"Peeress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... notwithstanding the boldness of her words—'fool! expose me at your peril! You dare not, for your own neck would be stretched in payment for your treachery, while your charges against me, low, miserable menial that you are, would never be believed—never! Such accusations against me, a peeress of the realm, and a lady whose reputation has never been assailed, would but add to the general belief in your own guilt, and the certainty of your fate; such charges would be regarded as a paltry subterfuge, and no one ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... about me, but not flattering. Then they snap-shotted us, and Octavia really does look rather odd, as her nose got out of focus, I suppose, and appears like Mr. Punch's; underneath is written, "An English Peeress and Society Beauty." ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... least, I suppose they're Greek. They all are nowadays, unless they're Russian. She's an English peeress.' ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Chateau de Miramel (in the zone of the armies in France) are of an age and ugliness incredible and of a superlative cynicism. One of them—local tradition pointed to a one-eyed old reprobate with a yellow face—is the richer these hundred years past by an English peeress's diamond ring. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... with whom had expired the higher honors of his house. But the Earldom of Pendennyss, with numerous ancient baronies, were titles in fee; and together with his princely estates had descended to his daughter as heir-general of the family. A peeress in her own right, with an income far exceeding her utmost means of expenditure, the lovely Countess of Pendennyss was a prize aimed at by all the young ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... then by a second marriage, with a commoner, she loses her dignity; for as by marriage it is gained, by marriage it is also lost. Yet if a duchess dowager marries a baron, she continues a duchess still; for all the nobility are pares, and therefore it is no degradation[t]. A peer, or peeress (either in her own right or by marriage) cannot be arrested in civil cases[u]: and they have also many peculiar privileges annexed to their peerage in the course of judicial proceedings. A peer, sitting ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... gone to the Peeress's School this morning, an appointment having been made to show us about. Mamma's cold preventing her going, we had somebody 'phone to see if the time could be changed. And this afternoon appear for ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... recovered from the violence of her attack, and from the consequent operation, as to be able to be removed to the Towers for change of air; and accordingly she was brought thither by her whole family with all the pomp and state becoming an invalid peeress. There was every probability that 'the family' would make a longer residence at the Towers than they had done for several years, during which time they had been wanderers hither and thither in search of health. Somehow, after all, it was ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... unfortunate shorthand writers had to take their notes on their knees, at the back of the Strangers' Gallery. In the House of Lords they had to stand in a kind of gangway, and I have heard a venerable man tell how a certain distinguished peeress, who had to pass along this gangway when she went to hear the debates, used deliberately to brush against the reporters as she did so, and knock the note-books out of their hands. It was, I suppose, her Grace's manner of displaying her peculiar ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... romances, though fascinating, are yet intelligible: Nor Thackeray, for he is a Hogarth, a photographer who flattereth not: Nor Kingsley, for he shall teach thee that thou shouldest not dream, but do. Read incessantly thy Burke; that Burke who, nobler than he of old, Treateth of the Peer and Peeress, the truly Sublime and Beautiful: Likewise study the "creations" of "the Prince of modern Romance;" Sigh over Leonard the Martyr, and smile on Pelham the puppy: Learn how "love is the dram-drinking of existence;" And how we "invoke, in the Gadara of our ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... not ask you, Angus, and of course you are differently placed; but I have my rights as a peeress of France; besides I have on my own account no complaint against the king. It was my father who shut me up in the convent, ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... income of five, four, or even three thousand a-year? And let any one of common sense, and ordinary knowledge of the world, ask himself—whether the highest of those amounts is more than barely sufficient, without undue economy, to provide for a dowager peeress and a young family! That such considerations were not lost sight of by Sir William Follett, but, on the contrary, were stimulants to his intense, unremitting, and exhausting labours, it is easy to understand; and they sprang out of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... sweeping over the whole world. Individual clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a British peeress.'" ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... everything had been got ready for the ceremony. It is the custom at a coronation that all the peers and peeresses should be present, and that they should all dress alike in rich robes of crimson velvet and white ermine, and each peer and peeress has a little coronet which he or she does not put on at first, but keeps on a cushion until the King puts on his crown. Then all the little coronets are put on at the same instant. Now, the arrangements for the coronation were very difficult ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... as they fell upon her. Soap-boiler's daughter she might be, with the blood of many Dobbs in her veins, but no young peeress, born to the purple, ever ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... through a muddle owing to somebody's deafness. The result was the same, since his demise left her with a handle to her name, but no one to turn it (to quote the mot of a well-known wit), and she looked, at the very least, like a peeress in her own right. Indeed, she was the incarnation of what the romantic lower middle classes imagine a great lady;—a dressmaker's ideal of a duchess. She had the same high forehead, without much thought behind it, so noticeable in her son Percy, and the same clearly cut features; ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... complete lady, and as good and conscientious a creature as ever existed; but you see, Lady Kenton, her whole life has been spent here, ever since she was sixteen, she has known nothing beyond the schoolroom, and how she is ever to fulfil the duties of a peeress, and the head of a large establishment, I really cannot see. It might be just misery to ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a scowl or a snarl was to be feared. On her, indeed, descended a relic of that tenderness her father had enjoyed, and Agatha used to the full the advantages it gave her. She knew her own importance. It is not every girl who will be a peeress in her own right, and she amused her grandfather by calmly informing him that it was not on the whole a subject for regret that she had not been a boy. "You see," said she, "we get rid of the new viscounty, and it's much better to be ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... a general flood, Did deluge all, and avarice creeping on, Spread, like a low-born mist, and hid the sun. Statesmen and patriots plied alike the stocks, Peeress and butler shared alike the box; And judges jobbed, and bishops bit the town, And mighty dukes packed cards for half-a-crown: Britain was sunk ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... lady presented be a peeress or a peer's daughter, the queen kisses her on the forehead. If only a commoner, then the queen extends her hand to be kissed by the lady presented, who, having done so, rises, courtesies to each of the other members of the royal family present, and then passes on. She must keep ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... folks. And when Bobbie was born it got worse. Only I must say even then Mr. Wrissell never turned a hair. Everybody seemed to make out that I ought to be very grateful to them, and I ought to think myself very lucky. Me—a peeress of the realm! They wanted me to change. But how could I change? I was Blanche Wilmot—on the road for ten years—never got a show in London—and Blanche Wilmot I shall ever be—peeress or no peeress! It was no joke being Lord Woldo's wife, I can tell you, and it's still less of ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... or had had supper, at various times, with a score of well-known men; she had received presents and offers of marriage from them; she had certainly had two chances of becoming a peeress, she might have become the wife of a millionaire, and half a dozen younger sons had kept ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... dinner-party even a peeress, even an American lady who has married a peer, dare not commit herself to an adverse literary judgement—except in the case of notoriously disaffected writers—for the very good reason that she does ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... died at Brussels in August, 1723.[225] The descendants of the Earl are now extinct, a son and daughter who survived him having both died. His Lordship's brother married a Scottish peeress, and is the ancestor of the present Earl of Newburgh, the rightful representative of ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... wonderful thing if, with one leg in the grave and no hair on his head, he manages to get a coronet; and a woman dances at a ball with some young fellow or other, or sits next to some old fellow at dinner and pretends she thinks him charming, and he makes her a peeress on the spot. Oh! it is a disgusting world; it must end in revolution. Now you tell your master, Mr. Sidney Wilton, that if he wants to strengthen the institutions of this country, the government should establish an order of merit, and the press ought to be represented ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... brave son has he reft from me, either by killing them or selling them away in the islands that are beyond the sea: even now I miss two sons from among the Trojans who have thronged within the city, Lycaon and Polydorus, whom Laothoe peeress among women bore me. Should they be still alive and in the hands of the Achaeans, we will ransom them with gold and bronze, of which we have store, for the old man Altes endowed his daughter richly; but if they are already dead and in the house of Hades, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... author of the Memoires de Grammont, and afterwards Richard Talbot, who was made Duke of Tyrconnel by James II. William's successful occupation of Ireland, where her husband was Lord Deputy, reduced her to poverty and obscurity, and she was probably the first Peeress who ever took to millinery as a livelihood. She had a dressmaker's shop in the Strand, and, not wishing to be detected, sat in a white mask and a white dress, and was known by the name of the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... would also be very nice to be a peeress,—so that she might, without any doubt, be one of the great ladies of London. As a baronet's widow with a large income, she was already almost a great lady; but she was quite alive to a suspicion that she was not altogether strong in ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... women expanded to each other; and after a very few meetings there was established between them a rare confidence. Even the personal austerity of Quakerdom, or the state and estate of the peeress, could not come between. Their friendship seemed to be for the life of one. To the other ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... to qualify Barbara Palmer for such a position, it was necessary she should be raised to the peerage. This could only be accomplished by ennobling her husband, unless public decency were wholly ignored, and she was created a peeress in her own right, whilst he remained a commoner. After some faint show of hesitation, Roger Palmer accepted the honours thrust upon him by reason of his wife's infamy. On the 11th of December, 1661, he was created ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... millions that she was placed before me," she said in an undertone to her husband, as soon as the guests had returned to the drawing-room. And, giving orders that her carriage should be summoned immediately, she left the house without speaking to any one, and with the air of a peeress of England outraged in ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... Mount-Rhyswicke. Already Mellin was forming sentences for his next letter to the Cranston Telegraph: "Lady Mount-Rhyswicke said to me the other evening, while discussing the foreign policy of Great Britain, in Comtesse de Vaurigard's salon..." "An English peeress of pronounced literary acumen has been giving me rather confidentially her opinion of ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... peeress in her own right since she had attained the tender age of two years. Her father and mother had died too early for her to miss them, and she had shown from her childhood a capacity to think for herself, which nurses and governesses and all such persons looked ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... progress along the railway platform to explain to a marchioness why he had jostled her. It was only by a vigorous use of his elbows that he could make his way; and it ought to have been evident, even to a peeress, that he meant to go from one end of the train to the other. His eyes glanced sharply right and left as he pushed on. He peered through the windows of the carriages. He scanned each figure in the crowd. At last he caught sight of a lady standing beside ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... old Lady Perth to a French gentleman is quaint and characteristic. They had been discussing the respective merits of the cookery of each country. The Frenchman offended the old Scottish peeress by some disparaging remarks on Scottish dishes, and by highly preferring those of France. All she would answer was, "Weel, weel, some fowk like parritch and some ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... proof of the transcending power of the genius of Burns than is found in the fact that, by a bare half-dozen of his stanzas, an humble dairy servant—else unheard of outside her parish and forgotten at her death—is immortalized as a peeress of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, and has been for a century loved and mourned of all the world. We owe much of our tenderest poesy to the heroines whose charms have attuned the fancy and aroused the impassioned muse ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... St. Paul's Cathedral by the Earl of Rosebery, when prime minister of England; noble monuments were raised to his memory in the cities of Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal; and the Queen addressed a letter full of gracious sympathy to his widow and conferred on her the dignity of a peeress of the United Kingdom under the title of Baroness of Earnscliffe, as a mark of her Majesty's gratitude "for the devoted and faithful services which he rendered for so many years to ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... Captain! Well, I believe they have a decent property, about 2,000 pounds a year, but all in land, which Sir Samuel never held by. Of course, it is nothing like the Russell match, which would have made a peeress of you some day and given you a great position meanwhile. But I suppose we must be thankful for ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... But a magnificent full-blown peeress, who knew her own mind and had nothing to fear, for her husband was no better than herself. But for that, a Guinevere and Vivien rolled into ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier |
