feels itself glorified and exalted when it has got something for nothing. The rustics, black and white, and some who had not the excuse of rusticity, were falling readily into the trap and losing their hard-earned money. Every now and then a man—one of their confederates, of course, would make a striking winning, and this served as a bait for the rest of the spectators. Schwalliger looked on with growing interest, always ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... admit to herself that the young fellow was very undemonstrative at dinner, and that he did not exhibit the rusticity that she half hoped to see. She gained the impression that he was observing her father very closely, and that no remark of his escaped him. "He has the eyes of a lynx," she thought, with a frown. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... James Frederic Prevost, is a most amiable and honourable man. Under the garb of coarse rusticity you will find, if you know him, refinement, wit, a delicate sense of propriety, the most inflexible intrepidity, incorruptible integrity, and disinterestedness. I wish you could know him; but it would ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... many travellers resort, (thanks now to his Grace of Beaufort for a better road than ours) the first inquiry that hunger taught us to make of a countryman, was for the hotel. "Hotel! Hotel! Sir? Oh, the sign of the Tobacco Pipe! There it is over the way." Rusticity and comfort often go together. We entered the inn, homely as it was, quite certain that any transition must be paradisaical, compared with our ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... and was obliged to me for informing her, that she must certainly come of the Setons of Windygoul. I wish you could have seen how prettily she blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... passed rapidly through three editions, and a fourth was printed. Several of Clare's influential friends took exception to a few passages in the first issue on the ground that they were rather too outspoken in their rusticity, and Lord Radstock strongly urged the omission in subsequent editions of several lines which he characterized as "Radical slang." Mr. Taylor contested both points for some time, but Lord Radstock threatened to disown Clare if he declined to oblige his patrons, and the poet at length made the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... love you the best of them all, Call round here whenever you care, And, if you should run against Brown in the hall, Just give him an insolent stare. And when, from rusticity taking a rest, You come up to London and meet me, Remember the evenings when you were my guest, And take me out, Thomas, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... was no longer able to laugh at his rusticity, but, on the other hand, was forced to admit to himself, with a twinge of jealousy, that the rough, uncultured boy of former days had wholly eclipsed him in every desirable accomplishment, as well as in the solid branches. For Maurice spent his evenings in quite a ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... the public of course set him down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lest the smell betray thy rusticity. Walk with gravity, and speak deliberately, but not so as to seem to be listening to thyself; for ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... it suggests lunch. At the mouth of Redstone Creek, a mile below Dunlap Creek, our port of departure, we turn in to a shaly beach at the foot of a wooded slope, in semi-rusticity, and fortify the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... candlelight," remarked Unity. "A Congo in the heat of the afternoon, a jig before sunset,—la! I had rather plough by moonlight. As well be a grasshopper in a daisy field! Elegance by waxlight becomes rusticity in the sunshine,—and of all things I would not be rustic! Oh, Mr. Cary, I've caught my ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external, which in the living prototype we should term countenance; as if a chastened consciousness of her high destiny and exalted character shone through the natural rusticity of her features, and touched them with a certain grace and dignity, emanating from the mind alone, which only mind could give, and mind perceive. I have seen within the last few days, three copies of this picture, in all of them the charming simplicity and rusticity, but in none ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... world. Newspapers and politics and visits to "Lunnon" weren't for the likes of him. Then came the change. These earlier chapters have given an idea of what happened to Bun Hill, and how the flood of novel things had poured over its devoted rusticity. Bert Smallways was only one of countless millions in Europe and America and Asia who, instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Rusticity's ungainly form May cloud the highest mind; But when the heart is nobly warm, The good excuse ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... this rusticity, or roguishness—he knew not which—the butler, in high dudgeon at Israel's republican familiarity, as well as black as a thundercloud with the general insult offered to an illustrious household by a party of armed thieves, as he viewed them, declined ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... that of Dorothy. He hastened forward, and soon got near enough to distinguish the faces of the four, and to perceive that the ladies were being annoyed by the unwelcome attentions of the two fops, who, attracted doubtless by Dolly's beauty and apparent rusticity, were endeavouring to force acquaintance upon the buxom hostess of the "Swanne." Johnnie seized both the situation and the offenders in a moment. Grasping the youths by the nape of the neck, he cracked their curled heads together until they yelled with pain. Then he forced their noses down ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... at an elegant rustic lodge (see the Cut,) where commences a new carriage-road[3] to Croydon; which winds round the flank of the hill, and is protected by hanging woods. The lodge is in the best taste of ornate rusticity, with the characteristic varieties of gable, dripstone, portico, bay-window, and embellished chimney: of the latter there are some specimens in the best style of our olden architects. This building, as well as the other rural edifices in the grounds, and the whole disposal of the latter, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... barbarism, Vandalism, Gothicism^; mauvis gout [Fr.], bad taste; gaucherie, awkwardness, want of tact; ill-breeding &c (discourtesy) 895. courseness &c adj.^; indecorum, misbehavior. lowness, homeliness; low life, mauvais ton [Fr.], rusticity; boorishness &c adj.; brutality; rowdyism, blackguardism^; ribaldry; slang &c (neology) 563. bad joke, mauvais plaisanterie [Fr.]. [Excess of ornament] gaudiness, tawdriness; false ornament; finery, frippery, trickery, tinsel, gewgaw, clinquant^; baroque, rococo. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... as if deprecating any thing so decided; "but Miss Leicester is a very nice girl; clever, I should say, decidedly; there's a shade of one can hardly call it rusticity—about her manner; but I like it, myself—I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... be amiss to hint that the success of the peroration depends much on the manner of the parties in conforming themselves to the emotions and action of their advocates. Stupidity, rusticity, and a want of sensibility and attention, as it is said, throw cold water on a cause against which the orator can not be too well provided. I have, indeed, often seen them act quite contrary to their ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... flourishes. Gilt edges, rounded or clipped corners, tinted surfaces or any oddity of lettering, such as German or Old English text, are to be avoided. A photograph or any ornamentation whatever upon a card savors of ill-breeding or rusticity. Have the script engraved always, never printed. The engraved autograph is no longer considered in good taste, neither are written cards as elegant as those ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... vulgarity, vulgarism; barbarism, Vandalism, Gothicism|!; mauvis gout[Fr], bad taste; gaucherie, awkwardness, want of tact; ill-breeding &c. (discourtesy) 895. courseness &c. adj[obs3].; indecorum, misbehavior. lowness, homeliness; low life, mauvais ton[Fr], rusticity; boorishness &c. adj.; brutality; rowdyism, blackguardism[obs3]; ribaldry; slang &c. (neology) 563. bad joke, mauvais plaisanterie[Fr]. [Excess of ornament] gaudiness, tawdriness; false ornament; finery, frippery, trickery, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... my neck. And so we were friends. When I had set him down, which I did presently, for I shuddered at the idea of the people thinking that I was showing off the CLERGYMAN, I looked at the boy. In his face was great sweetness mingled with great rusticity, and I could not tell whether he was the child of gentlefolk or of peasants. He did not say a word, but walked away to join his aunt, who was waiting for him at the gate of the churchyard. He kept his head turned ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... master of all those languages, which John Trott seldom speaks at all, and never well; consequently you need be a stranger nowhere. This is the way, and the only way, of having 'du monde', but if you have it not, and have still any coarse rusticity about you, may not one apply to you the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... by pleasurable excitement; she carried her hat in her hand, and seemed to have been walking bare-headed, for there were signs of wind-play in her abundant black hair. But neither face nor attire suggested rusticity: the former was handsome, spirited, with a hint of uncommon things in its changeful radiance; the latter was the result of perfect taste choosing at will among the season's costumes. At her throat were fastened two blossoms of wild rose, with the dew still on them, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... goodly and gallant town, almost fitted to invite the temporary residence of holiday-making Londoners who are fond of the water. At all times it is a pretty sail to Harwich and thence to Felixstowe, that quiet watering-place, a seaside residence that has still a pleasant flavour of rusticity about it, with a fine crisp sea-sand floor ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... in his own eyes and in the eyes of the village girls of Harby, a vastly fine gentleman. If they had ever heard of the sun-god, Phoebus Apollo would have presented himself to their rusticity in some such guise as the personality of the local knight. Sir Blaise had been to London—once—had kissed the King's hand at Whitehall, and had ever since striven vehemently to be more Londonish than the Londoner. He talked with what he thought to be the town's drawl; he walked, as he believed, ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Bearer had on, that he walked all the Way to bring it me, tho dated from York. My Misfortune is that I cannot talk, and I found the Messenger had so much of me, that he could think better than speak. He had, I observed, a polite Discerning hid under a shrewd Rusticity: He delivered the Paper with a Yorkshire ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... short stature, broad-shouldered and muscular. Liked by his friends and colleagues for his frankness, there was a salt savour in his forthright speech—he never learned to play the courtier. His manners were not polished, a certain rusticity clung to him always, but his honesty was appreciated and he held positions of trust. Affectionate, slow—with the Dutch slowness praised by Rodin—and tenacious, he set out to conquer a small corner in the kingdom of art, and to-day ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... humour, as it is shown in the great body of comic writers who are represented by Mark Twain and the "Genial Showman," are its rusticity and its puritanism. The fun is the fun of rough villagers, who use quaint, straightforward words, and have developed, or carried over in the Mayflower, a slang of their own. They do not want anything too refined; they are not in the least like the farm- ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... to contentious disputation, which is in truth the most dangerous sort of idleness, and as they became in their own ideas more enlightened, they became more miserable; a sullen morose gloom usurped the frank hilarity of satisfied rusticity, which formerly animated their countenances. Athletic exercises and cheerful sports were renounced as sinful, and the green became the resort of conceited politicians, who, with misapplications of Scripture ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the Privy Council Office; his weight, which cannot, even then, have been much under eighteen stone, must have stopped his hunting some time before. But in his manner there was no trace of this fancied rusticity—how could there be, indeed, in one trained in society almost from the cradle?—and his voice was soft and musical. I have seen it stated that he was pompous, self-assertive, and dictatorial. That his manners, formed by his mother and his aunt on eighteenth-century models, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... where I presented Dr Johnson to the Duke of Argyle. We were shewn through the house; and I never shall forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought, for the moment, I could have been a knight-errant for them. [Footnote: On reflection, at the distance of several years, I wonder that my venerable fellow-traveller should have read this passage ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... well as weep in the other. The true reason of this mixture is to be sought for in the manners which are prevalent amongst a people. It has become very fashionable to affect delicacy, tenderness of heart, and fine feeling, and to shun all imputation of rusticity. Much mirth is very foreign to this character; they have introduced, therefore, a sort of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... things going wapper-jawed and catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for our rusticity—the spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in us! We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to me that as a leading American orator, Henry should have proper European terminal facilities. And the Ritz looked ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... compatriots—save only the two Red-Cross prisoners—had gone home on holiday. The day was bright and balmy; and while strolling in the park beyond the Petit Trianon, we stumbled by accident upon the hameau, the little village of counterfeit rusticity wherein Marie Antoinette loved ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... away on vacations. He was a homely man, with a large family, and he took serious views of life. He was country bred, and he had never outgrown a certain rusticity of appearance. It was said that his wife always cut his hair, and the concentric circles made by the neatly trimmed ends lent verisimilitude to the tale that she began at the crown with a butter dish to guide her scissors, then extended the diameter of her circle by using next ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... a virtue between rusticity and scurrility, two extremes, as affability is between flattery and contention, it must not exceed; but be still accompanied with that [2181][Greek: ablabeia] or innocency, quae nemini nocet, omnem injuriae, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... unlimited power over all the district. He, too, prided himself on having lived at Paris, and seized every occasion ostentatiously to show he was not ignorant of its pleasures and refinements; concealing beneath this film of varnish his inborn rusticity, he assumed as well as he was able the polish of one accustomed to good society. His tall, portly form was always tightly buttoned in a close-fitting uniform, and he lied outrageously about his age, never being ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... received by magistrates of the most severe character, and represented before a virtuous queen; when, I say, foreigners are told of this insolent conduct, this contempt for the royal authority, and this Gothic rusticity which some presume to call Christian severity, what an idea must they entertain of our nation? And how will it be possible for them to conceive, either that our laws give a sanction to an art which ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... the scarlet tanager had been carefully inserted. Presumably, the vermilion feather was the owner's private sign of his work as a marksman. So far the lad's dress and accoutrements were in entire conformity to the primeval rusticity of his surroundings. Judge, then, of the reasonable surprise which the observer might feel at discovering that the object in the boy's hand was nothing less incongruous than a pair of binocular glasses, an exquisitely finished example of the highest ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... won't, Jimps. As for rusticity, I can keep you company. Can you bear to lose such ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... the middle of the walk—not one of the modern mockeries of rusticity—but a real old-fashioned lath-and-plaster concern, such as used to be erected in front of a bowling-green. It was roofed in, was open only on the sunny side, and was supported by a couple of little Ionic pillars, up which clematis and passion- ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... he was entertained, had served him with stale, instead of fresh, oil [78], and the rest of the company would not touch it, he alone ate very heartily of it, that he might not seem to tax the master of the house with rusticity ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works; those highly magnify Him, whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... rarely met with in Russia. This manner repels the neighbouring proprietors—a fact that he does not at all regret, for they do not belong to his monde, and they have in their manners and habits a free-and-easy rusticity which is positively disagreeable to him. His relations with them are therefore confined to formal calls. The greater part of the day he spends in listless loitering, frequently yawning, regretting the routine of St. Petersburg life—the pleasant ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Diane de Ribaumont,' he corrected himself, ashamed of his English rusticity. 'I beg pardon if I spoke too ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therefore must be shown free from sin from her birth. The same motive gives us a clue to the character of Joseph. That nothing may be wanting to give whiteness to the purity of Mary, she is implicitly contrasted with the crude rusticity and gaffer-like obstinacy of her aged husband. He is just such an old hobbling wiseacre as may be found supporting his rheumatic joints with a thick stick in any Dorsetshire village. He is an old man before he is required to marry her, and his protests against the proposed ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the poet's own district round Mantua; playful contests between rural bards interspersed with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors of the poet; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of genuine rusticity with assumed courtliness; such are the incongruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these the continual imitations, sometimes sinning against the rules of scholarship, [25] which make ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity; and, perhaps, a little swayed by a desire to be near an old friend and correspondent of the mother, to whose memory she was so strongly attached, came in the budding spring time, the showery, flowery month of April, to spend the ensuing ...
— Country Lodgings • Mary Russell Mitford
... owe him a vignette. Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the Regent. He was active, admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear. Once, in London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his rusticity and his prodigious accent. They plied him with drink—a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed cards, and Soutar would not play. At last, one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened? 'I'm no' ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the small self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough, in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference." [Footnote: Op. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... yellowing tules appeared the fringed and raised banks of the river. Half tropical looking cottages with deep verandas—the homes of early Southern pioneers—took the place of incomplete blocks of modern houses, monotonously alike. In these sylvan surroundings Mr. Hamlin's picturesque rusticity looked less incongruous and more Arcadian; the young girl had lost some of her restraint with her confidences, and lounging together side by side, without the least consciousness of any sentiment in their words or actions, they ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... track over the rustic bridge, and were received anything but hospitably by a huge white dog. We calmed him in time, however, and proceeded to inspect the buildings, but found nearly everyone shut up, though the little church—elevated above the rest—was, unlike them, thrown open. Its very rusticity and simplicity gave it a religious air which to us so few Roman Catholic edifices seem to possess. The badly-spelt and feebly-worded address to the Pope, to which he has affixed his signature, that hangs in a frame near the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... occurring in the publication, Schopenhauer wrote one of his characteristically abusive letters to Brockhaus, his publisher, who retorted "that he must decline all further correspondence with one whose letters, in their divine coarseness and rusticity, savoured more of the cabman than of the philosopher," and concluded with a hope that his fears that the work he was printing would be good for nothing but waste paper, might not be realised.[2] The work appeared ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms and ancient words, which he had been digging from the minds of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called the "Faerie Queen," and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden |
