"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this letter, the second edition of Pamela attests a curious fact: while Hill pontificates in the introduction about ignoring such vulgarity of mind, Richardson has tiptoed back to Volume Two and changed the questioned passages. From the second edition forward, Pamela trembles during her wedding not "betwixt Fear and Delight" but "betwixt Fear and Joy"; and although Richardson leaves Pamela ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... that of his mistress, however unhappily he has placed his affections. But the real excellence of these scenes consists less in peculiarity of character, than in the vivacity and power of the language, which, seldom sinking into vulgarity, or rising into bombast, maintains the mixture of force and dignity, best adapted to the expression of tragic passion. Upon the whole, as the comic part of this play is our author's master-piece in comedy, the tragic plot may be ranked with his very best efforts of that kind, whether in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... strife) 5 For V—ker and for V—ker's Wife— She large and round beyond belief, A superfluity of beef! Her mind and body of a piece, And both composed of kitchen-grease. 10 In short, Dame Truth might safely dub her Vulgarity enshrin'd in blubber! He, meagre bit of littleness, All snuff, and musk, and politesse; So thin, that strip him of his clothing, 15 He'd totter on the edge of Nothing! In case of foe, he well might hide Snug in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... canzone; you cannot help what they are like." The indecent ones she will only say at a terrific rate, and not a second time. But if one pay attention, they are easy to understand. They are a mixture of audacity and simple vulgarity. They all begin with flowers. She is too undeveloped to share the educated girl's abhorrence of things that are in bad taste; everything natural, she thinks, can be said, and she speaks out, quite unperturbed. Still, now she understands ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed for half an inch from each corner, a finicking arthulation, and a set of horribly corrupt vowels, notably ow for o, this being his chief means of bringing Oxford refinement to bear on Hackney vulgarity. Morell, whom he has won over by a doglike devotion, looks up indulgently from The Church Reformer as he enters, and remarks) Well, Lexy! Late ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... shut the window with a shrug of protest against the vulgarity of prejudice. He did not notice four men in the garb of pilgrims who stood in the dark of a ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... her quick feeling that Will Strong's training could not have made work and discomfort and contact with vulgarity seem outside the sphere of women. If it had been one of his own sisters he would have said: "Oh, well, we have to take the world as we find it. Brace up, little girl; I'll put you safe through, and you'll find it's not so ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... had fought at Copenhagen and Trafalgar, and distinguished himself in many a severe contest on the main during those stirring times, and bore the reputation of a dashing naval officer. At the advanced age of eighty, he retained all his original ignorance and vulgarity; and was never admitted into the society which his rank in the service ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... around, the Indians, deriding, reviling, and charging them with all the outrages committed by the savages, threatening to kill them on the spot. From ten o'clock until three these Indians, with the missionaries, endured every abuse which wild frenzy and ribald vulgarity could clothe in words. In the midst of this persecution some Quakers braved the danger of the mob and taking the Indians by the hand gave them words of encouragement. During all this tumult the Indians remained silent, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... tremendous will drawn into an accidental path, not his real path. You are an artist at heart. I don't mean that you will ever be a great etcher, though one cannot tell; I mean that all this turbulence, sordidness, American hurry, waste, vulgarity, agitation, politics, did not belong to you. But what right have I to talk? My ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more human companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to have menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow" carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he could not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the only alternative, he chose the latter. An Indian woman, so hideous as to scarcely suggest humanity, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Petion's dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... for the amusement of the company, giving descriptions of persons and scenes in a racy Western twang, without the slightest scruple as to what she said. In a few years Tahoe will be inundated in summer with similar vulgarity, owing to its easiness of access. I sustained the reputation which our country-women bear in America by looking a "perfect guy"; and feeling that I was a salient point for the speaker's next sally, I was relieved when the landlady, a ladylike Englishwoman, asked me to join herself and her family ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... talking in a loud tone, gesticulating, so proud that he seemed almost handsome, as if, by dint of gazing long at his bust in artless admiration, he had caught a little of the splendid idealization with which the artist had softened the vulgarity of the type. The head at an elevation of three-fourths, free from the high rolling collar, gave rise to contradictory opinions from the spectators concerning the resemblance; and Jansoulet's name, which had been repeated so many times ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... entirely broke down, and became a prey to the most violent agitation. The vulgarity of the twins, and the gross materialism of Mrs. Otis, were naturally extremely annoying, but what really distressed him most was that he had been unable to wear the suit of mail. He had hoped that even modern Americans ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... retirement, of straw bonnets and shepherding, of the new school to which you belong and who are the enemies of everything permanent. You are destroying customs to make way for theories, manners for boon comradeship, chivalry for finance, elegance for vulgarity, religion for atheism, and character for sentiment. You are to blame for all the present disorders, and such as you have brought about the burning of your own chateau. No, Madame, I will not permit the marriage. How dare you ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... He hath not left us in darkness as to the methods and purpose of His dealings with us, or as to the attitude of His heart towards us. He has bound Himself by solemn words, and by deeds as revealing as words. So we can reckon on God. To use a vulgarism which is stripped of its vulgarity if employed reverently, as I would do it—we know where to have Him. He has given us the elements to calculate His orbit; and we are sure that the calculation will come right. So, because the name flashes upon men the thought of an absolute ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... first time, were shaped to the prevailing fashion, and of a taste for colours less subdued than is usual with Englishmen, yet still such as a person of good mien could wear without incurring the charge of vulgarity, though liable to that of self-conceit. If you doubted that the man were a gentleman, you would have been puzzled to guess what else he could be. Were it not for the look we have mentioned, and which was perhaps not habitual, his appearance might have been called prepossessing. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mention; and the other women with whom I afterwards became intimate, were of a class of which you can have no knowledge. I formed my acquaintance with them at the theatres; and, when vivacity danced in their eyes, I was not easily disgusted by the vulgarity which flowed from their lips. Having spent, a few years after I was of age, [the whole of] a considerable patrimony, excepting a few hundreds, I had no recourse but to purchase a commission in a new-raised regiment, destined to subjugate America. The ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... more personal and particular import and abuse." It is really a relief to know that Overton, who is still credited with these lines by Godwin, Guizot, and others, was not the author of them, and this not because of their peculiar political import, but because of their utter vulgarity. How else could we have retained our faith in Milton's character of Overton—"you, Overton, bound to me these many years past in a friendship of more than brotherly closeness and affection, both by the similarity of our tastes, and the sweetness of your manners"? Still to have copied and kept such ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... but long ago his insight into the heart of man had taught Tinker to attack the vulgar with the only weapon effective against them, vulgarity. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... dark, curly hair, thick lips, and close-set Eastern eyes. His tastes were unrefined. He had none of Ippolito's gentleness and attractiveness, but in disposition he was morose, passionate, and cruel. His manners were marked by abruptness and vulgarity. He was no genius, and refused to receive the lessons of his masters, and set at defiance all who claimed authority. Alessandro was a shrewd lad all the same, and became Clement's inseparable companion—no doubt he was ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... vain, frivolous, dishonest, mean, hypocritical, and insufferably vulgar letters would be turned out of any respectable, well-bred spelling-book. Vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, meanness, hypocrisy, and vulgarity can be exhibited in all the affairs of life, not excepting those whose proper office is to sweeten and to beautify it; but it does not need all your logical faculty to discover that there is not, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... written a 'successful' book and am a 'somebody'—a literary 'notable'—what matter my tastes, my morals, or my disposition! If this sort of thing is Fame, all I can say is, that it savors of very detestable vulgarity!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his favorite emotions, left him disillusioned, asking "Is that all it amounts to?" He always had a profound respect for force of character, regarding even lawlessness as preferable to apathy; but he was implacable towards baseness or vulgarity. Herein lies, perhaps, the chief reason for Stendhal's ill success in life; he would never stoop to obsequiousness or flattery, and in avoiding even the semblance of self-interest, allowed his fairest chances to pass him by. "I have little ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... against which Ward's good taste so strongly protested, greatly tended to make them incredulous. It was not till the statements of scholars and gentlemen, like Henry Martyn and Bishop Heber, became generally known, that the work was looked on without sarcasm, provoked by vulgarity, even where ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... are personal and relative. They are not to be foisted on one's readers as anything "ex cathedra." One such test is the test of what has been called "the grand style"—that grand style against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the "grand style" into an academic "narrow way," through which I would force every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... in his hands. It all depressed him like a weight. From the depths of his soul he despised them for their vulgarity, and hated himself for so doing, for he was of their life and work akin. He shut his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... was, he was very much frightened, and looked very mean; for he knew that a kick was just what he deserved for his vulgarity and insolence. ...
— The Nursery, February 1878, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... vivacity, which seemed rather to belong to some village maid, the coquette of the ring around the Maypole, than to the high-bred descendant of an ancient baron. A touch of audacity, altogether short of effrontery, and far less approaching to vulgarity, gave as it were a wildness to all that she did; and Mary, while defending her from some of the occasional censures of her grave companion, compared her to a trained singing-bird escaped from a cage, which practises in all the luxuriance of freedom, and in full possession of the greenwood bough, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the two was dressed in a manner that would better become a miss of twenty than a matron who was on the shady side of fifty; and the young lady, though not displaying the ingrained vulgarity of the mother, was not costumed with that simple elegance that ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... whether the time has not really arrived to enter a protest against the convention which forces the pipe into a position of inferiority, and exalts to a pinnacle of undeserved pre-eminence the cigar, and still more the cigarette ... why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity, of plebeianism, to inhale tobacco-smoke through the stem of a briar, and the hall-mark of good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine—a cigarette?" To ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... surprised her that she hopped a foot into the air. When the time came to open the door into her cage, the stranger was delighted to go in, but Virginia dodged him, exactly as she had done his predecessor. He did not lose his temper and condescend to the vulgarity of flying at her, as the first admirer had done. He looked interested to see that she avoided him, but after all he did not take it much to heart. This cardinal, like the other, was not yet acclimated—if one may call it so—to life ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... CASTILLO, regidor of the loyal city of Guatemala, while composing this most true history of the conquest of Mexico, happened to see a work by Francisco Lopez de Gomara on the same subject, the elegance of which made me ashamed of the vulgarity of my own, and caused me to throw away my pen in despair. After having read it, however, I found it full of misrepresentations of the events, having exaggerated the number of natives which we killed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... hopelessness of his position. The sympathy poured upon him, welcome though it was, but emphasised his sense of the pitiable failure of his existence. He still burned under the terrible insult of the morning; he smarted from the friction of living amid the petty, squabbling vulgarity of the Kettering household. He remembered, too, he must come to some understanding with Cleo; he must give her an opportunity of joining him wherever he should be staying. And, of course, he must also write to thank Mr. and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... is much easier. According to him, instead of working better, organising better, and putting more of our output into plant and equipment and less into self-indulgence and vulgarity all that we have to do to work the necessary reform is to provide more money and credit. Since, he ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... looking on him as too hopelessly middle-aged, to entertain any such evil designs, avowing freely that she likes him, and treating him very nearly as she does papa. It is my business to keep 'our aunt,' who, between ourselves, has, below the surface, the vulgarity of nature that high-breeding cannot eradicate, from startling the little humming-bird, before the net has been properly twined round her bright little heart. As far as I can see, he is much smitten, but very cautious in his ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... word that is! It has such a decent sound, almost respectable. We are a refined people, even in our sins, and I know no word in the English language we strive harder to avoid using in any of its forms than that word of brutal vulgarity, but terrific meaning—adultery. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... amount; so that, as we go from place to place, our financial position in London still appears. In Brussels we found the banker, or, at least, his agent,—for whether the banker or his clerk we did not know,—a perfect specimen of vulgarity and rudeness. He was the most uncivil fellow that we have yet seen in Europe. His most pleasant words were grunts, and his motions and attitudes were almost threats. He looked like a Jew, but he acted like a wild Arab; and his manoeuvres would have been a godsend to the ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... cheerfully; emboldened by which, yet avoiding their scope, pairs of lovers of the commoner class sneaked to and fro under the trees. Whether the presence of these recalled early memories which Sir George's fastidiousness found unpalatable, or he felt his fashion, smirched by the vulgarity of this Venus-walk, his impatience grew; and was not far from bursting forth when his guide turned sharply into an alley behind the cathedral, and, after threading a lane of mean ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... are not many whose minds are so obtuse as to be blind to its peculiarly graceful attitude and motions, and every one is familiar with its history, as recorded in poetry and romance, all the incidents of which have served to elevate it above any association with fashion or vulgarity. When we see it waving its long branches neatly over some private inclosure, overshadowing the gravelled walk and the flower-garden,—or watching pensively over the graves of the dead, where the light hues ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... or the like. To compensate is to make suitable return for service rendered. Does compensate not sound the more soothing? But save in exceptional circumstances the downrightness of pay has no hint of vulgarity. To recompense is to make a return, especially if it is not monetary, for work, pains, trouble, losses, or suffering; or some quality or blessing (as affection or happiness) may be said to recompense one. To remunerate ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... pedlars and rustics, were of the most edifying description; mostly on subjects moral or metaphysical, and couched in the most gentlemanly and unexceptionable language, without the slightest mixture of vulgarity, coarseness, or pie-bald grammar. Such appeared to me to be the contents of the book; but before I could form a very clear idea of them, I found myself nodding, and a surprising desire to sleep ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... They spoil the country roads and ruin the country houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a back yard of the city. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... could not help but observe that Lamborn had been drinking. What a strange taste—this whisky drinking! We did it in England, to be sure. But here it was done everywhere and at all hours and in all degrees of immoderation and vulgarity. Lamborn, however, was not unduly under the influence of drink; he was rather laughing and genial and humorously familiar. Douglas had doubtless taken as much as Lamborn, but he was quite equal ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... things, you common flower!' the insect angrily exclaimed. 'I'll not stay here any longer to listen to such vulgarity. I prefer ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... England on every important point. Sixthly, the English language was then at the happiest stage of its progress, with all the strength, simplicity, and. clearness of the elder literature, whilst, at the same time, it was free from the cant of the age of Charles I. and Cromwell, from the vulgarity and levity of that of Charles II., and from the artificial character ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... in ultra-Rabelaisian exaggeration, is American wit and humour—therefore unsurpassable. The Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression of popular taste, too often of an ecoeurant vulgarity, personal beyond all bounds of common decency, sensational as a transpontine drama, is American; America is the greatest nation upon earth's face, ergo the daily sheet is setting-up the standard of English speech and forming ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... operations, solutions that rest wholly upon text and argument and make no appeal whatever to ordinary judgment and good sense. What a disproportion often between his science and his real education. What vulgarity of tastes and sentiments and language. What brutality of methods on the part of this man whose authority is indisputable in his specialty. Take this learned man from his university chair, place him on that scene of war where force ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... very quickly!—to great houses and great people, and all the vapid pomp and idle toil of wealth. All that picture of herself, stooping from place and power, to bind up the wounds of the people, in which she had once delighted, was to her now a mere flimsy vulgarity. She had been shown other ideals—other ways—and her pulses were still swaying under the audacity—the virile inventive force of the showman. Everything she had once desired looked flat to her; everything ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the part of the individual. We gain immensely by the liberation from the old tradition, but we lose immensely also. We get the benefit of the fancy and feelings of this individual, but we are at the mercy, also, of his stupidity and vulgarity. Of this the great examples are Tintoretto, and after him Velasquez and Rembrandt. Of Tintoret I would speak later, for he is eminently the artist in whom the gain and the loss are most typified, and perhaps most equally distributed, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... only example of a proper manner of contribution to natural history is in White's Letters from Selborne. You know I have always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid honor and genius; his vulgarity shows in nothing so much as in the poverty of the details he has collected, with the best intentions, and the shrewdest sense, for English ornithology. His imagination is not cultivated enough to enable him to choose, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... popular; and, we have no hesitation in saying, deservedly popular; for in spite of their occasional vulgarity, affectation, and silliness, they were undoubtedly characterised by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and natural feeling; and recommended to all good minds by the clear impression which they bore of the amiable dispositions and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... highly efficient that we now expect her to be a paragon of perfection. To give the young lady her due, we must acknowledge that she has done more than any other person to introduce courtesy into the business world. She has done most to abolish the old-time roughness and vulgarity. She has made big business to run more smoothly than little business did, half a century ago. She has shown us how to take the friction out of conversation, and taught us refinements of politeness which were rare even among the Beau Brummels of pre-telephonic days. Who, for instance, until ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Let us have our coffee in the music-room, Dorian. You must play Chopin to me. The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... easily recognise. The one with the red puffy face, with an enormous gold pin in his cravat, a bunch of charms hanging to his chain, and a ring on his hand, which he loses no opportunity of displaying, is our friend Jones, with vulgarity as usual stamped on every feature, and displayed in every movement which he makes; the tall slim fellow, with an air of feeble fastness, an indecisive mouth, a habit of running his hand through his light-coloured hair, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... moment again she was lost in the thought of Elise, of Valmond's vulgarity and commonness; and he had dared to speak words of love almost to her! She flushed to the hair, as she had done fifty times since she had seen him that moonlit night. Ah, she had thought him the dreamer, the enthusiast—maybe, in kind, credulous moments, the great man he claimed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... actress this resort is admissible, where effects are necessary to be produced for distant spectators in large audiences; but in daily life even custom does not rob it of its inevitable aspect of vulgarity. True, all nations resort to such artifices, more or less, especially in southern Europe. The Chinese ladies carry the practice of painting their faces so far as to amount to caricature; and if the Japanese ladies do not so generally follow the example, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... that Louis XIV. despised, and that our own time finds so valuable for their artistic qualities, was there anything outside of their beauty or richness of tone or color to redeem their coarseness and vulgarity. There was no poetry in the treatment, nor any sympathy with anything higher than the grossest guzzling, fighting, and horseplay. The great monarch, who, according to his lights, was a man of delicacy and refinement, was certainly right in contemning such subjects, and it is perhaps to his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken by the ancient Court of Scotland, to which no idea of vulgarity could be attached; and the lively manners and gestures with which it was accompanied were so completely in accord with the sound of the voice and the style of talking, that I cannot assign them a different ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;—so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, his whiskers untrimmed, the meaning of his face compacted, sharpened. It was many a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet tears belonged there, as much as to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... relieved my mind by the performance of a good action, suppose I show you next (though I protest against the vulgarity of the expression) that I can see a little further than ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... led Nancy Magot to the altar, he recorded, in a large business hand, both the date of his marriage and his wife's birth. She protested, it was vulgar. And when the bridegroom inquired whether the vulgarity were in the fact of being born or in recording it, she said: "Mr. Newt, I am ashamed of you," ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... means of changing, or at least checking, the current of such thoughts in your minds; and I am in hopes that you may have a little pleasure in examining the plates in the volume of Sibthorpe's "F. Graeca" which I send to-day, in comparison with those of "F. Danica." The vulgarity and lifelessness of Sibthorpe's plates are the more striking because in mere execution they are the more elaborate of the two; the chief point in the "F. Danica" being the lovely artistic skill. The drawings for Sibthorpe, by a young German, were as exquisite as ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... evening and one could see little, we knew well enough that his eyes were steady and dark. For he had the attitude and carriage of those men who invigorate France. His self-confidence was evident in his sturdy legs and his arms akimbo, his vulgarity in his gesture, his narrowness in his forward and peering look, his indomitable energy in every movement of his body. It did not surprise me to learn in his later conversation that he was a Republican. He spoke at once to us both, saying in a kind ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... intended for the virtual representatives of the people. Mr. Hunt, on the whole, bore himself well; and, by a total absence of affectation, of either tone or manner—that surest test of the gentleman, at least of Nature's forming—disappointed his audience of their ready smiles at demagogue vulgarity. But once, and that for a moment, did his self-possession seem to fail him while going through the ceremonies preceding a new member's taking his seat. After the member has signed his name and taken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them; and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... begun. There are callous episodes, for instance, one of revolting caddishness of an orderly standing by without offering help when an invalid officer is struggling to tie up his bootlace. Military bounce, popular vulgarity, hardships, homesickness, courage—all these things one may read of, but the incidents which some journalists revel in are to seek. It was a neutral journalist, we should remember, who sent to a German paper a wonderful account of the ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... the sister asleep; she is disenchanted, joins her brothers, and the Spirit vanishes.—The resemblance to Milton's Comus need not be pointed out. The difference of the two pieces in all points of execution is literally immense; Peele's work in this case being all steeped in meanness and vulgarity, without a touch of truth, poetry, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... in everything. He was always amused, and therefore was always amusing. Above all, there was a spontaneity in his mirth which acted upon others as a perpetual stimulant. He was in short, what the French call a bon garcon, and the English a capital fellow; easy without assurance, comic without vulgarity, and, as Sydney Smith wittily hath it—"a great number of other things without a great ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... theologian. He was a stranger to moderation in every form. Having conceived certain skeptical views, he knew no terms strong enough to condemn the whole evangelical scheme. His chief defects of style are abruptness and occasional vulgarity, which no man more regretted than their author in his calmer hours. But there can be no apology for his dealing with serious subjects in that vein of sarcasm which reminds us of the grossness of the coarser brood of infidels. An ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... listened as for the good information, and there was support for him—since it was a question of his going step by step—in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to see her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... this has been the idea that such work was easy, on the part of the young men who attempted it, and the total vulgarity and want of education in the great body of abler artists, rendering them insensitive to qualities of fine delineation; the universal law for them being that they can draw a pig, but not a Venus. For instance, two landscape-painters of much reputation ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... to suppose that the great captains of industry, the great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostentation of their wives and children, who "devote themselves," it may be, "to expense regardless of pleasure"; but we ought not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The masters of ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... replied Chapman, "the world is a great vulgarity, and only puts on politeness for appearance sake. The young man might have his name changed, or he might add something to it to soften it. How would you ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... turned in the doorway and looked back. "I'm so glad to have my mind settled about it," she said, with a pathos which overcame her absurdity and vulgarity. "I do work awful hard, and it doesn't seem as if I could lose my money." She appeared suddenly tragic in her cheap muslin and her frizzes. She looked old and her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and your duty to God and the ten commandments—nothing else, because of the Dissenters," she explained in a bustle. "Imagine the vulgarity of an education for the poor from which the Bible may be omitted! Dreadful! I persuade the children to get certain of the psalms, proverbs, and parables by heart out of school. Bless you! they like that; but as for teaching them such abstract knowledge ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and found in the "Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... too, to be in high repute, one must feign an ignorance of every kind of employment. To be a good housewife, to understand every domestic duty, is degrading in the extreme. It is thought a proof of vulgarity to be acquainted with ordinary things. Pride is taken in egregious mistakes as to certain persons, places, and pursuits. To show a knowledge of what is done beyond her own caste would be to forfeit her rank, and would expel her from ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... becoming a great singer; but I learned that a voice alone does not make a great singer. I needed years of study, and this would necessitate the expenditure of large sums of money. I had grown heart-sick and disgusted with the annoyances and vulgarity I was subjected to in my position. When you were four years old a good man offered me a good home as his wife. It was the first honest love I had encountered, while scores of men had made a pretence of loving ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... are words whose use shows vulgarity or ignorance. Such words as the following are ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less under the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he could put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the right side. Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to tolerate false sentiment, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... up as Ella Hylton had been, in an artistic milieu, her eye insensibly trained to love all that was beautiful in colour and form, to be almost morbidly sensitive to ugliness and vulgarity—it was a very real and bitter struggle, a hard-won victory to come to such a decision as she formed. Life, Heaven knows, contains worse trials and deeper tragedies than this; but at least Ella's happy life had as yet known ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... "A cheap, gaudy show, all bluster and vulgarity. Even the dancing is a mere parody. I early ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... thick voice bearing plain testimony as to his condition. On these occasions I used to consider with a sort of fierce humor how Nina would receive him—for though she saw no offense in the one kind of vice she herself practiced, she had a particular horror of vulgarity in any form, and drunkenness was one of those ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... of carved work in chimney- piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these constitutes ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... is a part of his affectations. He is really a childish, self-conscious creature, with a very decided dash of vulgarity. He only tries to look strange and wild, and he would be delighted if he knew you ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... true magic. And it is not slate-writing, toe-joint snapping, fortune-telling, or the vending of charms. Magic, too, is an art—like other arts. This is forgotten by the majority of its practitioners. Hence the sordid vulgarity of the average mind-reader and humbugging spiritualist of the dark-chamber seance. Besides, the study of the super-normal mind tells us of the mind in health—nature is shy in ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... preached against the licentiousness, swearing, gambling, duelling, and drunkenness of the men. He attacked with both argument and ridicule the idea so prevalent since the Restoration, that vice was necessarily associated with pleasure and elegance, virtue with Puritanism and vulgarity. To teach people to be witty without being indecent, gay without being vicious, such was the object of Addison. As M. Taine says, he made morality fashionable. To do this he exposed the folly and ugliness of vice. But he did more. He held up to the public view characters who exemplified ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... lamp shining full on his sleeping face. Then I remembered how, not very long ago, I had seen that same head lying side by side with Jack's head on the pillow at Mrs Nash's. And as I stood for a moment to look, I could almost have believed that the sleeping figure there, with all his vulgarity and dishonesty, had as good a title to call himself Jack ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... repetition of her taunt about "furnishing" supplies for the wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire success, concealed—namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people. But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... inferiority in herself. We are inclined to agree with the opinion expressed by the naval lieutenant at Naples, who said "She was a very handsome, vulgar woman." All her portraits confirm what the sailor says about her beauty, and the most reliable records are confirmatory so far as his view of her vulgarity is concerned. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... "bicycle" is quite dignified and proper, though bike is certainly vulgar. In the hurry of life to-day people more frequently phone than "telephone" to each other, and we can send a wire instead of a "telegram" without any risk of vulgarity. The word cab replaced the more magnificent "cabriolet," and then with the progress of invention we got the "taxicab." It is now the turn of cab to be dropped, and when we are in haste we hail a taxi. No one nowadays, except the people who sell them, speaks of "pianofortes." ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... It will be said, a domestic should not take notice of these things; I was certainly to blame, yet I perceived all this, nor was I the only one; the maitre d' hotel and valet de chambre spoke of her sometimes at table with a vulgarity that pained me extremely. My head, however, was not sufficiently turned to allow of my being entirely in love; I did not forget myself, or my situation. I loved to see Mademoiselle de Breil; to hear her utter anything that marked ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning. The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... author; and of two orders of society—as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in both, he could never forget the one character in the other. To the last, he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. "Vulgarity," he writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English radicals; ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... whom she respected for his talents, and Christian character. But he was still destitute of acute perceptions and deep sensibility. There was a coarseness in his nature, which made him blind to her feelings, and a vulgarity of habit and speech, which to her was completely disgusting. He did not intend any harm, but was still always offending her taste; and this simple circumstance embittered her whole happiness, and hastened her, I believe, out of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... much better look at Joan's tongue," said Nancy. "Starling said last night that her stomach was a little out of order, and we rebuked her for her vulgarity." ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... and the bread and butter," says the professor, in great wrath. "And let me tell you, Hardinge, that there are occasions when one's high spirits can degenerate into offensiveness and vulgarity!" ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Once, as the horror of his suspicion rose before her, she felt a wild impulse to cry out, even to throw herself on his mercy—telling him her story and Martha's suspicions. Then the recollection of the cunning of the man, his vulgarity, his insincerity, slowly steadied her. Her secret must be kept, and she must not ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and Royal dinner parties with menus printed on white silk, Americans, Republicans in feeling, really "run" the government, and in state affairs there is a taint of that combination of obsequious and flippant vulgarity, which none deplore more deeply than the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... and the miseries of this tramping life, and the weariness and sordidness and meanness and vulgarity of it, became gradually and steadily so intolerable to the captive that he began at last to feel that his release from the hermit's knife must prove only a temporary respite ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... may say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... have so few comedies from women. Dr. Doran mentions five Englishwomen who wrote successful comedies. Of these, three are now forgotten; one, Aphra Behn, is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... he even took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly not ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Reise der Prinzessin Ananas nach Gros-glogau" (Riez, 1798, pp. 68, by Grfin Lichterau?) in its revolting loathesomeness and satirical meanness is an example of the vulgarity which could parade under the name. In 1801 we find "Prisen aus der hrneren Dose des gesunden Menschenverstandes," aseries of letters of advice from father to son. Aplay of Stephanie the younger, "Der Eigensinnige," produced January 29, 1774, is ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... there was no vulgarity in the words. Their huge reproach of him drove every other quality out of them and a deep color ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London. The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in this crowd, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... confined, to make it a moral crime for a woman to be seen abroad. If they should have occasion to visit a friend or relation, they must be carried in a close sedan chair: to walk would be the height of vulgarity. Even the country ladies, who may not possess the luxury of a chair, rather than walk, suffer themselves to be sometimes rolled about in a sort of covered wheelbarrow. The wives and daughters, however, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... mind; she began to see what it ought to be, though she also saw that she would perhaps have to wait awhile. Mrs. Tarrant, too, in her own house, became now a complete figure; there was no manner of doubt left as to her being vulgar. Olive Chancellor despised vulgarity, had a scent for it which she followed up in her own family, so that often, with a rising flush, she detected the taint even in Adeline. There were times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it, every one but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it—she was an antique) ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... thoroughfares and the Park with their costly and showy equipages, and flaunt their wealth so coarsely and offensively in the faces of their neighbors, that many good people have come to believe that riches and vulgarity are inseparable. They make themselves the most conspicuous, and are at once accepted by strangers as the "best ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... be said at once that Lady Patterdale was a perfect dear. One lost sight of her incredible vulgarity in view of the charming kindliness of her heart. And, after all, vulgarity is only comparative. In the sanctity of the little shop in Birmingham where Sir John had first laid the foundations of his fortune, aspirates could drop unheeded. What mattered then, as always, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... "there's the danger of vulgarity. One puts up with that in politics, but I confess I shrink from ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... his carouses, his debaucheries, his hordes of mistresses, gave scandal even in that time of prodigal license. But he had a cool head, a daring spirit, and an intellect capable of accepting new and original ideas. He must be called a statesman; and, despite the vulgarity of some of his vices, he has to be called a gentleman as well. He could be trusted; he would keep his word once given. Other statesmen could treat with him, and not fear that he would break a promise or betray a confidence. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... down in a love-lock on his forehead, and low cunning eyes. I felt uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser's, vowed away from coarseness and vulgarity: he's the most perfect intellectual companion in the world. He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire even such applause as theirs.... Of course, that was the explanation—vanity. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... "Camelot," his own tradition, as we have shown, was received from the Arthurian source. His chivalry gave his satire a very delicate edge. It was infinitely more cutting in showing the misfit of vulgarity with beauty than in ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... taken For workes that vulgar-good-name hath forsaken: A Poeme and a play too! why tis like A scholler that's a Poet: their names strike Their pestilence inward, when they take the aire; And kill out right: one cannot both fates beare. But, as a Poet thats no scholler, makes Vulgarity his whiffler, and so takes with ease, & state through both sides prease Of Pageant seers: or as schollers please That are no Poets; more then Poets learnd; Since their art solely, is by soules discerned; The others fals [fall, D, E, F] within ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... who would insult a new teacher without cause, it would affect the dignity of this school. The spirit of education is not only in imparting technical knowledges, but also in encouraging honest, ennobling and samurai-like virtues, while eliminating the evil tendency to vulgarity and roughness. If we are afraid of reaction or further trouble, and satisfy ourselves with make-shifts, there is no telling when we can ever get rid of this evil atmosphere[G]. We are here to eradicate this very evil. If we mean to countenance it, we had better not accepted our positions here. ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had loved ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and forgetting that very useless old gentleman, her cousin, who had sat for the borough for many years. "In this country it doesn't do to go too fast," said Mr. Kennedy. "And then the mixture of vulgarity, falsehood, and pretence!" said Lady Laura, shuddering as her mind recurred to the fact that Mr. Quintus Slide had contaminated Loughton by his presence. "I am told that they hardly let ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... wielded the brush at this stage which precedes that of his very last and most impressionistic style. For decorative effect, for "go," for frankness and breadth of execution, it could not be surpassed. Yet hardly elsewhere has the great master approached so near to positive vulgarity as here in the conception of the fair Europa as a strapping wench who, with ample limbs outstretched, complacently allows herself to be carried off by the Bull, making her appeal for succour merely pour la forme. What gulfs divide this conception ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the unattractive figure of "red-hot" Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner expected. Chayne, instead of turning his ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... malicious to the point of vulgarity; that was Althea's thought as, like an arrow released from long tension, she sped away, the turn of the square once made and Mrs. Mallison and her dogs once more received into the small house in an adjacent street. Tears were in Althea's eyes, hot tears, of fury, of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... warmer in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him and Frau Haydn in Vienna." We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the charge of "vulgarity." ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... remember this. Let us through life endeavor to personify the virtues, and always begin 'em with a capital letter. Let us, whenever we can find an opportunity, deliver our sentiments in the form of roundhand copies. Respect the Aged. Eschew Vulgarity. Admire ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... particular form that Minty's vulgarity had taken had not been anticipated by the two other women. They had, not unreasonably, expected some original audacity or gaucherie from the blacksmith's daughter, which might astonish yet amuse their guest, and condone for the situation forced ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... with vulgarity so completely that she must often have been unjust to him. At least she was surprised now and then by a reassertion that he was a "highbrow," and that he decidedly disapproved of any sort of vulgarity. Several times ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... all things considered, I do carry on the farce of life wonderfully well,"—all this passage, with the silence of the man, is on the highest level of poetic invention, and Clara ranks with Ophelia. To her strain of madness we may ascribe, perhaps, what Sydney Smith calls the vulgarity of her lighter moments. But here the genius of Shakspeare is faultless, where Scott's is ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... not to suppose that the elision of Mrs Clarissa's poor letter H, as well as R, proceeded either from ignorance or vulgarity—except so far as vulgarity lies in blindly following fashion. Mrs Clarissa's only mistake was that, like most country ladies, she was rather behind the age. The dropping of H and other letters had been fashionable in the metropolis some eight ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... part-cause is true. Doubtless very often, as Mr. Bain says, "it is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity without the reality that gives us that stiff position from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us, to our uproarious delight." And in so far as mirth is caused by the gush of agreeable feeling that follows the cessation of mental strain, it further illustrates the general principle above set forth. But no explanation ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... And he has done so after the very manner and in the very spirit of Shakespeare. The noble creatures of his invention give to the story that dignity and variety of interest without which the most powerful romance or drama can be but an example of vigorous vulgarity. The upright and high-minded mother and brother of the shameless Flamineo and the shame-stricken Vittoria refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere of the poem by the passing presence of their virtues. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... joined her sister in the veranda, and, shading her eyes with a narrow white hand, glanced on the prospect with a polite interest and ladylike urbanity. The searching sun, which, as Miss Kate once intimated, was "vulgarity itself," stared at her in return, but could not call a blush to her somewhat sallow cheek. Neither could it detract, however, from the delicate prettiness of her refined face with its soft gray shadows, or the dark gentle eyes, whose blue-veined ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... tavern, where Western wit, often vulgar or profane, was freely indulged in, and the best of them at times told stories which were somewhat "broad;" but even while thus indulging in humor that would grate harshly upon severely refined hearers, they despised the vulgarian; none despised vulgarity more than Lincoln. ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... written for and sung by the late Mr. Fitzwilliam, the comedian, as others of Hudson's songs were by Mr. Rayner. Collectors of comic ditties will not readily forget "Walker, the Twopenny Postman," or "The Dogs'-meat Man"—rough caricatures of low life, unstained by the vulgarity of many of the modern music-hall ditties. In the motto to one of his collections of poems, Hudson borrows from Churchill an excuse for the rough, humorous effusions that he ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of phraseology than his friend, and knew that outrageous as it was to good taste under the circumstances, it yet might spring from a sincere and honourable motive, or at best must be regarded as the natural result of innate vulgarity and mistaken training. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... real appreciation of equal rights almost uniformly betray a want of proper training and great ignorance of the world. Whenever, however, any attempt is made to identify equality of rights and democratical institutions with vulgarity and truculency, as is sometimes attempted here, in the presence of Americans, and even in good company, it is the part of every gentleman of our country to improve the opportunity that is thus afforded ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... volume of lyrical pieces, published by him when he was thirty-five. In the first book of the Satires, produced about five years earlier, he had shown much of his admirable later qualities,—humour, sense, urbanity, perception,—but all strangely mingled with a vein of artistic vulgarity (the worst perhaps of all vulgarities) which is totally absent from his matured writing. It is not merely that in this earlier work he is often deliberately coarse—that was a literary tradition, from which it would require more than ordinary originality ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the rich blood throbbed too painfully in the veins—which are the first signs of the decay of "fine" women. With middle age and the fullness of figure to which most women of her temperament are prone, had come also that indescribable vulgarity of speech and manner which habitual absence of moral restraint never fails ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... flattered into listening; at other times she was feline in her methods. Talleyrand and Fouche made use of this latter phase of her character to serve their own ends. She had a talent which was used for mischief, but her vulgarity and egotism were quite deplorable. She would have risked the torments of Hades if she could but have embarked upon a liaison with Napoleon. She plied him with letters well seasoned with passion, but all to no purpose. She came to see him at the Rue Chantereine, and was sent away. She invited ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Tenderness and harshness, refinement and vulgarity, sentiment and sensuality; now soaring up into ether, and then dragging along in mud. Mire and sublimity; all that is strangely blended in this admixture of inspired dust. It may seem strange, but to me it appears that a true voluptuary should never abandon his thought to the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... modelling influences of the finished, refined, tender, sweet-tongued, and sweet-thoughted Englishwoman, who, if she had been less of a woman, would have been repelled by his uncouthness; if she had been less of a lady, would have mistaken his commonness for vulgarity. But she was just, like the type of womankind, a virgin-mother. She saw the nobility of his nature through its homely garments, and had been, indeed, sent to carry on the work from which his mother had been too ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... these words young Mr. Rowe, who believed himself to be connected with society, and who dealt largely in pictures, without, however, descending to the vulgarity of shop-keeping (he would resent being called a picture-dealer), approached and insisted on Sir Owen listening to the story of his difficulties with some county councillors who could not find the money to build ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the belfry but no bell, and her mother trained her in domestic science and the precepts of religion, which, lacking definite direction perhaps by reason of the fact that there was no church in San Pasqual, served, nevertheless, as a bulwark against the assaults of vice and vulgarity which, in a frontier town, are very thinly veiled. As a child she was neither precocious nor shy. From a rather homely, long-legged gangling girl of fourteen she emerged apparently by a series of swift transitions into a young lady at sixteen, giving ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... good eating and drinking which is employed to give a comic stamp to servants and persons in a low rank of life, it may still be used without impropriety: of those to whom life has granted but few privileges it does not require much; and they may boldly own the vulgarity of their inclinations, without giving any shock to our moral feelings. The better the condition of servants in real life, the less adapted are they for the stage; and this at least redounds to the praise of our more humane age, that in our "family picture" tales we meet with servants who ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... than all its other elements together. Strange and seductive for any lover of the reasons of things this inordinate value, on the spot, of dauntless refinement of the Sherman image; the comparative vulgarity of the environment drinking it up, on one side, like an insatiable sponge, and yet failing at the same time to impair its virtue. The refinement prevails and, as it were, succeeds; holds its own in the medley of accidents, where nothing ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... visage? It is outrageously indecent. Why not? Who made this portentous "decency" to be the rule of free-born life? Who put fig-leaves upon the sweet flesh of the immortals? Decency after all is a mere modern barbarism; the evocation of morbid vulgarity and a perverted heart. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he went about the country holding his little exhibits ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... destruction is complete sometimes. You often come across the blackened remains of houses, and you always feel anxious about the new buildings that will replace them. It is a good deal to say, but I believe our own jerry-builders are outdone in florid vulgarity by German villadom, and the German atrocities will last longer than ours, because the building laws are more stringent. But the old Bauernhaus still to be seen in most parts of the Black Forest is dignified and beautiful. The Swiss chalet is a poor gim-crack thing in comparison. Sometimes the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick |
