"Puritanical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier was himself a Tory and a High Churchman, as was William Law, of the Serious Call, who also denounced the stage. The sentiment was, in fact, that ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... rites that are splendid symbols of the faith we hold. Call it mummery if ye like, but let me ask you why so many of your sheep stray into our fold? It's because they miss the warmth, the hearty, the maternal tenderness which all souls love and long for, and fail to find in your stern. Puritanical belief. By Saint Peter! I've seen many a lukewarm worshipper, who for years has nodded in your cushioned pews, wake and glow with something akin to genuine piety while kneeling on the stone pavement of one of our cathedrals, ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... to the 23rd page, and as far as the end of section 33. There you will find in what year the excellent man, whose life you write, became a Master of Arts: how his first reading of learned Hooker had been occasioned by certain puritanical pamphlets; and how good a preparative he found it for his reading of Calvin's Institutions, the honour of whose name (at that time especially) gave such credit to his errors: how he erred with Mr. Calvin, whilst he took things upon ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... what I had heard from Mr. Clifford, of the practices of the law and the courts of justice, and from Dr. Gabriel, with respect to the debaucheries of the most dignified members of the church, and the hypocrisy of many of its puritanical preachers, really made me almost believe that I was got into a new world, and that the men and women of which it was composed were a different species from those with whom I had been in the habit of associating; in fact it opened to my view such scenes ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... that we have attained a complete understanding. You have no place to go, nor means with which to insure a living for yourself and Natalie. I would hate to see you sacrifice yourself and her to a Puritanical whim, for I owe you much happiness and I'm sure I should miss you greatly. Some one must rule, and since nature has given me the right I shall exercise it. We will have ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... profess to understand her. Her character is not easily sounded. But no doubt she has the puritanical spirit in a rather rare degree. I daily thank the fates that my wife grew up apart from that branch of the family. Of all the accursed—But this is an old topic; better not to ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... as by any who belonged to an opposite party. It has been aptly observed that several of Robert Nelson's remarks upon the proper observance of Sunday would have been derided, eighty or a hundred years previously, as Puritanical cant by men whose legitimate successors most warmly applauded what he wrote.[1262] No one whose opinion had any authority, desired, after Charles II.'s time, to revive the 'Book of Sports,' or regretted the abolition of Sunday wakes. Amid all the laxity of the Restoration period—amid the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... big man in the long coat?" said another, who had not participated in the banter of his companions on the Puritanical devices of Charles and his cronies. He was jerking his head aside to where a man whom we have known in other scenes was pushing his ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... vitality. When, therefore, Savonarola preached a reform of manners, he was at once obeyed. Strict laws were passed enforcing sobriety, condemning trades of pleasure, reducing the gay customs of Florence to puritanical austerity. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... visit some of our Suez friends—Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the Sextons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Eastern public as had any leisure to devote to the subject, persisted in looking upon Indian affairs from the viewpoint and remoteness of Boston, where once upon a time Miles Standish and our Puritan forbears handled such matters in a manner anything but Puritanical. Nothing was left to the military arm of the Government but temporary submission, so, as has been said, "the Gray Fox" went off on a hunt for bear, mountain lions, and such big game as was reported to be awaiting him toward the Grand Canon to the north. An adjutant-general ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... puritanical. Ragged black clothes, blue worsted stockings, pewter-headed long cane.—Guy Mannering (dramatized), ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... its face. The scarf and cassock could hardly appear there without calling forth sneers and malicious whispers. Maids of honour forbore to giggle, and Lords of the Bedchamber bowed low, when the Puritanical visage and the Puritanical garb, so long the favourite subjects of mockery in fashionable circles, were seen in the galleries. Taunton, which had been during two generations the stronghold of the Roundhead party in the West, which had twice resolutely repelled the armies ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... olive hue, a colour which harmonized well with his piercing black eyes and pearly teeth. His hands and feet were small, and the greatest dandy must have admitted that he was irreproachably dressed, with a neatness that bordered on the puritanical. In age he might have been anything from eight-and-twenty to forty; in reality he was thirty-three. He advanced into the room and walked with out-stretched hand directly across to where Eastover ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... said) 'had left the stage to be his alone, to be a good and charming wife.' And somehow Tullia managed to induce the most Puritanical members of du Bruel's family to accept her. From the very first, before any one suspected her motives, she assiduously visited old Mme. de Bonfalot, who bored her horribly; she made handsome presents to mean old Mme. de Chisse, du Bruel's great-aunt; she spent a summer ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... a prison make, nor iron bars a cage," laughed Lovelace. Have not some of the great books of the world been written in prison? Things work by antithesis; and if your discipline is too severe, you get no discipline at all. Puritanical pretense, hypocrisy and a life of repression, with "thou shalt not" set on a hair-trigger, have made more than one man bold, genuine and honest. Draw the bow far enough this way, and your arrow will go a long way that. Forbid a man to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... of the text is that the simple act of trusting beneath the shadow of God's wings brings to us an ever fresh and flowing river of gladness, of which we may drink. The whole conception of religion in the Bible is gladsome. There is no puritanical gloom about it. True, a Christian man has sources of sadness which other men have not. There is the consciousness of his own sin, and the contest that he has daily to wage; and all things take a soberer colouring to the eye that has been accustomed to look, however dimly, upon God. Many of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Hall of the Stationers underwent as great a purgation as was carried on in Don Quixote's library. Warton gives a list of the best writers who were ordered for immediate conflagration by the prelates Whitgift and Bancroft, urged by the Puritanical and Calvinistic factions. Like thieves and outlaws, they were ordered to be taken wheresoever they may be found.—"It was also decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed for the future. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to art, than any popular craving for "human interest" or for the comfort of amorous voluptuousness, is the unpardonable stupidity of puritanical censorship. Such censorship, in its crass impertinence, assumes that its miserable and hypocritical negations represent that deep, fierce, terrible "imperative" uttered by the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the movement for the last fifty years, have been too anxious to make the type of popular instruction conform to the type of academic instruction proper to learned men. The principles of instruction have been too rigorously ascetic and puritanical, and instead of making the access to knowledge as easy as possible, we have delighted in forcing every pilgrim to make his journey to the shrine of the Muses with a hair-shirt on his back and peas in his shoes. Nobody would say that Macaulay had a superficial knowledge ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... extremely bad; nor must we forget that an eternity of Sundays means the elimination 'from our midst,' as the novelists say, of baseball, of circuses, of horse-racing, and other necessities of life, unless we are prepared to cast over the Puritanical view of Sunday which now prevails. It would substitute Dr. Watts for 'Annie Rooney.' We should lose 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' entirely, which is a point in ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... to church three times in the day, but the general appearance of Washington on a Sunday is much less puritanical than that of most other American towns; the people walk about, and there are no chains in the streets, as at Philadelphia, to prevent their riding or ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... few works printed in days of yore which have running titles to the subjects discussed in them. These may be recommendations with the bibliomaniac; but he should be informed that this volume contains a great deal of puritanical cant, and licentious language; that vices are magnified in it in order to be lashed, and virtues diminished that they might not be noticed. Stubbes equals Prynne in his anathemas against "Plays and Interludes:" and in his chapters ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a Man had really such an Affair upon his Hands, and he knew the Person, he had to do with, to be a resolute Man that understood the Sword, do you think he would have Patience or be at Leisure to hearken to all that puritanical Stuff, which you have been heaping together? Do you think (for that is the Point) it would have ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... systematic cruelty ever practiced against the colored folks by Americans has been by the New England slavers, sir. The slave trade has always been monopolized by the Northern folks in this country—by the puritanical New Englanders who used to sell the pickaninnies at so much a pound, as cattle or sheep ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... next! You are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend chastity and 'skilly,' though I admit," he added laughing, "that your 'skilly' includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne, Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too puritanical. It's absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... new Rector we can read on the testimony of many visitors. The intensity of his devotion at all times, the inspiration which the great festivals of the Church particularly roused in him, changed all this rapidly. He did all he could to draw his parishioners to church; but he had no rigid Puritanical views about the Sabbath. A Staff-College officer, who frequently visited him on Sundays, tells us of 'the genial, happy, unreserved intercourse of those Sunday afternoons spent at the Rectory, and how the villagers were free to play their cricket—"Paason he do'ant ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... with Jane's uncle when he had been studying in Paris, who was then only a younger son, and had been just released from the strict discipline of a Scotch puritanical home, and not being ambitious of filling the subordinate office of "Jock, the laird's brother," wished to learn a profession, and thought he might try medicine as well as anything else. He was then clever, idle, and extravagant, but a great favourite ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... was a young nobleman of sporting proclivities and your true sportsman's breadth of mind. He was immensely popular with all sects and sections but the aggressively puritanical and the narrowly austere. He graced the theatre with his constant presence, the Turf with his own horses. His entertainment was lavish, and in quality far above the gubernatorial average. Late life and soul of exalted circle, he was hide-bound by few of the ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... mouthful, and then elevates his head again while munching it with great gusto, wearing meanwhile an expression of intense satisfaction mingled with timidity, as though he thinks the enjoyment too good to last long, they look as cosey and fussy as a gathering of Puritanical grand-dames drinking tea and gossiping over the latest news. Within a mile of the Ispahan gate are two other gates, and between them is an area devoted entirely to the brick-making industry. Here among the clay-pits and abandoned ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... our faults. Do you know, count, that persons of our time of life—not that you belong to the class, you are still a young man,—but as I was saying, persons of our time of life have been very unfortunate this year. For example, look at the puritanical procureur, who has just lost his daughter, and in fact nearly all his family, in so singular a manner; Morcerf dishonored and dead; and then myself covered with ridicule through the villany of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he nevertheless engaged in business; but he had a high sense of the obligation which wealth lays on its possessors. And so, instead of wasting his life in merely heaping up dollars, he dedicated it to spending wisely and generously those which he had. There was nothing puritanical, however, in his way of living. He enjoyed the normal, healthy pleasures of his station. He drove his coach and four and was counted one of the best whips in New York. Taking his paternal responsibilities seriously, he implanted in his children lively ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... that it could not disagree with them. But the moment men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it, they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find, for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins; about how Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by lightning for going out after dark. Now these moral stories are immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because Puritanism is wrong. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... seen that some of the Greek thinkers were banished, or even executed, for their new ideas. The Roman officials, as well as the populace, pestered the early Christians, not so much for the substance of their views as because they were puritanical, refused the routine reverence to the gods, and prophesied the ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... things in this world he should know that could not be gleaned from the earth, trees, and sky; and with the few dollars he had saved he came East. The visit apparently was not a success. The atmosphere of the town in which he went to school was strictly Puritanical, and the townspeople much given to religious discussion. The son of the pioneer missionary found himself unable to subscribe to the formulas which to the others seemed so essential, and he returned ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... to obtain for the brothers an invitation from Lady Eleanor to quarter themselves at Penford-bourne. Once he had settled them there, he obtained, through Frank Masterton's valet, a puritanical knave called Gabriel Jones, complete information as to their plans, which he was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... with masculine stride she marches a-field; and that Constant Meyer's ideal more nearly approaches ours. The one depicts her in rather Puritanical attire; the other, studying authentic ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the American colonies had been a little more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober, frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice, and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great poverty nor great wealth was common among those sturdy farmers, who tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Shakespeare and Bacon, it will be noticed, outlived Elizabeth. Two other names hold a less prominent place,—that of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), the courtly knight, who wrote the Arcadia, a sort of pastoral romance, and A Defence of Poesy, a work intended to counteract the Puritanical spirit then rising; and that of Richard Hooker (1553-1600), who in his Ecclesiastical Polity ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... This rigid, puritanical principle of mine, however, did not declare against the unrighteousness of falling in love with ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... know. I was listening at one of the windows, and I heard you tell mother—dear old puritanical mother—that you had crept away without leave from the learned professor, and had got into difficulties. Oh, didn't I just love you for it! There's a Miss Frost here who tries to teach me; but, bless you! ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... to Howard. In a later time he passed under the control of Sherman in the West, a shrewd and relentless judge of men, and Sherman trusted him to the utmost. To a group of officers in their cups who were chaffing Howard for being Puritanical, Sherman curtly said: "Let Howard alone; I want one general who ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... been living and elastic; the prophets themselves gave proof that inspiration was still a vital and human thing. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that while the prophets were preparing their campaign, under pressure of the same threatened annihilation, the same puritanical party should have edited a new code of laws and attributed it retroactively to Moses. While the prophet's lips were being touched by the coal of fire, the priests and king in their conclave were establishing the Bible and the Church. It is easy to suspect, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... likeness of a swain,' so as to perform his charge unknown, the Spirit leaves the stage, which is at once invaded by Comus and his rout. A brilliant speech by the god, preceding the first measure, illustrates the strange but yet not infrequent irony of fate by which it has happened that the most puritanical of poets have thrown the full weight of their best work into the opposing scale, and clothed vice in magic colours to outdo the richest fancies of the libertine. No doubt this reckless adorning of sin was intentional on Milton's part; he ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... proof of what has been doubted, namely, that the theatres were not permitted to be open during Lent, in the reign of James I. The restriction was waved in the next reign, as we find from the Puritanical Prynne:—"There are none so much addicted to stage-playes, but when they goe unto places where they cannot have them, or when, as they are suppressed by publike authority, (as in times of pestilence, and in Lent, till now of late,) can well subsist ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... the professional, and the capitalist class on the voters' list. Workmen of the faubourg St. Antoine signed a petition to be allowed to pay taxes so as to obtain a vote. Robespierre, a narrow, prudish, jealous, puritanical but able lawyer from Arras, with journalists like Desmoulins and Loustallot, inveighed against what they described as iniquitous class legislation that would have excluded from the councils of the French nation Jean Jacques ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... suppression of the Parliamentary majority. It survives now only by the curious passage in it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave an hour. Perhaps as a mark of their approval of Eikonoklastes, the Council of State gave Milton lodgings ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... embellished mouldings of a doorway, carried the mind back to [Picture: Doorway] the days of Charles I., and, standing within which, imagination depicted the figure of a jolly Cavalier retainer, with his pipe and tankard; or of a Puritanical, formal servant, the expression of whose countenance was sufficient to turn the best-brewed October into vinegar. The old carved door leading into this apartment is shown in the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... indeed Zion Street itself, as it turned the corner, flamed into quite a jovial and ruddy shop—a provision merchant's, and kept by Eli Moggridge. The name did its owner considerable wrong, for its suggestion of puritanical sanctimoniousness was a flat contradiction of the jovial and ruddy personality, the huge red-whiskered laugher, for whom it stood, and of whom the shop, with its healthy smell of cheese and its air of exuberant prosperity, was ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... back into his face and a new light flashed into his cold blue eyes. He laughed. "Why, you game little angel!" he said delightedly. "Gad, I never thought you had it in you—never. I begin to adore you, Mary Virginia, upon my soul I do! Now listen to reason, my too-good child, and don't be so puritanical. You've got to take folks as they are and not as you'd like them to be, you know. Men are not angels, no, nor women, either. You must learn to be charitable—a virtue very good people seldom practice and ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and Levite must do ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... profane or provocatively indecent is not a matter for discussion at all; it is a disgusting criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle classes, of refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. But while the negative defence of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost as complex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the last few pages of this book to a triad corresponding to the last one—to the three important ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... parties are wrong, because both go to extremes, and therefore are to be equally avoided. Our Articles, as dear old Minister used to say, are very wisely so worded as to admit of some considerable latitude of opinion; but that very latitude naturally excludes anything ultra. The Puritanical section, and the Newmanites (for Pusey, so far, is stedfast), are not, in fact, real churchmen, and ought to leave us. One are Dissenters and the other Romanists. The ground they severally stand on is slippery. A false step takes one to the conventicle and the other ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... eye of a mere visitor France is the most moral of the four Great Powers—France, Russia, England, Germany; has the strongest family life and the most seemly streets. Young men and maidens are never seen walking or lying about, half-embraced, as in puritanical England. Fire is not played with—openly, at least. The slow-fly amorousness of the British working classes evidently does not suit the quicker blood of France. There is just enough of the South in the French to keep demonstration of affection away from daylight. A certain school of French novelist, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... dislike, and take refuge with some noble-faced grandmother, or withered old maid, whose features tell of sorrow and patience. And the beauty would think with herself that such a middle-aged gentleman did not admire pretty girls, and was severe and unkind and puritanical; whereas it was the lack of beauty that made him turn away; the disappointment of a face—dull, that ought to be radiant; or the presence of only that sort of beauty, which in middle age, except the deeper nature should meantime come into play, would ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... perhaps encouraged by the sympathy he showed, she had spoken on impulse without reserve, and Blake listened with pity. The girl, brought up, subject to wholesome Puritanical influences, in such surroundings as she had described, must have suffered a cruel shock when suddenly plunged into the society of the rakes and gamblers ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... crept into his affections was growing up into a beautiful and light-hearted girl. Quite insensibly she assimilated herself to his hobbies and studies, became mistress of his London house and fine estate in Berkshire, and, by operation of forces more effective in their way than any Puritanical safeguards, lived apart from the gay throng in which she was eminently fitted to ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... brings its modesty under suspicion. His business motto—unfortunately, a motto that he never followed—has often been attributed, because of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket—and then—watch that basket! His anti-Puritanical convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Truly classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a classic as a book which people ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... to the throne of England was a bid for the banished and persecuted Protestants to return from foreign lands and again pursue their puritanical philosophy. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... to the Regency three times in one week to study the inward significance of her dances, he declared. He treated me to a learned discourse concerning them, and was furious when one journal, slightly puritanical in tone, perhaps, said that they were generally unedifying, and in one case, at ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... one other aspect of this great subject, which is almost peculiar to New England, the home of reform. Certain Puritanical pessimists have argued that the use of tobacco is immoral. There are few, except our own sober people, who would admit this question at all. We would treat this prejudice with the respect due to all sincere reforms. And we ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... choice; and he was once more disturbed by the attenuation of her small body. But that could be soon remedied; she had suffered other, far greater, irremedial, oppressions; her very birth had confronted her, in the puritanical self-righteousness of his world, with an almost insuperable barrier to happiness. Still back of that, even before the birth of himself and Essie Scofield, back, back in the unguessed past, Eunice had been ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sinking of a packet-boat, and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... could hope to rise to eminence and command but by their favour. Their favour was to be gained only by exchanging with them the signs and passwords of spiritual fraternity. One of the first resolutions adopted by Barebone's Parliament, the most intensely Puritanical of all our political assemblies, was that no person should be admitted into the public service till the House should be satisfied of his real godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real godliness, the sadcoloured ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in a thin remnant of worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical austerity which marked England's ascent, from the death of Edward the Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her long struggle for life. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... les moeurs, en creant ou perfectionnant la langue. {2} Blameworthy carelessness at the least, which can class the Vita Nuova with the Ars Amandi and the Decameron! And among many English Catholics the spirit of poetry is still often received with a restricted Puritanical greeting, rather than with ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... "Oh, puritanical, eh?" he sneered, ignoring the danger signals in her eyes. Even yet there might have been some chance of avoiding shipwreck, had he heeded those twin beacons, humbled himself, made amends by due apology and promised reformation. For though Catherine never had ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... suffused by the sunset. Its prettiness and comfort were so many fresh exasperations. He contrasted it inwardly with the wretched lodging from which he had just come. Why, he knew the photographs on the walls—her father, the old parson, and her puritanical mother, whom Rachel had always thrown in his teeth. Her eldest brother, too, who had been drowned at sea. And that engraving—that sentimental thing by Watts, "Love and Death," that Rachel had bought once on a visit to Toronto, and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... me, I reckon, and confound your silly puritanical fancies, I'll leave it where I please," retorted Fletcher, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Margaret Moffatt understood what she saw. She had noticed every letting down and abandonment of Travers since he had joined them. She was too wise not to know the effect of such a woman as Priscilla upon such a man; such a denied and almost puritanical man as Travers. She knew his story from her father. An artistic triumph was hers that night. The splendid elements of primitive justice had been set in motion, and almost gleefully she wondered what they would do with Richard ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... listen to Jack Dawson's argument, which was good enough, being to the effect that we had not as much as a pound amongst us, and that he would rather be hanged than pay it if he had; and when Ned Herring (seeing the kind of Puritanical fellow he was) urged that, since the damage was not done by any design of ours, it must be regarded as a visitation of Providence, he says: "Very good. If it be the will of Providence that one should be scourged, I take it as the Divine purpose that I should finish the business by scourging ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... in the writings and newspapers of the times to this truly Puritanical dread of bishops. To the descendants of the Pilgrims the very name smacked of incense, stole, and monkish jargon. A writer, signing himself "America," gives in the Boston Evening Post, of October 14, 1771, a communication thoroughly characteristic of the spirit of the ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... Sir Hudibras's Merit in Letters is of a Piece, and set off with a Puritanical Air, that renders the whole truly Ridiculous, and makes a good Comment on several Pages of the Doctor's Epistle, which is most valuable for the great Judgment and Sincerity that he has ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... newspapers, endeavoring to show that Byron had all along been laughing at the doctor. All these attacks might have influenced Kennedy's picture of Byron, but it will be seen that, with the exception of a few puritanical touches, the artist's picture is not unworthy ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the gloomy and puritanical faces of the officers of the court-martial. Other questions were put, and then came the vital points. To the first of these, as to whether young Enderby had uttered malignant and seditious libels against the Protector, the old man would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Nehemiah now-a-days, we need some of his strong measures to stop the growing disregard of the Sabbath, which is creeping slowly but surely like a dark shadow over this country of ours. We need a man who will not be afraid of being called strait-laced, or narrow-minded, or peculiar, or Jewish, or Puritanical, but who will speak his mind clearly and decidedly on such an all-important point, and who will not hesitate to use strong measures to put down the Sabbath-breaking and the utter disregard of God's law, which is threatening the ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... after she entered with her puritanical mother, who told me I must not be surprised to see her daughter better dressed, as she was going to be married in a few days. I congratulated her, and Momolo's daughters asked who was the happy man. Mariuccia blushed and said modestly, to one ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... way ends. In a field hard by that spot, the leaden seal of a Pope, the bulla that gives its name to a Pope's bull, was once ploughed up; but the chapel itself, which was probably a very humble place, was unroofed and wrecked in an outburst of Puritanical zeal, with a practical piety which could not bear that a place should gather about itself so many hopes and prayers and holy associations. Well, it is all history, both the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased. It all passed over the head of the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of whomever chanced to be looking at her. It was significant that she had the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Sarah in all the ignorance and all the rigidity of the most obsolete of the old school; she had made Lady Sarah precisely like herself; with virtue, stiff, dogmatical, and repulsive; with religion, gloomy and puritanical; with manners, cold and automatic. In the course of eighteen years, whilst Lady Glistonbury went on, like clock-work, the same round, punctual to the letter but unfeeling of the spirit of her duties, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... pirate's crew, and a return to my native land. A launch was sent from the ship to communicate with our friends on the island, who supplied us with stores, provisions, and general information. The launch was manned by eight men, and officered by the first mate,—a grim, Puritanical, practical New Englander, if I may use such a term to describe a pirate, of great courage, experience, and physical strength. My Portuguese friend, acting as pilot, prevailed upon them to allow me to accompany the party as coxswain. I was naturally ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... become aware that you make no way, and that the sea is not within sight—that in fact you are exploring an inclosed basin." So the ungauged reservoir turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea was prevented by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical "reversion," from foreseeing that. She might have been saved from her gloomy marital voyage "if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman who has begun by showering kisses on ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... of his life was that he had taken pains with his own character. While he was still quite young we find him bewailing the "worldly element which enters so largely into his composition," and which threatens to make a gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, associations of his youth. "But," he says in writing to his sister, "as Thomas a Kempis recommended, frequentur tibi violentiam fac ... so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... dissipation,' as he termed the elegant amusements suitable to our wealth and rank and discoursing upon the pleasures of the domestic circle, and such humbugs. All this was exceedingly irksome to me, accustomed as I was to one unvarying round of excitement; but your father was as firm as he was puritanical—and obstinately interposed his authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to feel a distaste for the insipidity of a domestic ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... married, and not relations, they have no reasonable call whatever to write each other long and interesting letters. In spite of her education and her reading, Miss Anna's standards in these respects were the small, Puritanical standards of ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is the matter with you? You appear to be upset about something. Perhaps my little story jars upon your puritanical English notions? Or perhaps it is—yes, of course you are upset about the news that you have just heard of your friends, for, now that I come to look at you, I see that you are the Englishman whom I met at Don Hermoso's house, and whom I warned to leave ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... energies into her cause, and by her firm resolve dispelled any opposition that Mr. Wilson may have intended to offer. One of the most striking episodes of the Conference was the swift, silent, and successful campaign by which Japan had her secret treaty with China hall-marked by the puritanical President of the United States, whose sense of morality could not brook the secret treaties concluded by Italy and Rumania with the Greater and Greatest Powers of Europe. Again, it was with statesman-like sagacity that the Japanese judged the Russian situation and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross- fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was practically as free as when it came from the hands of the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws. In 1649 a solemn association was formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Both these Puritanical estimates of Greek deity are of course to some extent true. The corruption of classical worship is barren idolatry; and that corruption was deepened, and variously directed to their own purposes, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... not puritanical; she had lived too much in Europe for that and had met many clever people, not to say men of much more than mere talent, who had made big marks on their times. But she had been brought up in the narrow life of old ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... good time. I put in my claim as an old Belfield friend for a couple of waltzes. She has the best pace of any woman here. Handsome girl, but dangerous: devilish amusing, though. Wonder where she got her ideas in that cramped, puritanical little place? Pity she's going to marry such a slow coach as Jack Holt! Beg your pardon—nothing derogatory intended. You must yourself admit that he is rather slow.—By the by, Floyd, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... brother, there were three sisters, one of whom died. His father was a wealthy man, and had built himself a small country house, and planted the few acres of ground round it very skillfully. Major Hamilton was a very religious man, of the self-sufficient, puritanical, and evangelical type, that issues from discipline; a martinet in his regiment, a domestic tyrant, without intending to be. He did not marry till rather late in life; and at the time when Arthur was growing up—the ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... plays, Shakespeare's life must have been a busy one. Tradition, however, accords him an easy enjoyment of the pleasures of the time; and his own sarcastic remarks against Puritans in his plays may indicate a hatred of puritanical restraint. He must have joined in many a merry feast with the other actors and writers of the day, and with court gallants. The inventory of property left by him {16} at his death indicates that while he had accumulated a good estate, he had ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... bitterness. Although he did not hope for a renewal of the strife, he trusted that if it were renewed, he might have the opportunity of laying the country in waste, and of exterminating the canting, hypocritical, puritanical, independents. He soon perceived the folly of the Seat of Government being situated on the very frontier, the more especially as Detroit was to be surrendered to the very people whom he most detested. York, from its security, situation and extent, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... observant as the critical moment approaches, thus denoting his firm and unwavering trust in the God of Israel. David makes but few gestures, but always assumes a reverential attitude when he mentions the name of God—not puritanical by any means, but expressive of humble hope and ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... no more than a brief "Good afternoon!" feeling that she could not trust herself to say more. Emily Peyton only laughed; she had full confidence in her charm, and thought she could bring back her puritanical little friend whenever she chose to smile in a particular way; meanwhile, the children were a new toy, and ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... to the reviewer, whose theatrical apprenticeship had been thorough, yet it never failed to awaken his deepest cynicism. Somewhere within him was a puritanical streak, and he still cherished youthful memories. He reflected now that it was he who had laid the foundation for the popularity of the girl he had come to interview; for he had picked her out of the chorus of the preceding Revue and commented so enthusiastically upon her ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... classification; while other so-called "novels," like Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, are but, little better than picaresque stories, with a deal of unnatural moralizing and repentance added for puritanical effect. In Crusoe, Defoe brought the realistic adventure story to a very high stage of its development; but his works hardly deserve, to be classed as true novels, which must subordinate incident to the faithful portrayal of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Hudibras reflected the new manners of this wretched court; and that Butler had become the satirist of the party whose cause he had formerly so honestly espoused, is confirmed by his "Remains," where, among other nervous satires, is one, "On the licentious age of Charles the Second, contrasted with the puritanical one that preceded it." This then is the greater glory of Butler, that his high and indignant spirit equally satirised the hypocrites of Cromwell ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... dress-basket. There were near green hills, and far blue mountains, and certain rocky eminences in the middle distance, but nothing of grandeur. Poplars marched along with us on either side, primly on guard, and puritanical, though all the while their myriad little fingers seemed to twinkle over the keyboard of an invisible piano, playing a ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... has announced, I learn through a Struthers quite pop-eyed with indignation, that it's Peter and I who possibly ought to be tarred and feathered, if our puritanical community is deciding to go in for that sort of ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... soft hair and delicious curves, and the charming indecision of immature contours which ought some day to fall into a nobler firmness.... It's as interesting as a satire, I tell you. Look at that perfectly good mouth and its delicate sensitive decision with a hint of puritanical primness in the upper lip—and the full, sensuous under lip mocking the upper and giving the lie to the child's eyes which are still wide with the wonder of men and things. And there's something of an adolescent's mystery in the eyes, too—a hint of languor where the bloom of the cheek touches ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Paul wrote as well all about it. I could but think I had been mistaken; that there had been no serious engagement between them, but only a flirtation, as they might call it, or something of that sort: a very reprehensible flirtation, with my Puritanical notions, it seemed to me. I need not ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... almost any public library books that are a physiological scandal, printed in type that it is an outrage to place before any self-respecting reader. I have seen copies of "Tom Jones" that I should be willing to burn, as did a puritanical British library-board of newspaper notoriety. My reasons, however, would be typographic, not moral, and I might want to add a few copies of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," without prejudice to the authors' share in ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick |
