"Lower class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... residents of San Francisco there are comparatively few of those of the higher class. The difference between them and the masses is very pronounced, and they appreciate the difference to the fullest extent. They are educated, well-bred gentlemen. The coolie and lower class are an ignorant, repulsive and ill-mannered people. They seem to be mere brutes, and not a gleam of intelligence is apparent in ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... substance, has from five to twenty wives. A merchant, from three to five. One of this class at Canton, had, indeed, twenty-five wives, and thirty-six children; but this was mentioned to me as a very extraordinary instance. An opulent tradesman has usually two; and the lower class of people very rarely more than one. Their servants are at least double in number to those employed by persons of the same condition in Europe. If, then, we suppose a Chinese family one-third larger, and an European ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... this aspect of the matter? It is too indisputable, not doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we must look for ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... seem to agree, that in the works accredited to him are plays of a lower order, which certainly are not from the same author as the remainder, and especially the greater plays. In this widely different and lower class, criticism seems to be agreed in placing the greater portion of Pericles, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, two parts of Henry VI., and Henry VIII.[1] In addition to those, there are at least ten ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... view of Edinburgh is picturesque and romantic, but it affects a lower class of our associations. It is, compared to that of London, what the poem of the Seasons is with respect to Paradise Lost—the castellated descriptions of Walter Scott to the Darkness of Byron—the Sabbath of Grahame to the Robbers of Schiller. In the ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... solicitation which will annoy her and bring upon her head the inconsiderate jealousy of her husband? Think of Agnes made subject to the rude authority, to the stripes and correction, which men of the lower class, under the promptings of jealousy, do not scruple to inflict on their wives! What career did society, as then organized, present to such a nature, so perilously gifted in body and mind? He has the answer. The Church has opened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... dined with us, taking coffee and smoking upon the balcony, I found that by good fortune I had escaped being witness of a murder which took place before our door. These gentlemen had observed, for some time, a group of persons, male and female, of the lower class, talking and apparently amusing themselves; sometimes laughing, and at other times disputing and giving each other blows. Suddenly, one of the number, a man, darted out from amongst the others, and tried to escape by clambering over the low wall which supports the arches ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... consist or hold together. It teaches an imminent mind; an almighty, constantly exerted power. Proof of this starts up on every side. There is a recognized tendency in all high-class energy to deteriorate to a lower class. There is steam in the boiler, but it wastes without fuel. There is electricity in the jar, but every particle of air steals away a little, unless our conscious force is exerted to regather it. There ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... particularly inculcated as a part of national education, for it is not at present one of our national virtues. Tenderness for their humble dumb domestics, amongst the lower class, is oftener to be found in a savage than a civilized state. For civilization prevents that intercourse which creates affection in the rude hut, or mud cabin, and leads uncultivated minds who are only depraved by the refinements which prevail in the society, where they are trodden under foot ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... enduring labor of some one belonging to his line, while among these gold pieces, he himself had provided his share.—For, personal services counted, even among the upper nobility; and all the more among the lower class, in the Third-Estate, and among the people. Among the notables of every degree just described, most of them, in 1789, were fully grown men, many of them mature, a goodly number advanced in years, and some quite aged; consequently, in justification ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... rough people who had to make their living, and little time to think of anything beyond, but we are indebted to them, for they are everywhere the necessary pioneers of civilisation—the mass whose dead bodies form a bridge for their more fortunate successors. Then the gold discoveries brought out a lower class. However, the second generation is a great improvement on the first, and, no doubt, the usual rule of amelioration of type will make itself felt in due course. In what I have just been saying I speak in the most ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... themselves. This, I think, implies, that on some occasions, human sacrifices are considered as necessary, particularly when they take such men as have, by the laws of their country, forfeited their lives, and have nothing to redeem them; and such will generally be found among the lower class of people. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... suggest grave doubts to his mind. Derues, with his usual cunning, had conformed his language to the quality of his listener. Any tricks, profession of piety, quotations from sacred books, so largely indulged in when he wished to bamboozle people of a lower class, would here have told against him. He knew when to abstain, and carried the art of deception far enough to be able to lay aside the appearance of hypocrisy. He had described all the circumstances without ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... obstinate is this belief. In Rome at present the learned no longer believe in Jupiter and Mars and the rest of the deities, though they still attend the state ceremonies at the temples, holding that a state religion is necessary. The lower class still believe, but then they cannot be said to reason. In Greece scepticism is universal among the upper class, and the same may now be said of Egypt. Our Roman belief is the more unaccountable since we have simply borrowed the religion of the Greeks, the gods and their attributes being the same, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... with a spoon, insists that meat, potatoes and salad shall all be placed upon the table at once, and, if the father and mother than whom he does not care to rise higher were, in spite of their excellence, of the lower class, he carries his food to his mouth on the blade of his knife, and noisily sips tea from his saucer. Evidently he does not believe in shams, those little conventionalities, nearly all of which have ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... innovation upon our antient laws and constitution. On the one hand, it prevents the clandestine marriages of minors, which are often a terrible inconvenience to those private families wherein they happen. On the other hand, restraints upon marriage, especially among the lower class, are evidently detrimental to the public, by hindering the encrease of people; and to religion and morality, by encouraging licentiousness and debauchery among the single of both sexes; and thereby ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... dramatic proverbs, which, with one of her drawing-rooms permanently arranged as a charming diminutive theatre, she caused to be performed by the young persons of her circle—often, when the case lent itself, by the wonderful small offspring of humbler friends, children of the Venetian lower class, whose aptitude, teachability, drollery, were her constant delight. It was certainly true that an impression of Venice as humanly sweet might easily found itself on the frankness and quickness and amiability of these little people. They were at least so much to the good; for ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... In her large hands, covered with tight black gloves, she carried a dark red parasol and a somewhat shabby little black leather bag with steel fastenings. The stout lady's face was of the type common among the Roman women of the lower class—very broad and heavy, of a creamy white complexion, the upper lip shaded by a dark fringe of down, and the deep sleepy eyes surmounted by heavy straight eyebrows. Her hair, brought forward from under ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... religious toleration should be extended to the Catholics, and that no one should suffer for their religion, all were not so tolerant; and when the news arrived of wholesale massacres of Protestants by Alva's troops, the lower class were apt to rise in riot, and to retaliate by the destruction of the property of the Catholics in ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... "You know reverend Father what it is that I require of him and that he refuses. His peasants—always his peasants! Now can you tell me why they, who must feel the influence and power of their masters so much more directly than the lower class in towns, they, whose weal or woe so obviously depends on the will of the Most High, are so obstinately set against the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such doctrines in Ireland is this, that whereas in England it is the upper class principally that is militarist, in Ireland it is principally the lower class, and whereas it is the Castle authorities who are always preaching the iniquity of physical force, it is the lower classes who ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... of me. She spoilt me shockingly—more than most mothers indulge their brats. She always seemed to retain a sense of the inferior position she had held. Not a common failing, by-the-by: persons raised unexpectedly to wealth, from the lower class, generally measure their presumption by their ignorance. She always treated me as a superior. My father was very fond of her. These passive women are always great favourites with men. They have no decided character of their own, and become the mere echoes of superior minds. A vain man loves to ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... inspired the engraver with respect, and dazzled him by the fascination which the audacious exert over the timid. M. Gerard thought he discerned in Combarieu one of those superior men whom a cruel fate had caused to be born among the lower class and in whom ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... away into the darkness, Francis followed him. He was shoeless, for at that time the lower class seldom wore any protection to the feet, unless when going a journey over rough ground. Among the gondoliers shoes were unknown; and Francis himself generally took his off, for coolness and comfort, when out for the evening in ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... best in smaller classes with good teachers. For two years in a row, Congress has supported my plan to hire 100,000 new, qualified teachers, to lower class sizes in the early grades. This year, I ask you to make it three ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... make the South what Ireland was when Arthur Young travelled there, the country richest in the world by nature, reduced to irredeemable poverty and hopeless weakness by an upper class who would not, and a lower class who could not, improve. We have no right to purchase dominion, no right to purchase even abolition, at such a price as that. No uti possidetis conveys any legitimate title, except on the condition of ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... laws of social caste. Where class spirit is traditional and fully developed, men have a double code for the women of their own class, and those of the lower classes. It is a far greater offense for a gentleman to marry a girl of the lower class than ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... celebrations was Angelo Brunetti, afterward so well known by his nickname of "Ciceruacchio." "He was a person of single mind, rustic in manners, proud and at the same time generous, as is common with Romans of the lower class." By his industry he had acquired considerable property, and by his liberal use of it had become a leader of the populace, whom he now fired with his own enthusiasm ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... as an amusement it was amusing. As fun, it was fun. She did her business with tea-leaves: so the tale ran. This was not considered to be very distinguished. A crystal, or even cards, or the anatomy of a sacrificed fowl, would have been better than tea-leaves; tea-leaves were decidedly lower class. And yet, despite these drawbacks, when the question arose who should first visit the witch of Endor, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... no dishonour for a girl of the middle or lower class to have a liaison with some admirer, particularly if he is a student or a young officer; in fact, it is quite the proper thing for him to be welcomed by her parents, although it is perfectly well understood that he has not the slightest ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... wood for lath used in building. This product is usually taken from lower class wood or logging camp waste. Then comes the wood for distillation into wood-alcohol for use in manufacture and ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... is but excessive few, it is but just an exception here and there, now and then, sich as ye two young uns and me, that, being in a different sphere, can understand t' one t' other, and be friends wi'out slavishness o' one hand or pride o' t' other. Them that reckons to be friends to a lower class than their own fro' political motives is never to be trusted; they always try to make their inferiors tools. For my own part, I will neither be patronized nor misled for no man's pleasure. I've had overtures made to me lately that ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... ratepaying L10 householders. The qualification for this franchise had originally been fixed at L20, and the king deprecated any reduction, but the omission of the ballot reconciled him and other timid reformers to an immense increase in the lower class of borough voters. Sixty boroughs of less than 2,000 inhabitants, returning 119 members, were to be disfranchised altogether; forty-seven others, with less than 4,000 inhabitants, were to be deprived of one member, and Weymouth was to lose two out of the four ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the lower class of Irish, and the meekness and resignation with which they bear misfortune or affliction, struck, me very forcibly. 'I haven't aten a bit this blessed day, glory be to God!' said one woman, 'Troth, I've been ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... more doubtful—but they change. When Mr. and Mrs. Beecham commenced life, they had both the warmest feeling of opposition to the Church and everything churchy. All the circumstances of their lives had encouraged this feeling. The dislike of the little for the great, the instinctive opposition of a lower class towards the higher, intensified that natural essence of separatism, that determination to be wiser than one's neighbour, which in the common mind lies at the bottom of all dissent. In saying this we no more accuse Dissenters in religion than Dissenters in politics, or in art, or in criticism. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... classifications it will be perceived that the main basis upon which the grouping of commodities rests is the relative value of the goods. The gradations cannot, however, be made strictly according to value. The goods are frequently put into a lower class than their value would warrant in order to stimulate their production and shipment or to develop the industries depending upon ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... extremely displeased. She was amply provided for by the treaty of Fontainbleau, but did not survive to reap any benefit from the provision, as she shortly after sickened and died at her beautiful villa of Malmaison. She was buried on the 3rd of June, at the village of Ruel. A vast number of the lower class attended the obsequies; for she had well deserved the title ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... painful kind, common to pedagogues, which betrays a constant fear of being caught tripping while engaged in correcting others, the comparison—to cite once more M. de Pontmartin—"will appear only the more exact." We forbear to descend to a far lower class, judges who know nothing of law, masters who have never been scholars, truly "incomplete artists" who cannot "forget or bury" their own extremely "circumscribed talent," but who are perfectly willing to bury, and would fain induce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... New Testament as no violations of law, but the coming in of higher laws or forces than those usually at work in the world, why may they not have taken place in our own time? If Christ's miracles differ only from other miracles in being higher and more perfect, what are the miracles of a lower class? Can we point out any events belonging to the same class of phenomena which have happened during ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... paused, a buzz of admiration ran through the chapel, accompanied by that peculiar rapid noise made by the lower class of an Irish Roman Catholic congregation, when their feelings of awe, astonishment, or piety, are excited by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... some of the Russians as big as a hand, eaten deep into by the vermin and the bones threatened to break through the skin of some as we sat about naked, shivering. Uncleanly at best and denied soap here, the lower class of them neglected all the rules of cleanliness. Their "non-coms" were the reverse, being almost without exception men of some ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... fuer Ethnologie, Heft 4, p. 167, 1896. Crawley, (Mystic Rose, Ch. VIII, p. 439) gives numerous other instances, even in Europe, with, however, special reference to sexual taboo. I may remark that English people of lower class, especially women, are often modest about eating in the presence of people of higher class. This feeling is, no doubt, due, in part, to the consciousness of defective etiquette, but that very consciousness is, in part, a development of the fear ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Europeans on shore might be massacred, and the whole city destroyed, by the exasperated troops and fanatical population. It was known that the number of Englishmen there was not large, two or three hundred at most; but there was a much larger number of the lower class of Europeans—port labourers, fishermen, petty shopkeepers, and others—who had preferred taking their chance to the certainty of losing all their little possessions, if ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... The arithmetic lesson was a review of the principles which the class had gone over, and consisted of a dozen examples, printed on a slip of paper, to test the knowledge of the students; and it was intimated that those who failed would be sent down into a lower class. Bill dreaded anything like a degradation. He was proud, if he was lazy. He knew that I had performed the examples, and while his fellow-boarders were at dinner, he had stolen the opportunity to appeal to me for the assistance he ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... think that they hazard much by their reply; they hesitate, and look eagerly in your face, to discover by your countenance what they ought to think and feel, and what sort of answer you expect. All who are governed by any species of fear are disposed to equivocation. Amongst the lower class of Irish labourers, and under-tenants, a class of people who are much oppressed, you can scarcely meet with any man who will give you a direct answer to the most indifferent question; their whole ingenuity, and they have ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... some costumes worn by Victorian ladies which you will never see worn by any other ladies; but for all that, the middle and even the lower class am by no means destitute of ideas about dress. Compare the Melbourne with the Birmingham or Manchester factory girl, or the young lady in a Collins Street retail establishment with the shop-girl in any but the most aristocratic part ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... happens to be a Romish family of considerable possessions," said the man in black, "our church is sure to have followers of the lower class, who have come over in the hope of getting something in the shape of dole or donation. As, however, the Romish is not yet the dominant religion, and the clergy of the English establishment have some patronage to bestow, the churches are not quite ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... people at the mines was made miserable. The American miners seemed to feel that the Californian had no right to be there. Of course there were some of the lower class, many of whom were part Indian, who would lie, steal, or, if they had an opportunity, murder; but often those who were persecuted were not of this type. A woman of refinement, who under the title of "Shirley" wrote her experiences ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... to be supposed that a movement like this, which the lower class of citizens in the towns had joined, just as in the German peasant war, and which was mainly directed against the landed gentry, could be stifled by one defeat: it continued to ferment uninterruptedly in ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... "damn" and "hell." There were Chinamen and Japs—a dozen of the slant-eyed, yellow-faced Orientals—the Chinamen all big, gaunt men with their queues coiled about their heads. There were Italians, the lower class known to the West as "Dagoes." And almost to the last man of them they were the hardest-faced men ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... which they fail not to cast or dart, whenever the Bull by his Nearness gives them an Opportunity. So that the poor Creature may be said to fight, not only with the Tauriro (or Bullhunter, a Person always hired for that Purpose) but with the whole Multitude in the lower Class at least. ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... spent among boys of the better class, who turned up their noses at his leather breeches and heavy boots. He was taken away from that school and sent where there was a lower class of boys, whose leader he soon became, but in his studies he was far ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... supported by "a large and respectable class of readers"? Emily seems to have had such a class in her eye when she wrote that strange thing Wuthering Heights. Anne, too, stops repeatedly to preach commonplace truths. She has had a still lower class in her mind's eye. Emily seems to have followed the bookseller's advice. As to the price you got, it was certainly Jewish. But what could the people do? If they had asked you to fix it, do you know yourself how many ciphers your sum would have had? And how should they know better? And if they ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the reputation of being grossly superstitious, they are not a whit more so than the peasantry of England, France, or Germany, nor scarcely as much addicted to superstitious beliefs and fancies as the lower class of Scottish Highlanders. The Irish imagination is, however, so lively as to endow the legends of the Emerald Isle with an individuality not possessed by those of most other nations, while the Irish command of language presents the creatures of Hibernian fancy in a garb so vividly real and ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... young friends in the wood, and there they intended, with the stroke of twelve, to drink out of Kirsten's well. Men and women, girls and boys of the lower class, and jovial young men, meet, after this manner, to enjoy St. John's Eve. Still sounded the music, the swings were in motion, lamps hung out, whilst the new moon shone through the thick tree boughs. ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... the teacher does for the boys in the high school where we go, only we're in the lower class," said Bunny. "Some of the ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Big Woods • Laura Lee Hope
... respectable provision for the younger son of a country squire. Their fine horses, their rich housings, their cuirasses, and their buff coats adorned with ribands, velvet, and gold lace, made a splendid appearance in Saint James's Park. A small body of grenadier dragoons, who came from a lower class and received lower pay, was attached to each troop. Another body of household cavalry distinguished by blue coats and cloaks, and still called the Blues, was generally quartered in the neighbourhood of the capital. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... occupant, or occupants. His excellency, Prince Boris, evidently did not wish, or had no time, to bother with blunderers; if they got in his way so much the worse for them. The lookout, pausing to stare once more ahead, suddenly started. Though apathetic, like most of the lower class of his countrymen, he uttered a faint guttural of surprise and peered over the bow. A voice had seemed to rise from the very seething depths of the sea. Naturally superstitious, he made the sign of the cross on his breast while tales of dead ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... gone further yet than Woolston; he dares to treat the transport of our Saviour by the devil upon the mountain, the wedding of Cana, the bread and the fishes, as absurd fables, injurious to divinity, which were ignored during three hundred years by the whole Roman Empire, and finally passed from the lower class to the palace of the emperors, when policy obliged them to adopt the follies of the people in order the more easily to subjugate them. The denunciations of the English priest do not approach those of the Champagne priest. Woolston is ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... the eyes, and chapping of the hands and face. The heats are sometimes so excessive, that persons going out without an umbrella are liable to suffer from coup de soleil, or sun-stroke; and the inhabitants, especially of the lower class, in order to guard against it, wrap up their heads in a large turban, over which in their journeys they plait a thick shawl many times folded. They seldom, however, venture out of their houses during mid-day, and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Plautus, who prides himself on not being as other cooks are, who make the guests into beasts of the field, stuffing them with all kinds of food which cattle eat, and even with things which cattle would refuse![85] we may take it that at all times the Roman of the lower class consumed fruit and vegetables largely, and thus gave employment to a number of market-gardeners and small purveyors. Fish he did not eat; like meat, it was too expensive; in fact fish-eating only came in towards ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... of some cities have made themselves ridiculous in the eyes of thinking photoplay patrons, but the work done by the National Board of Censors has been the means of slowly and surely causing the lower class of photoplay patrons to acquire an appreciation of good dramatic subjects as ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... ground where the prizes were to be given out. . . . Lord Braybrooke made first a most paternal and interesting address, which showed me in the most favorable view the relation between the noble and the lower class in England, a relation which must depend much on the personal character of the lord of the manor. . . . First came prizes to ploughmen, then the plough boys, then the shepherds, then to such peasants as had reared many children without aid, then to women ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... with many of these men, I more than suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... Wisdom's use? If I treat you like a crown'd head, You have cheap enough compounded; Can you put in higher claims, Than the owners of St. James? You are not so great a grievance, As the hirelings of St. Stephen's. You are of a lower class Than my friend Sir Robert Brass. None of these have mercy found: I have laugh'd, and lash'd them round. Have you seen a rocket fly? You would swear it pierced the sky: It but reach'd the middle air, Bursting into pieces there; Thousand sparkles falling down Light on many a coxcomb's crown. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... themselves invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the lower class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career he had been a provincial actor, a manege rider in a circus, a billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted these liberal professions that he encountered ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... not know," said Fleda, quietly, "that it was by design of the rulers of England that so many of her lower class are in the intellectual ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Jefferson knew that here all were people, and that no set of men, whether because of riches or of poverty, had the right to arrogate to themselves this distinction. But he also knew that in Europe this distinction did exist, and that the emigrants who were coming in such numbers all belonged to the lower class, there called people. Of course these flattering phrases would win their ears and their votes for the people's ticket, against an imaginary aristocracy. Thus might be secured an army of obedient voters, knowing nothing but their orders, and thinking of nothing but ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... of the sound, and they followed. Five minutes brought them to the scene of the disturbance. They reached a street of cheaper houses and small shops. About one of these a crowd was surging, made up largely of young men of the lower class, for in West Kensington, as in all parts of London, the homes of the rich and of the poor rub one another's elbows in easy familiarity. The crowd seemed to be trying to break in the door of this shop. Already all the glass of the show ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of precept. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... melancholy aspect, all the houses being of the rudest construction, built of unhewn granite, black with age, and very lofty. It is divided into two quarters; one inhabited by wealthy families, among which, we were told, there are fifteen worth 200,000 francs each; and the other by the lower class of people, a turbulent race, between whom and the patricians there have long been bloody feuds, breaking out into ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... a lower class of workers who find employment in the spinning-mills and power-loom factories that abound among us, and these number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been brought up from childhood to fill the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Creoles—to the incoming lower class of superstitious Germans, Irish, Sicilians, and others—he became an omen and embodiment of public and private ill-fortune. Upon him all the vagaries of their superstitions gathered and grew. If a house caught fire, it was imputed to his machinations. Did a woman go off in a fit, he had ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... vernacular language, either some fool or knave had taught him to say his prayers in English: and you may take this as an observation founded on fact, that the language which a Roman Catholic of the lower class does not understand, is the one in which it is disposed to pray. As for him he had lots of English prayers, though he was totally ignorant of that language. The twang from the nose, the loud and rapid tone in which he spoke, and the malaproprian ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... the lower class of the parishioners now gathered round the strangers, and the cry arose among the boys that "there was a-going to be a fite between mad Madge Murdockson and another Bess of Bedlam." But while the fry assembled with the humane hope ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Aurora, are simple Germans of the lower class, and they live comfortably after their fashion. They have no library, and read few books except the Bible. They have never printed any thing. In many of the houses I noticed two beds in one room, and that the principal sitting-room of the family. Dr. Giese, the president, has ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... families of the lower class of Irish who lived in shanties near the canal that ran within a few rods of our school- house, and as the most of our school passed them, or would have to go half a mile farther, we got from one man in particular a systematic ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... to be given to young Powel and Mrs. Bracegirdle. In this they committed two palpable errors; for while the best actors are in health, and still on the stage, the public is always apt to be out of humour when those of a lower class pretend to stand in ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... continually talking of them, continually bringing them forward— I had almost said they thought of nothing else. If you compare the Holy Bible with the works which were most popular among our forefathers, especially among the lower class, till within the last 200 years, you will see at once what I mean,—how ghosts, apparitions, demons, witchcraft, are perpetually spoken of in them; how seldom they are spoken of in the Bible; lest, I suppose, men should ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 1805. Of Russian lower class origin and wonderfully beautiful. Espoused perhaps morganatically by a great lord of the land. Left a widow she reigned over Paris in 1827. Supposed to have an income of eighty thousand francs. She received in her drawing-rooms ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... also observe, that, except a few, those we had hitherto seen on board were of the lower class; for a great number of those we now met with had a superior dignity in their air, and were of a much whiter cast. In general, they had the hair tied on the crown of the head, long, black, and of a most luxuriant growth. Many of the young men were perfect models ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... and never feel really acquainted with any one until he is termed Tom or Jack. It is doubtless all very genial and jocose and sociable, but the man who shows a tendency to it should not complain when his betters put him in a lower class ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... seer certainly helped Carlyle: in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of strong man mentioned in Scripture ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... of commerce are chiefly exercised by the merchants of Aberdeen, I have not inquired. The manufacture which forces itself upon a stranger's eye is that of knit-stockings, on which the women of the lower class ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... strange mixture of virtue and vice in the minds of the lower class of Irish; or rather a strange confusion in their ideas of right and wrong, from want of proper education. As soon as poor Paddy found out that his spirited action of pulling down the rick of bark was ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... (A), planted on the high road, directs travellers to the gate of the monastery. reached by an avenue of trees. On one side of the gate-house (B) is a long building (C), probably the almonry, with a dormitory above for the lower class of guests. On the other side is a chapel (D). As soon as the porter heard a stranger knock at the gate, he rose, saying, Deo gratias, the opportunity for the exercise of hospitality being regarded as a cause for thankfulness. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his calculations; he did not even make a pretence of consulting her in matters relating to the common good of the common people, and as she was in the habit of devoting a considerable portion of her time, energy and executive ability to the interests of the common or lower class people, the omission ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... rebellion which broke forth in Waialua school when I had been there three weeks. A month or two before one of the school-girls had died after a brief illness. The old heathen superstition about praying to Death had been revived by the lower class of natives in the place, who were not friendly to the school, and had been transmitted by them to the older girls. While yet ignorant of this I had noticed the scowls and dark looks, the reluctant obedience and manifest distrust, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... assimilates American culture, and intermarries in the second generation. Into the middle class of the cities is absorbed the constant stream of rural immigration, except the few who rise into the upper class or fall into the lower class. In the city itself grow up thousands of boys and girls who pass through the schools and into business and home life in their native environment, and who constitute the solid ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the species is fixed at the lowest step of the classification (varieties not being reckoned as classes), and the genus is also fixed on the step next above it, in Logic these predicables are treated as movable up and down the ladder: any lower class being species in relation to any higher; which higher class, wherever taken, thus becomes a genus. Lion may logically be regarded as a species of digitigrade, or mammal, or animal; and then each of these is a genus as to lion: or, again, digitigrade may be regarded ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... some years older than myself. She was a barmaid. Can you fancy me now in love with a barmaid? I find it hard to imagine, myself. I married her, Kitty. Before we had been married six weeks I discovered that she drank. I was tied to a drunken, brawling, foul-mouthed woman of the lower class—for life. At least I ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... many crevices in the building, the wood of the hut was still sound and unimpaired, therefore the deficiency was supplied and done the more easily, because the lower class of Russians are expert carpenters. Here they had plenty of ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... sewing-girl. The prejudice will never attach to you, but it will always cling to me. How cruel it seems that the world should consider as ladies all who can afford to be idle, and all working-women as belonging to a lower class, because God compels them to labor for the life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... motive—the need of keeping pace with others in the march of improvement—will cease to act if a whole community advances together. We saw at the outset that this motive acts powerfully on a superior class, which has before its eyes a lower class into whose rank some of its members may possibly drop. The lowest class must always be present, however a community may advance, and a well-to-do worker will always dread falling into it. If it should grow smaller and smaller in number, and if the second of the three classes we are speaking of ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... A close carriage stood at the church door; a few people, mostly of the lower class, and mostly old women, were scattered about the interior of the building. Here and there Doctor Wybrow detected the faces of some of his brethren of the club, attracted by curiosity, like himself. Four persons only stood before the altar—the bride and ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... is ceasing to be the badge of a lower class; so that already it is disreputable for a man to be "a lazy gentleman." And this feeling must increase, till there is such an equalization of labor as will afford all the time needful for every class to improve the many advantages offered to them. Already through the munificence of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... thrown loosely round them, affording a striking contrast to the cleanness of those of the Egyptians, while their unkempt hair was in equally strong contrast to the precise wigs of the middle-class Egyptians and the bare heads of the lower class. Their skins, too, were much darker in color, though there was considerable variation in this respect. Among them were a sprinkling of men of entirely different type, almost black in hue, with thicker lips and flatter features. These were Ethiopians, whose land lay beyond that ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... determinate end, traces of which pervade the vegetable kingdom,—while on the other hand, this indefinable principle, this vegetable animula vagula, blandula, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it. Again, propagation ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... it is found, and with the skies under which it was erected; we shall be led as much to the street and the cottage as to the temple and the tower; and shall be more interested in buildings raised by feeling, than in those corrected by rule. We shall commence with the lower class of edifices, proceeding from the roadside to the village, and from the village to the city; and, if we succeed in directing the attention of a single individual more directly to this most interesting department of the ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... unveiled. This is precisely why passion, when it speaks, always carries conviction, whatever the passion may be; and rightly so. For the same reason, the passions are the principal theme of poets and the stalking-horse of actors. And it is because the will is most striking in the lower class of animals that we may account for our delight in dogs, apes, cats, etc.; it is the absolute naivete of all their expressions which charms us ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Second's reign the age of chivalry was totally at an end, yet the sentiments, which had ceased to be motives of action, were not so obsolete as to sound totally strange to the public ear. The French romances of the lower class, such as "Cassandra," "Cleopatra," etc., were the favourite pastime of the ladies, and retained all the extravagancies of chivalrous sentiment, with a double portion of tedious form and metaphysical subtlety. There were occasionally individuals romantic enough to manage their correspondence ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... was popular with the lower class, who went about sacking and pulling down the Protestant churches. They also tracked the Huguenots and their pastors, where they found them evading or breaking the Edict of Revocation; thus earning the praises of the Church and the fines ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... smell, as of an arid dried-out swamp, with a faint taint of fish. But in the Flats the odor changes. Here is the smell of factories, warehouses, and trading marts; the smell of stale cooking drifting from the homes of the laborers and lower class techmen who live there. ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval Italian novelists—a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock carts, or riding their mules up to the red city ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee |
