"Irrelevant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unkempt appearance, cooking his rice. When Y-ts'un perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and as he had lost his teeth, and his tongue was blunt, he made most irrelevant replies. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... nobody listened much, so she came away disappointed and fiercely determined to do good somewhere or know the reason why! She's a stout, wildly untidy woman whose mouse-coloured hair is always coming down, though it's freely dotted with irrelevant tortoise-shell combs; and whose elaborate clothes look somehow insecure, the way scree does on the side of a mountain. Her ideas leap out of her brain like rabbits out of holes, and then go scuttling away again, to be followed ineffectively by others: and ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... certain—the self-proved and amazing inability of one of her professors of philosophy to give an honest or intelligent reception to a thoughtful, closely reasoned, and earnest plea for philosophical reform in this very direction, or to criticise it with anything better than irrelevant and unparliamentary personalities, studied and systematic misrepresentation both of the plea and of the pleader, and a demoralizing example of libel, so bitter and so extreme as to ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... reign of Darius, extending over thirty-six years, was memorable for vast improvements in the administrations of the empire, nor will it, in this place, be an irrelevant digression to glance briefly and rapidly back over some of the events and the innovations by ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the same style, declaimed during an hour against Whigs and Dissenters, and reminded the jury that the prisoner's husband had borne a part in the death of Charles the First, a fact which had not been proved by any testimony, and which, if it had been proved, would have been utterly irrelevant to the issue. The jury retired, and remained long in consultation. The judge grew impatient. He could not conceive, he said, how, in so plain a case, they should even have left the box. He sent a messenger to tell them that, if they ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... educational system is that it neglects the plant for the sake of the flower. In anxiety for elegance it forgets substance, preparing not at all for the discharge of parental functions and for the duties of citizenship, by imparting a mass of facts most of which are irrelevant, and the rest without a key. But the accomplishment of all those things which constitute the efflorescence of civilisation should be wholly subordinate to that instruction and discipline on which civilisation rests. As they occupy the leisure part ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I was tying on my trees in the garden directly ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... within him, and he would have liked to pour it all out before her at once. It is just at such times that we often take up as a means of expression and relief that which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant. ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... blubber sentiment, but McClintock spews it; other people can mishandle metaphors, but only McClintock knows how to make a business of it. McClintock is always McClintock, he is always consistent, his style is always his own style. He does not make the mistake of being relevant on one page and irrelevant on another; he is irrelevant on all of them. He does not make the mistake of being lucid in one place and obscure in another; he is obscure all the time. He does not make the mistake of slipping in a name here and there that is out of character ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... money to prevent the looting of public property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed, hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... with full consent and confidence, as they let out the colts in the country? Who knows but they might behave the better for it, when out of your sight altogether? Think of it, Madame mere, and make public the result of your experiment! But all this is grossly irrelevant, and springs out of the fact that Emily, who wished to drag Frank Wallace out of the danger of an approaching melee, had not ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that his course indeed had led him in an entirely different direction. Although John professed himself satisfied with the explanation, he soon after despatched an ambassador to Barcelona, who, after dwelling on some irrelevant topics, touched, as it were, incidentally on the real object of his mission, the late voyage of discovery. He congratulated the Spanish sovereigns on its success; expatiated on the civilities shown by the court of Lisbon to Columbus, on his late arrival there; and acknowledged ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... business of theirs; that it was not the business of the prelates of the church in union with the state to remonstrate against the Crown commanding murder! Some say that the edition was published, but under an irrelevant title, which prevented people from knowing what it was about. Such things have happened: for example, arranged extracts from Wellington's general orders, which would have attracted attention, fell dead under the title of "Principles of War." It ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... longed to look at what I had discovered: for I realized that in all human probability I was about to suffer a crushing disappointment. This lost scrap of paper might prove to be part of some torn, irrelevant letter of long ago; or it might be an American greenback, or a forgotten memorandum. As I withdrew my hand—the paper in it—involuntarily I shut my eyes, as if shrinking from a blow. But I scolded myself for cowardly weakness, and opened my eyes again to ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a big wooden rocker before the fireplace, Gwynne stretched out his long legs one after the other; Zachariah tugged at the heavy, mud-caked riding-boots, grunting mightily over a task that gave him sufficient excuse for interjecting sundry irrelevant appeals for mercy and an occasional reference to his ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Musgrave home in Lichfield, and Colonel Musgrave waited until it should be time to open the Library for the afternoon. And about them birds twittered cheerily, and the formal garden flourished as gardens thrive nowhere except in Lichfield, and overhead the sky was a turkis-blue, save for a few irrelevant clouds which dappled it here and there ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the king, I was accompanied by the premier's sister, a fair and friendly woman, whose whole stock of English was, "Good morning, sir"; and with this somewhat irrelevant greeting, a dozen times in an hour, though the hour were night, she relieved her pent-up feelings, and gave expression to her sympathy and regard ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the longer passages, wanting in the Greek but found in the Hebrew, many of which upon internal evidence must be regarded as late intrusions into the latter.(13) And occasionally a word or phrase in the Hebrew, which spoils the rhythm or is irrelevant to the sense, is ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... a little confused by this avalanche of seemingly irrelevant facts hurled at him at a moment when the whole map of Europe was being changed by destiny and her future trembled ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... succession was to be determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... countries where those who occupy high stations of trust or of power are actually selected, for the purpose of being placed there, by the voices of their fellow-men, all inquiry into the personal character of a candidate is often suppressed, such inquiry being condemned as wholly irrelevant and improper, and they who succeed in attaining to power enjoy immunities in their elevation which are denied ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... of dismissing a question she liked not was to pour out matters which were quite irrelevant, when to stop her was altogether past hope. I had learned to wait. She, at my desire, made Jack her aid in her affairs, as I was fully occupied with my father's neglected business. Now, too, she was busy finding Jack a wife, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... clear that the Targumists intended here a strong allusion to the original meaning of Jezebel's name; viz. that she who was named "the undefiled" should become as "defilement." I am not sure whether a disquisition of this kind may be considered irrelevant to your work; but as the idea seems not an improbable one to some whose judgment I value, I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... for reasons best known to herself. She was by nature rather a loquacious and, so to speak, irrelevant talker. She delivered herself in a soft, unmeaning monotone, which, like "the brook," flowed "on for ever"—at least until some desperate listener interrupted her discourteously. In the present instance it was her own ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of a great presence; he commands ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not whether to laugh or weep when I think of the occasion on which the following charmingly irrelevant remarks were made to me: "We are all proud of our village library and even prouder of the feeling that prompted such a gift. I am reminded," the speaker went on to say, "of a cousin of mine who got a present of exquisite fruit (preserved ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... contented with the outcome[475]. He thought that "thus the preparation for war ... has prevented war." Seward's argument reviewed at great length all the conditions of the incident, dilated on many points of international law both relevant and irrelevant, narrated the past relations of the two nations on "right of search," and finally took the ground that Mason and Slidell were contraband of war and justly subject to capture, but that Wilkes had erred in not bringing ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... we get any personal account of Arthur is Caradoc, if Caradoc it be. The biographer makes his hero St Gildas (I put minor and irrelevant discrepancies aside) contemporary with Arthur, whom he loved, and who was king of all Greater Britain. But his brother kings did not admit this sovereignty quietly, and often put him to flight. At last Arthur ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... this romance have combined the two forms, and have omitted the irrelevant incidents in the Antiquarian version; there are literary advantages in this course, for the disconnected character of the Antiquarian opening, which must stand first, as it alone gives the beginning of the story, affords ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... John, raising his brows, conscious of a humane but very faint interest in Mr. Timson's affairs. Mr. Harum got out a cigar, and, lighting it, gave a puff or two, and continued with what struck the younger man as a perfectly irrelevant question. It really seemed to him as if his senior ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... had but a few moments previously passed up the street, he too ran in the same direction, and arrived on the scene as promptly as his short legs and shorter breath permitted him. In a fever of fright and flurry he approached, the crowd making way for him as he snapped out a cannonade of irrelevant questions. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... some wholly irrelevant issue, and after a protracted argument with William, largely composed of insulting remarks, she declared that she wasn't going to take the two shillings, nor yet one of them; let them give her the three she had won—that was all she wanted. William looked at her, shrugged his shoulders, ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... readily, by the way in which she tried to put me off, changing the conversation whenever I got on to the forbidden ground, and suggesting various irrelevant queries on my endeavouring again to chain her wilfully-erratic attention down to the one topic that I only thought worthy ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... late summer morning, yet to old Mrs. Quin's perplexity, he continued to sit on his little stool, with his slice of griddle-cake half-crumbled in his lap, and answered her suggestions that he should finish his breakfast, and run out to play, by irrelevant requests for his own ould mammy. He wanted her cruel bad, he said, and there was nothin' ailed him, and he wouldn't like to look for blackberries along the hedge—or to throw stones for Bran—or even to ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of human knowledge. And if we may judge by what we know of these two books, we have ample grounds for regretting that numerous other philosophical treatises which were written between the fourth and the first centuries B.C. were deemed too abstruse, too irrelevant, or too heterodox to find a place in the Jewish Canon.[2] For the Book of Job is an unrivalled masterpiece, the work of one in whom poetry was no mere special faculty cultivated apart from his other gifts, but the outcome of the harmonious wholeness ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... HINMAN. A new work in a new and convenient form. All irrelevant matter is omitted, and the pages devoted exclusively to Physical Geography clearly treated in the light of recent investigations. The numerous charts, cuts, and diagrams are drawn with accuracy, fully illustrating ...
— Arbor Day Leaves • N.H. Egleston
... bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. "It may rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence. You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, but ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... to Beason, who was plainly impatient at this shifting to anything so irrelevant as a wife, "I play quite a leading part in Dr. Hubers' life. I'm his cousin—that's the accident of birth; but I handed over to him his wife, for which he owes me undying gratitude. I'm looking for something ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... nomenclatures which formerly were considered sufficient for education. We no longer imagine that the history of our institutions has less interest than that of our wars, nor that the annals of the humbler classes are irrelevant to those of the privileged orders. We go further still. What is above all sought for in historical works nowadays is the physiognomy, the inmost character of past generations. "How did our fathers live?" is a daily question. "What institutions ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... a level. She had started up with defiant words ready to burst from her lips, but they fell back again without utterance. She had met Fra Girolamo's calm glance, and the impression from it was so new to her, that her anger sank ashamed as something irrelevant. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... with the one thought, the one word "Jim—Jim—Jim!" repeating in my head it was strange, even irrelevant to hear Jim's unsuspecting father and my blind ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... you please about feminine "togs," That they're ugly, unhealthy, are burdens or clogs, Too high, or too low, or too loose, or too tight, There is just one reply (but 'tis more than enough) To such "rational," but most irrelevant stuff:— If not in the Fashion, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... the patience to discover it. Therefore, by adopting a passive attitude, by simply letting his thoughts wander, by talking out to the physician everything that comes to his mind without criticizing or calling any thought irrelevant or far-fetched, and without rejecting any thought because of its painful character, the patient is helped to trace down and unearth the troublesome complex which may have been absolutely forgotten for many years. He is helped to relive the childhood experiences back of the over-strong habits ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... below the altar, which was lighted up with rows of wax candles, very lean ones, but the best the poor people could afford. All the villagers assembled soon afterwards, dressed in their best, he women with flowers in their hair, and a few simple hymns, totally irrelevant to the occasion, but probably the only ones known by them, were sung kneeling; an old half-caste, with black- spotted face, leading off the tunes. This finished, the congregation rose, and then marched in single file up one side of the church and ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... cathedral archives much valuable and interesting information exists, treating in this very manner such embellishments as may to-day be lacking; but unfortunately such facts are often buried in a mass of other irrelevant material which would make its discovery unusually difficult to any but a very learned local antiquarian. In this same connection, also, there is a dearth of illustrative material which can be depended upon as to minutiae or accuracy of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Letter is, as I have implied, principally taken up with secondary and collateral questions, and might therefore be set aside as in the main irrelevant, I am willing, for the student's sake, to touch some of these questions briefly, as an illustration ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Australian climes, even to the realms of the rising sun (the greek: anatolai haedlioio,) must in every age draw perennial streams of intellectual life, we feel that the little accidents of birth and social condition are so unspeakably below the grandeur of the theme, are so irrelevant and disproportioned to the real interest at issue, so incommensurable with any of its relations, that a biographer of Shakspeare at once denounces himself as below his subject if he can entertain such a question ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... which, as counsel for the city of Boston, he argues that a certain piece of land has not become a public highway, is a good illustration of an introduction on what was virtually a proposition of fact. Notice with what skill he cast aside all irrelevant matter and reduced the proposition to clearly ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... me) but very little, what with looking at the sea with its crossing and recrossing ships, and dawdling with my nieces of an evening. Besides a book is to me what Locke says that watching the hour hand of a clock is to all; other thoughts (and those of the idlest and seemingly most irrelevant) will intrude between my vision and the written words: and then I have to read over again; often again and again till all is crossed and muddled. If Life were to be very much longer than is the usual lot of men, one would try very hard to reform this lax habit, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... were more or less vague and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should, to put it briefly, bear looking back upon—that it should appear to stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be suspended too long; and suspension for a whole ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... settlement of these disputes much depends upon the glibness of tongue and on the sagacity of one or more of the principal men. For were it not for their skill in understanding the intricacies of the subject and in sidetracking irrelevant claims the disputes would be impossible of satisfactory arrangement. This will be understood more readily if it is borne in mind that outside of the reasonable facts of the case, counterclaims are made by the debtor or the accused party. These claims are sometimes of an extraordinary nature and ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... by the horns. I never neglect an opportunity of this nature, for however irrelevant to the matter in hand an episode may seem to be, not infrequently I have found that it is by the pursuit of such chance clews that one is led to the very piece of news ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the decadent, than we had anticipated. More than possibly, even his physique would be a disillusion. Leave him in that old world, which is precious to the imagination of a few, but to the business and bosoms of the modern multitude irrelevant as ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant question. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... rise and decay of Puritanism, and the development of modern thought will fill his pages. Each of these six will select just those facts, and those facts only, that are relevant to his subject. The introduction of irrelevant facts would be felt to mark the ignorant or unskilful workman. The master of his craft will keep in the background the details that have no bearing on his main purpose, and to those which have but a ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... an opportunity of speaking on so delicate a subject. Once when Zarah had ventured to ask the question, "Did you know my father?" Solomona had appeared not to hear it, and had instantly started some quite irrelevant topic of conversation. Abishai doubtless knew much about the brother of his wife, but Zarah shrank from questioning him; from his fierce impetuosity of character, he was not one to draw out the confidence of a gentle ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... to talk of the decapitation of Russell, and the death of Sidney. The view from this promontory includes the island of Corfu; and the name suggests to Mr. Gell the following note, which, though rather irrelevant, is of a curious nature, and we therefore conclude our citations by ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... may not be irrelevant to quote a communication which has been received from Sir John Young, the Governor-General of Canada, dated Ottawa, May 3rd, 1870:—"For emigrants able and willing to work, Canada offers at present a very good prospect. The demand for agricultural labourers in Ontario during the present ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... descanted on the power of the Fourth Estate; and in his addresses to young aspirants he ever laid stress on the crucial faculty of sifting out the essentials, whether in narrative or argument, from whatever was of secondary importance, circumstantial, or irrelevant. The confidence and accuracy with which Mrs. Purchase challenged him to put his faith and his method into instant practice, staggered him not a little. He felt himself hit, so to speak, with ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... under which Agamemnon sank was neither more nor less guiltily struck because it was dealt with an axe, because it was under pretence of giving him a bath, or because his feet were entangled in a long robe. These circumstances are all irrelevant. Those only are relevant which attach some special reasonableness or unreasonableness to the thing done Thus the provocation that Clytemnestra had from her husband's introduction of Cassandra into her house made her act of vengeance less unreasonable: on the other hand it was rendered more ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... situation is now possible. But before presenting this review, a definition of two words which will be frequently used may not be irrelevant. The Jewish problem is taken to mean an immediate concrete maladjustment where life and property are imperiled, much as we speak of the Mexican problem. The Jewish position, on the other hand, is taken to mean a social, cultural, or spiritual disharmony or repression, much as we speak of the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... thousand pities if Captain BATHURST should persist in leaving the department of the FOOD-CONTROLLER. If he could only keep down food-prices as effectively as he does irrelevant questioners he would be worth his weight in "Bradburys." His latest victim is Mr. PENNEFATHER, who has developed a keen curiosity on the subject of potatoes. Did not the Government think that the high price would cause premature "lifting"? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... senses, that he was wandering in some of the mysterious be-tween-worlds which he had so often dreamed of, with the love of his youth in her youth-time charm. Did he really believe it to be so? Belief is a term quite irrelevant to such a frame as his, in which the reflective and analytical powers are for a time purposely held in abeyance. The circumstances of her introduction to him had dropped from his mind as irrelevant accidents, like the absurdities ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... was irrelevant. "Joel, seems to me that so far my life's been for all the world like a checked gingham, if you know ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Every minute spent in irrelevant interbranch wrangling is precious time taken from the intelligent initiation and adoption of coherent policies for our national ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... found in the early part of George Sand's Histoire de ma Vie, and in the lives of the Brontes. Under the influence of nourishing books, her mind, sustained and stimulated, became nervously active. It had a trick of flashing off from the subject she was studying to something wholly irrelevant. She would begin Emerson's essay on Fate or Beauty with enthusiasm, and presently, with her eyes still following the lines, her thoughts would be busy forming a code of literary principles for herself. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... chloride is two vols. or four vols., an idea of the magnitude of the assumed decomposition is conveyed by the proportion of the volume of the decomposed salt to the volume of the non-decomposed, and Mr. Greene's quotation of the percentage of weight is irrelevant and misleading, and his number not even ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... from paper, it may not be irrelevant to say a word or two on the names by which we distinguish the sorts and sizes. The term "post-paper" is derived from the ancient water-mark, which was a post-horn, and not from its suitableness to transport by post, as many suppose. The original watermark ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... attention—displeasing pictures and still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. "Let us leave this—let us leave this!" she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure, and her ruffled spirit ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Plot. Interest the Essential Feature. c. Narration with Plot. 1. Selection of Main Incident of first Importance. It gives to the story Unity, ridding it of Long Introductions and Conclusions, Tedious Enumerations, and Irrelevant Details. 2. Arrangement of Material. Close of Story contains Main Incident. Opening of Story contains Characters, Place, and Time. Incidents generally follow in Order of Time. 3. Movement. 4. Use of Description in Narration. 5. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... nearly every thing: the only difficulty is to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant in the ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... silence in the room. There had been nothing thus far in the case leading up to this description, and those present looked at Ned with wonder in their faces. To say the least, the questions seemed irrelevant. ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... gave her a glance of surprise at first, at this very irrelevant propounding of questions; then a gleam came out of his blue eyes, which were not in the least like Mr. St. Leger's blue eyes; but he ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... singularly successful. Its effect upon capable minds possessed of common sense is to produce that contempt for pure intellect which distinguishes the British nation from all others, and ensures the practical success of administrators selected by an examination so gloriously irrelevant to their future duties that, since the lamentable demise of the Chinese system, it may boast to be the most antiquated in the world. In minds, however, which are more prone to theorizing, but at the same time clear-headed, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious, whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an air of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises, emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever attempting to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men who ride pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family have none, identify themselves ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous temperament.—"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was so apparently irrelevant that Mick failed to understand. A sudden skidding swerve as the team wheeled nearly jerked him off his seat, the crackling bursts of half a dozen light shells over the plain behind him distracted his attention for a moment further. Then he leaned in towards Donovan, "What was ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... private wire will be installed to-morrow morning. Remember to be absolutely unsuspicious, to appear deeply grateful for the kindness offered you; receive these men and your spiritual adviser whenever they call, and above all, keep me informed of everything that occurs, no matter how insignificant or irrelevant it may seem to you to be. Keep me advised on even the smallest details—anything, everything concerning you ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... sipped his wine and regarded the Vicar benevolently. For closest friends he had two of the most irrelevant thinkers on earth and he delighted to ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... With which apparently irrelevant remark he seized the matted beard of the larger tramp and struck the fellow a quick, sharp blow in the face. Instantly the fellow's companion was upon him; but the camper retained his death grip upon the beard of the now yelling bully ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... are formal. Hence they swarm with words and phrases for which no parallel can be found. Unless the purpose of the letter is otherwise clear, these words and phrases may be quite unintelligible. Any side issue may be introduced, or even a totally irrelevant topic. While the point of these disconnected sentences may have been perfectly clear to the recipient of the message, we cannot possibly understand them, unless we have an intimate acquaintance with the private life and personal ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... as said and declared therein; and this will be proved and established with true and sufficient evidences and proofs, at any and all times, as it shall prove necessary. And I do not feel bound to reply to many of the things contained in his rejoinder, inasmuch as they are utterly irrelevant, and have nothing to do with the business here concerned—tending, as they do, to attribute fault, and cause for slander, where there is none; many of them, also, being untrue, and unworthy of a person in so ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... pained to discover this unsuspected vein of cruelty in a woman I had long admired. And the woman merely became irrelevant with her apothegm ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... How plausible it appears! And yet it is irrelevant, as Dr. Priestly frankly confesses, who tries to save the credit of the apostle by the convenient principle of accommodation! The whole force of Peter's reasoning depends upon the word "corruption." David did ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... to have a boy about the house, and positively writhed under the irrelevant and irrepressible questions, the unnecessary noises and boisterous high spirits which nothing would subdue; his son's society was to him simply an abominable nuisance, and he pined for a release from it from the day ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... and for more than half an hour he regaled Kapfer with a story that, stripped of descriptive and irrelevant material concerning Elkan's own feelings in the matter, ought to have taken only five ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... may be tested with other papers in the case, but not with irrelevant papers, and the whole of the test paper must be shown him. He is entitled ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... history came to the ears of Mrs. Brownlow or her children. That evening they only heard fragments, much more that was utterly irrelevant, and much that was inexplic- able, all interspersed with inquiries and caresses and intent listening for Allen. Elvira might not have acquired brains, but she had gained in sweetness and affection. The face had lost its soulless, painted-doll expression, and she was evidently happy beyond all measure ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... found persons to maintain the contrary. There is no reason whatever to suppose that Milton felt any keen personal grief at the death of Edward King. There is nothing spontaneous, nothing, one might almost say, genuine in the lament. This is indeed strictly irrelevant to the question of its artistic merit, but it must nevertheless be admitted that there is thus much justice in the censure, that the poem purports to be the expression of an intimate sorrow, of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... what his moral character may be in other directions, whether he is kind to his wife, whether he is loving towards his children, whether he is generous in a charitable way, whether he is politically stanch or corrupt, do you not see that these questions are entirely irrelevant, have nothing whatever to do with the question of success in the money field? He sows according to the laws of the product which he wishes to raise, and the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... first, I have no complaint to make, because he has quoted my own words, and I am well content that they should tell their own tale. If our author considers the argument 'unsound in itself, and irrelevant to the direct purpose of the work,' [131:1] I venture to think that discerning readers will take a different view. I had directed attention [131:2] to certain passages in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. xxiii. 37; Luke xiii. 34) as implying other visits to Jerusalem which these ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... duties and prerogatives of the lowly, lasting quite up to the moment when the carriage stopped before the door of Mrs. Van Deuser's residence, it fell upon ears which heard not. Indeed, her next remark was so entirely irrelevant that her august kinswoman stared in displeased amazement. "I am going to purchase some—some necessaries to-morrow, Cousin Maria; I should like Fifine to go ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... unequalled drug! All the agitation and turmoil of the last few months seemed to fall away from him. He felt that he had been living in a world of false proportions; that the maze of doubts and fears through which he had wandered was, after all, no part of life itself, merely a tissue of irrelevant issues, to which his distorted imagination had affixed a purely fictitious importance. What concern of his was it how Morris Barnes had lived or died? And who was Bentham that his fate should ever disturb ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Chesapeake outrage as an act of aggression which should be promptly disavowed without reference to the larger question of impressment. He was now obliged to eat his own words and inject into the discussion, as Canning put it, the irrelevant matters which they had agreed to separate from the present controversy. Canning was quick to see his opportunity. Mr. Monroe must be aware, said he, that on several recent occasions His Majesty had firmly declined to waive "the ancient and prescriptive usages of Great Britain, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... spread out and the pen all right, and the ink within easy reach, how they keep back from the final plunge! And after they have begun to write, how they dally with their subject; shrink back as long as possible from grappling with its difficulties; twist about and about, talking of many irrelevant matters, before they can summon up resolution to go at the real point they have got to write about! How much unwillingness there is fairly to put the neck to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... accounts, with no effort whatever to reconcile them. He was an industrious collector of information, and gathered an enormous quantity, some of it very useful; he recorded with the like complacency authentic incidents of the highest importance and palpable fabrications or irrelevant trivialities; and it never entered his head to sift evidence or to exercise a little critical ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... her governess was spared the embarrassment of telling her if he were more of a gentleman than papa. This was not moreover from the want of opportunity, for there were no moments between them at which the topic could be irrelevant, no subject they were going into, not even the principal dates or the auxiliary verbs, in which it was further off than the turn of the page. The answer on the winter nights to the puzzle of cards and counters and little bewildering pamphlets was just ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven't had a minute all week to send the laundry out." Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant—"I must show ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thought and expression, where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... furnished the territorial means for the attack on the southern side of the Polish triangle; and although Ivanov was farther pushed back from the Gnilia Lipa to the Strypa and thence almost to the Sereth, this Eastern advance became irrelevant to the main strategic design, and German reinforcements were collecting mostly under Gallwitz, Scholtz, and Von Eichhorn along the Narew and the Niemen for an onslaught on the north-western side of the triangle. The Austrian Prince ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... who should say that the senses cannot feel: it does not touch {204} Berkeley who says they cannot know. So the attack on Lycidas might be fatal to a judge who put his judgment into the form of a pastoral; as the criticism of a poet it is in the main simply irrelevant. It is evident that what Johnson admires in Milton is the power of his mind and the elevation of his character, not at all his purely poetic gifts. He never betrays the slightest suspicion that in speaking of Milton he is speaking of one of the very greatest artists the world has ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... momentarily out of favor, while the perpetual smuggling of the Dutch had convinced Napoleon that the only means to secure the continental embargo was to incorporate Holland with France. Three days later Murat received still higher praise, with a perfectly irrelevant clause interjected: "I suppose Godoy will come by way of Bayonne." This was, of course, a hint to send the Prince of the Peace into France. If the commander of the French forces should act on the suggestion, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... to exact use of balances or to watching filter papers and the like but the mere layman may learn in a short time with profit the meaning of a chemical equation, and find a kind of diagrammatic knowledge sufficient to meet all he requires. To discard what is irrelevant to the purpose is one of the most difficult but most important things to be learned. Instead of using "Euclid" as a means of teaching scholars to reason, they are expected to use compasses carefully to make circles round—a matter of no ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... that Dame Lovell would ask an irrelevant question, which might lead to conversation—that Friar Andrew would awake—that Cicely would rush in with news of the cows having broken into the garden—or that anything would occur which would put a stop to the examination of those volumes ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid to cure people—he laid great stress on "paid"—and had no business ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... views, fully supported by many quotations from Scripture. This paper, after reading aloud, he handed to the cardinal, who, however, cast it contemptuously aside, declaring it to be a mass of idle words and irrelevant quotations. Luther, fully roused, now met the haughty prelate on his own ground,—the traditions and teachings of the church,—and utterly ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... back. What the devil should he say to the admiral? There was one thing he knew absolutely nothing about, and this was the duties of a private secretary to a retired admiral who had riches, a yacht, a hobby, and a beautiful, though impulsive daughter. His thought became irrelevant, as is frequent when one faces a crisis, humorous or tragic; here indeed was the coveted opportunity to study at close range the habits of a man who spent ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... given to one who, discarding as irrelevant all theories and observances bearing upon the other world and its interests, holds that we ought to confine our attention solely to the immediate problems and duties of this, independently of all presumed dependence on revelation and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and poor. She lived full a quarter of a mile away. So in deciding to make the visit that night, I hardly think a very strong element of self-interest was included in the motives that governed me. But that is irrelevant. ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... upon the sea at Baiae, the acres covered by imperial palaces in Rome, are as Latin as the small scale of the Parthenon is Greek. Athens annihilates our notions of mere magnitude by the predominance of harmony and beauty, to which size is irrelevant. Rome dilates them to the full: it is the colossal greatness, the mechanical pride, of her monuments that win our admiration. By comparing the Dionysian theatre at Athens, during a representation ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of Bodhidharma, however, this conception of Buddha seemed too crude to be accepted unhesitatingly and the doctrine too much irrelevant with and uncongenial to actual life. Since Zen denounced, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the scriptural authority, it is quite reasonable to have given up this view of Buddha inculcated in the Mahayana sutras, and to set at naught those statues and images of supernatural ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... in a dream where all physical motion was mechanical, and his body was acting automatically. His concentration, and therefore his abstraction, was phenomenal. Jowett's reminiscences at a time so critical did not disturb him—did not, indeed, seem to be irrelevant. It was as though Felix Marchand was being passed in review before him in a series of aspects. He nodded encouragement to Jowett ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... truth as the scientist studies his facts and constructs his theories. This method implies that the teacher and pupil hold in abeyance all those probable theories, speculations, and conjectures which are not established, as irrelevant to the work in hand. When this scientific spirit is more effectively introduced into the study of the Christian religion in our colleges, it will prepare the way for the restatement of doctrine so as to commend it with increasing force to every intelligent student. Christian truth is capable of ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... so irrelevant that one could make no answer to it. But the sense of the absurdity was beginning at last to exercise its well-known fascination. I felt I must not let the man talk to me any more. I got up, observing curtly that he was too much for me—that I couldn't ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... subject abruptly, and talked in a desultory manner on irrelevant matters. But Robert saw that Quebec itself and the struggle between the powerful Bigot ring and the honnetes gens was a much greater weight on his mind than the approaching war ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... is her tendency to wander away from the direct line and ramble about among irrelevant and inconsequential trifles. Sometimes these rambles are altogether entertaining and enable her pupils to pass the time pleasantly, but they lack "terminal facilities." They lead from nowhere to nowhere in the most fascinating and fruitless meanderings. Such expeditions bring back no emoluments. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... the main conclusion of the "Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very attentively, the close of my inaugural lecture given here; for the matter, no less than the tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and ill-judged;—which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this place or elsewhere, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... now. Blaine held fast to the girl as they felt their way along the smooth tunnel wall, and Tom Farley, behind them there in the darkness, kept up a running fire of small talk that was utterly irrelevant. Nothing could keep ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... Confidente, which has become a sort of national air in Turkey. The strains floated in through the window, and the young girl struggled hard to concentrate her thoughts, which somehow wound themselves in and out of the music in a very irrelevant manner. ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... second marriages a folly may be to make enemies for life. Which, by the way, is absurd: all conversation should be regarded as privileged and impersonal. 'T is brain meeting brain, not foot treading gingerly among irrelevant personal considerations. And just as we are all willing to preach, we are all willing to be preached at—it gives us such an opportunity of gauging the preacher's morality and ability. The Scotch peasants who denounce their meenister's orthodoxy are an extreme ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the midst of Madame Bertrand's effusive benevolence, seemed quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, but nevertheless ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... unpremeditated ease that it seems all to the manner born. It may be a new evidence that to-day national lines, at least in art, are vanishing; before long the national quality will be imperceptible and indeed irrelevant. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... going to the theatre. Assuredly it must show us more than that; and it is an interesting paradox that in order to show us more it has to show us less. The magic mirror must refuse to reflect the irrelevant and non-essential, and must thereby concentrate attention on the pertinent and essential phases of nature. That mirror is the best that reflects the least which does not matter, and, as a consequence, reflects ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... similar first principles, it will readily be seen, are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl's Court Exhibition. No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr. Kiralfy has built 'midmost the beating' of our ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. "Would you examine me as a witness against myself?" was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her. General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity; two-edged questions, which not one of themselves could have answered, without, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... and evidently followed a direct connection of thought in a speech apparently irrelevant. "I understand the young Malone wants to marry Henrietta. I hope she won't; he seems rather ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... in his chair. He had listened patiently, but without consuming interest, to the major's story. It had impressed him as irrelevant to the situation, and it could certainly have no effect upon the consequences. Those Western people, he thought, had an exaggerated sentimentality. They were not business-like. They needed to be protected from their friends. Evidently the major had concluded. And what he had ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... just an' valid claim fer two rounds of drinks to the total value of two dollars an' four bits, leavin' a dollar an' four bits still owin' to me. The case is now closed, owin' to any testimony the defendant, here, might introduce, would be mere hearsay an' therefore irrelevant an' immaterial, he havin' admitted he wasn't here at the time. Now, gentlemen of the jury, what's ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... why you should see. My father was the second son and—But this is quite irrelevant. You, an American, can scarcely be expected to understand English family customs. It is sufficient that, for reasons of his own, my father had for years been ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... conception of what morality is, it will be safest to consider first what the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... say, mind you," continued the man in the corner with a chuckle, "that to most people present, Sir James Fenwick's cross-questioning seemed completely irrelevant. Both Mr. Campbell and his clerk were quite ready to swear that they had had an interview concerning some diamond earrings with a lady, of whose identity with the accused they were perfectly convinced, and to the casual ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... But this was Bunyan's peculiar excellence. He was even better acquainted with the Gospel as the scheme of God, than he was familiar with the Bible-text; and the consequence is, that though he is sometimes irrelevant in his references, and fanciful in interpreting particular passages, his doctrine is almost always according to the analogy of faith. The doctrine of a free and instant justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ, none even of the Puritans could state with more Luther-like boldness, nor ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... the continuator of Mackintosh; and a larger selection, from the originals in the Vatican, appeared in Theiner's Annals of Gregory XIII. The letters written under Pius V. are beyond the limits of that work; and Theiner, moreover, has omitted whatever seemed irrelevant to his purpose. The criterion of relevancy is uncertain; and we shall avail ourselves largely of the unpublished portions of Salviati's correspondence, which were transcribed by Chateaubriand. These manuscripts, with others of equal importance not previously consulted, determine several doubtful ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... I followed your example, and ask what you think of the Copernican system?" "You can't be ill-balanced if you try, and your question is not in the least irrelevant. The Copernican system is true, and illustrates my position exactly. There is a heavenly body, radiant with light and beauty, that attracts me irresistibly. The moment I came within her influence my ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... of the witnesses on the stand was asked by a lawyer, who wanted to embarrass or discredit him, if he were not an Abolitionist. Objection came from the other side on the ground that the inquiry was irrelevant; but the learned justice-of-the-peace who presided held that, as it related to the witness's sanity, and that would affect his credibility, the question was admissible. It is not, perhaps, so very strange that in those days, in view of ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume |
