"Third-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will be accumulated by those who work towards this end. All are surprised to find that a uniform fee is charged and that there is no opportunity for bargaining, as the regular physician writes prescriptions for first, second, or third-rate medicine, according ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... fore, the latter having a square-sail and yard, and the former a sail that is narrow aloft, like a sloop's main-sail. In fine weather they have also a top-sail, which, in foul weather, they lower to the deck, yard and all. The main-mast of one of their largest junks is equal in size to that of our third-rate men of war, but all of one piece, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... September, when he was overtaken by a violent tempest, which drove him into the channel, and obliged him to make for the port of Plymouth. The weather being hazy, he reached the Sound with great difficulty: the Coronation, a second-rate, foundered at anchor off the Ram-head; the Harwich, a third-rate, bulged upon the rocks and perished; two others ran ashore, but were got off with little damage; but the whole fleet was scattered and distressed. The nation murmured at the supposed misconduct of the admiral, and the commons subjected him to an inquiry: ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... moving picture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a brief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, buta hideous ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction, Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that incomparable verve and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... controversy. Ability, adroitness, vigour, and character were for once all on one side. Palissot was perhaps, after all, the best of the writers on the conservative side.[192] With all his faults, he had the literary sense. Some of what he said was true, and some of the third-rate people whom he assailed deserved the assault. His criticism on Diderot's drama, The Natural Son, was not a whit more severe than that bad play demanded.[193] Not seldom in the course of this work we have wished with Palissot that the excellent ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... too far to come out whole, captain. General Aguinaldo may mean well, but he never went at this thing right. He ought to know that he isn't dealing with some third-rate power." ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... champagne breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I, nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 1830-31 put an end to the Orange policy of creating a powerful Netherland State from Lorraine to the North Sea which could hold its own with either France or Prussia, and since that period Holland has gradually sunk, and seemingly without discontent, into the position of a third-rate Power. This has taken place without any apparent loss of the old love of independence, but it has necessarily been accompanied by a diminution not only of the military spirit, but of military efficiency and readiness. The spectacle of immense armies of millions ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... chess, but very seldom, because he was only a third-rate player, and he did not like to be beaten at that game, which, I know not why, is said to bear a resemblance to the grand game of war. At this latter game Bonaparte certainly feared no adversary. This reminds me that when we were leaving Passeriano ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... inspired Rougon with exquisite delight. Everything, even the dust and the old documents lying in the corners, seemed to exhale an odour of incense, which rose to his dilated nostrils. This room, with its faded hangings redolent of petty transactions, all the trivial concerns of a third-rate municipality, became a temple of which he ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... which he always talked as if being shot at was the most pleasant and amusing feature of Irish life), he repaired to England, and there, after trying to set up as popular preacher in London, declaiming at Exeter Hall, and writing for all the third-rate magazines, found himself incumbent of Lower Whitford. He worked there, as he said himself, 'like a horse;' spent his mornings in the schools, his afternoons in the cottages; preached four or five extempore sermons every week to overflowing congregations; took the lead, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... our painters traversing the wildest places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... draw the line, and where would you begin to leave out?—I would only draw the line when I was purchasing a picture. I think that a person might always spend his money better by making an effort to get one noble picture than five or six second or third-rate pictures, provided only, that you had examples of the best kind of work produced at that time. I would not have second-rate pictures. Multitudes of masters among the disciples of Giotto might be named; you might have one or two pictures ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... discovery of a descendant of the same family in one of the most admired artists of the day. They visited Jocelyn's studio together—a vast, bare place, wholly unadorned by the tawdry paraphernalia which is sometimes affected by third-rate men to create an "art" impression on the minds of the uninstructed—and they had stood lost in wonder and admiration before a great picture he was painting on commission, entitled "Wild Weather." It was what is called by dealers an "important ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... out second and third-rate kinds from defective knowledge. He has not judiciously compared his petted seedlings with the superb varieties already in existence. It is soon discovered by general trial that the vaunted new-comers are not ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... unusual word, every new compound, every metaphorical turn of meaning, to be found in our great writers, would be a compendium of the genius of our authors rather than of our language; and a lexicographer who rakes the books of second and third-rate men for out-of-the-way phrases is doing us no favor. A dictionary is not a drag-net to bring up for us the broken pots and dead kittens, the sewerage of speech, as well as its living fishes. Nor do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... race begins with the education of the child. The Schools differentiate between British and Indian teachers; the Colleges do the same. The students see first-class Indians superseded by young and third-rate foreigners; the Principal of a College should be a foreigner; foreign history is more important than Indian; to have written on English villages is a qualification for teaching economics in India; the whole atmosphere of the School and College emphasises the superiority ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... It was this third-rate town that became the birthplace of a new school of German opera, for years the hub of the musical universe. Here in Weimar the princess lived thirteen years. She placed herself under the protection of the Grand Duchess of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... hand. She seemed definitely to decide to put away her childishness. She treated him as though she had forgotten his supposed youth; she talked straightforwardly, with a certain dignity, about her childhood, about her amusing and pitiful experience as a third-rate little actress, and she asked him a question now and then half diffidently, which he answered in stumbling, careful speech, always weighed upon by his promise, by the deception he must practice, by the dread of what must come. Nevertheless, minute by minute, his pulse quickened. This, God be thanked, ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of Queenston Heights Sheaffe succeeded Brock in command of the British, and Smyth succeeded Van Rensselaer in command of the Americans. Sheaffe was a harsh martinet and a third-rate commander. Smyth, a notorious braggart, was no commander at all. He did, however, succeed in getting Sheaffe to conclude an armistice that fully equalled Prevost's in its disregard of British interests. After making the most of it for a month he ended it on November ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... BULGER, and even Professors gave him a wide berth in making up a match. But by steady perseverance, reading Sir WALTER SIMPSON, taking out a professional, and practising his iron in an adjacent field, BULGER soon developed to such an extent that few third-rate players could give him a stroke a hole. He had been in considerable danger of "a stroke" of quite a different character before he left London, and the delights of the Bar. But he returned to the Capital in rude health, and may now often be seen and heard, topping into the Pond at ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... works of profound research on any subject, and, above all, in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our vast and wealthy foundations ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... and any one is considered competent to legislate. He can do that, even if by common knowledge he is incompetent or untrustworthy in every other capacity. Localization thus becomes the stronghold of mediocrity, the sure avenue to office of the second-and third-rate man,—he who wishes always to enjoy his share of a little brief authority, to have, he also, a taste of public life. In this respect our American system is, I submit, manifestly and incomparably inferior to the system ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... find,—next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the small, over-wrought, {166} under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig or schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate seaport; and which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water, seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. Of the larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... that one has to go back to the battle of Sedgemoor for the last occasion when in anything dignified by a higher name than riot, blood has been shed in England; the fact that when a retiring English Attorney-General appointed his son to a third-rate position in the legal profession an outcry arose in which the salient feature was surprise that so flagrant a job should have been perpetrated, are indications of what I mean when I say that English people are in every ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... contrary, words exact and truthful in themselves seem always too thrilling, too great for the subject; seem to embellish it unduly. I feel as if I were acting, for my own benefit, some wretchedly trivial and third-rate comedy; and whenever I try to consider my home in a serious spirit, the scoffing figure of M. Kangourou rises before me—the matrimonial agent, to whom I am indebted ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... is never the master, but usually a second or third-rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those beneath her, or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight place. If such a one can get loose in the stable, she is quite certain to do mischief. She delights to pause in the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and—to London's shame let it be noted—the more attractive girls are all from the Continent. Without these feminine importations I doubt if the supper clubs could be maintained. At the musical galleries—a third-rate supper place run by the Musical and Theatrical Club at 30 Whitfield Street, near Tottenham Court Road, W.—I was approached and greeted by a little French girl, whose knowledge of English was almost as limited as is my knowledge ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... waiting for us at Rosendaal, and we had a hard time getting shelter for the night. Finally we succeeded in getting a room for the two women in a little, third-rate hotel, and Jack and I slept on the floor of a sitting-room in the little Hotel Central. I was so dog-tired that I slept like a log, wrapped ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... just made myself into a committee of welcome; an', when the train pulled in, there I was, extendin' the glad hand of the burg—likewise the glad hand of a guy you used to know in Oakland once, a third-rate dub prizefighter by the name of—lemme see—yep, I got it right—Big Bill Roberts was the name he used to sport, but now he's known as William Roberts, E. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... resisted Russia, and which, had its greatness continued, could have protected Poland,—if, indeed, Poland could have been threatened, had Russia been unsuccessful at Pultowa,—was thrown into the list of third-rate nations. Poland was virtually given up to Russia through the defeat of Charles XII., just as, a century later, she failed of revival through the defeat of Napoleon I. in his Russian expedition. But the effect of Sweden's defeat was not fully seen until many years after its occurrence. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... would have a very anxious afternoon, Charles Osmond gave up his brief midday rest, snatched a hasty lunch at a third-rate restaurant, finished his parish visits sooner than usual, and reached the little house in Guilford Terrace in time to share the worst part of her waiting. He found her hard at work as usual, her table ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Buckthorne. "It is the 'Club of Queer Fellows.' A great resort of the small wits, third-rate actors, and newspaper critics of the theatres. Any one can go in on paying a shilling at the bar for the ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... the latter took his position as a third-rate man. Indeed, he never afterward reached even to the House of Representatives at Washington, while Harvey still retains his place in the Senate-chamber, one of the most esteemed and valuable ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... of provisions. As far as we can judge, a first-rate of the latter end of the seventeenth century mounted her guns on three whole decks, a quarter-deck, forecastle, and poop; a second-rate mounted hers on three whole decks and a quarter-deck; a third-rate on two whole decks, a quarter-deck, forecastle, and poop; a fourth-rate on two whole decks and a quarter-deck; a fifth-rate on her first gun-deck, with a few guns on her quarter-deck; a sixth-rate on a single-deck, with or without any ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... The sea air and the warmth there might set your mother up marvellously." And as the young man stared at him unresponsively he gave a grasp to the hand he held, and turning, found his way out alone. He stumbled down the dark steps of the third-rate apartment-house and into his brougham, and as the rubber tires bowled him over the asphalt ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... it leaves me to know that very clever people despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... diagnosing a disease. "It's not my business—but since you've come here I'd be interested to hear what you think is going to be the end of it all. I might persuade you to look facts in the face. By position you're a little suburban nobody, who was pushed out to West Africa to become a third-rate little trader. You've survived, and you've got a little money to burn. To you it seems a fortune. But it won't pay this woman's cigarette bills. She ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... assistance to him, namely, the number of examples of many different styles which surround him in galleries or museums. His mind is disturbed by the inconsistencies of various excellences, and by his own predilection for false beauties in second or third-rate works. He is thus prevented from observing any one example long enough to understand its merit, or following any one method long enough to obtain facility in its practice. It seems, therefore, very desirable that some such standard of art should ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... afterwards under-clerk to the magistrates, and played the rogue for two or three drachmae?[n] and how at last, in recent days, you thought yourself lucky to get a parasitic living in the training-rooms of others, as a third-rate actor? What then is the life of which you propose to speak? Where have you lived it? For the life which you have really lived has been what I have described. And how much does he take upon himself! He brought another man to trial here for unnatural offences! ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... seat in the Lord-Mayor's chair. People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in politics, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... two lost plays, The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant, in which the same collaborators are known to have been engaged. The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, and The Lady's Trial which we have, and which are known to be Ford's only, are but third-rate work by common consent, and Love's Sacrifice has excited still stronger opinions of condemnation from persons favourable to Ford. This leaves us practically four plays upon which to base our estimate—'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Lover's Melancholy, The Broken ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... circumstantial story has been given currency by Dr. Johnson. Voltaire, it appears, was a spy in the pay of Walpole, and was in the habit of betraying Bolingbroke's political secrets to the Government. The tale first appears in a third-rate life of Pope by Owen Ruffhead, who had it from Warburton, who had it from Pope himself. Oddly enough Churton Collins apparently believed it, partly from the evidence afforded by the 'fulsome flattery' and 'exaggerated compliments' to be found in Voltaire's correspondence, which, he ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... It was only an assumption at best. So the aspiring lady received what she called select company on a Tuesday, and entertained generally on Thursday evenings. But her neighbors tossed their heads, and said they were only third-rate people ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Bellini finds in it his last and fullest ideal; Catena, Basaiti, Cariani do their best to acquire it, and so successfully was it acquired, so congenial was it to Venetian art, that even second- and third-rate Venetian painters have usually something attractive which triumphs over superficial and doubtful drawing and grouping. It is easy to see how much to their taste was this fused and golden manner, this ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... better enter my name as a student at one of the colleges where he was a professor, and that he himself would give me lessons. And, oh! the bitterness of the moment when I had to say that I had no money, no friends to pay for my education, and that I was earning my living as a pupil teacher in a third-rate school in the suburbs. Do you know he seemed almost as much upset as I was. He said it was a great pity, that a voice like mine ought not to be thrown away, and he asked me a lot of questions about Miss McDonald and the school. Did I think she would continue to let me live with ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... Bosc. At this Nana looked sedate and remarked dryly that she would have given them a pretty reception. Had she wanted colleagues, she would certainly have undertaken to ask them herself. No, no, she wouldn't have third-rate play actors. Old Bosc was always drunk; Prulliere was fond of spitting too much, and as to Fontan, he made himself unbearable in society with his loud voice and his stupid doings. Then, you know, third-rate play actors ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... measures for the forcible conversion of the nation. The aim is to substitute the improvised rites of a logical abstraction mechanically elaborated in the closet for the tender emotions nourished by the customs of eighteen centuries.—Never did the dull imagination of a third-rate scholar and classic poetaster, never did the grotesque solemnity of a pedant fond of his phrases, never did the irritating hardness of the narrow and stubborn devotee display with greater sentimental bombast ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his children of nature. Cooper was an elemental man, and he comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere artistic instinct, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... he waited and thumbed through a fan magazine. From time to time he found his own face in such publications. He was a third-rate celebrity, really. Luck hadn't been with him so far as the buffs were concerned. They wanted spectacular victories, murderous situations in which they could lose themselves in vicarious sadistic thrills. Joe had reached most of his peaks while in retreat, ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of other quarters of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic, in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... elegant attitude against his bureau. He had discovered his reply. "You know you are bitten by the fashion for originality. Why should I make my room hideous with the work of third-rate mediocrity, or of men who are still learning to paint, simply in order ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... nervous system from mortifying mistakes and serious corrections is to many young ladies a cruel additional burden laid upon them in the course of study"; "that the provision we offer to girls is not the best, and is even dangerous"; that "where women are admitted, the college becomes second or third-rate, and that, worst of all, young men will be deterred from coming to this college by the presence of ladies." An "annex" was recommended, not with college degrees, but a subordinate arrangement with "diploma examinations, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... irascible Corsicans at our baggage! It is borne off to the custom-house, and undergoes an examination far from rigorous. We mount several flights of steps, leading from one narrow street to another in this old quarter of the town, and are led to an hotel, which had much the air of a second or third-rate Italian locanda—lofty and spacious apartments, neither clean nor well arranged; and the déjeûner was a sorry affair. N'importe; we shall not stay longer in Bastia than is necessary, and we may go further and fare worse. Meanwhile, a battalion of French infantry were on parade, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... to be said of those to whom, with all goodwill, one cannot apply such terms, even in the sense given them by the feeble tongue of man? What can one say of the ordinary, common, second-rate, third-rate toilers—whatsoever they may be—statesmen, men of science, artists—above all, artists? How conjure them to shake off their numb indolence, their weary stupor, how draw them back to the field of battle, if once the conception has stolen into their brains of ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... situated thirty miles south of London, and within two miles of our ancient and respectable hamlet. Here she belonged to several clubs, bridge, tennis and croquet; enjoyed being a Triton among minnows; entertained a third-rate set at "Littlecote," and joined gay little theatre parties to London to "do a play," and return ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... River Railroad's list of 'dead and wounded,' than Printem & Sellem's list of 'Popular Publications!' But it is consoling to know that books like 'Daisy's Necklace,' in spite of 'purchased puffery,' find their level at last as linings for portmanteaus and third-rate trunks. We shall make cigar-lighters of our copy, and thank the stars that we were not born a ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... death of Dom Ferlus, the college passed into the hands of his brother Raymond Ferlus, a former Oration, now married, a third-rate poet and man of little capacity. The college went into decline when the restoration of 1814 allowed back the Jesuits, who were determined to wreak revenge on the Benedictines by destroying the edifice which the latter had erected on the ruins ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... 'A third-rate actress, whom I met with during my stay in Liverpool last summer, where I had gone to fulfil a short engagement ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,' the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!—I will now quit this of the organisation of Men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... slighter those peculiarities, the greater is the merit of the limner who can catch them and transfer them to his canvas. To paint Daniel Lambert or the living skeleton, the pig-faced lady or the Siamese twins, so that nobody can mistake them, is an exploit within the reach of a sign-painter. A third-rate artist might give us the squint of Wilkes, and the depressed nose and protuberant cheeks of Gibbon. It would require a much higher degree of skill to paint two such men as Mr. Canning and Sir Thomas Lawrence, so that nobody who had ever seen them could for a moment hesitate to assign ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... few months later, he describes his position as a sort of 'Benthamee Lycurgus,' and sets forth the problem which he is trying to solve in an official document then in course of preparation: 'Given corrupt natives, incompetent civilians, and a sprinkling of third-rate barristers, how to get perfect judges.' His estimate, indeed, of the merits of the Indian services, considered collectively, was the highest possible. He speaks of them not merely with appreciation but with an enthusiasm such as might have been generated in other men by a ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... numbers of the enemy, have utterly destroyed the latter, and obtained full command of the sea. Japan would have been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... work of the house. He made the beds, brought up the meals and water, laid the tables and emptied the slops; but, while thus engaged, he never made any remark, and when spoken to replied in monosyllables. The ground floor front was let to a third-rate Hebraic music-hall artiste, who perfunctorily attended his place of business. The second and third floors, and most of the top rooms, were let to good-looking young women, who were presumed to belong to the theatrical profession. If ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... poem called third-rate Not as ill written, but as written late; To hear your critics for their ancients claim Not charity, but honour and high fame. Suppose I doubt if Atta's humorous show Moves o'er the boards with best leg first or no, The fathers of the city all declare ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Nicholas," he said, and added: "Now, what do you want me to do for you? I can't make you a judge. It took me fifty years to make myself one—a third-rate ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... creature, Lady P.' A title that is an oddity, whose costume always suggests the wardrobe of a provincial actress! My dear Paul, your society novelist would make a fortune out of such a character. The personages of her amusing anecdotes, instead of being third-rate theatrical folk, shall be Earl Blank and the Baroness de Dash. The editors of society journals shall pay me a shilling a line for them. Jarman—yes, Jarman shall be the son of a South American millionaire. Vulgar? Nonsense! you mean racy. Minikin—he looks much ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... nearly every minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep—by a certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights—a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next—a kind of national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, and talking ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to Liverpool," Quarles went on. "Thorn's Hotel is third-rate, but quite good enough for a man who does not want to burn money. 'C.M.' stands for Claude Milne. That was the only name with those initials in the hotel books on that date. He had come from New York, and he left an address to which letters were to be ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... purpose of going by coach to Lyndhurst, a considerable village in the New Forest, from which an ex-chancellor derives his title. I had appointed to meet a confidential agent there at the Fox and Hounds Inn, a third-rate tavern, situate at the foot of the hill upon which the place is built; and as the evening promised to be clear and fine, though cold, I anticipated a bracing, cross-country walk afterwards in the direction of Hythe, in the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... sensible individual to see romance in this entry into a third-rate Parisian hotel—to see daring or to see danger—but the boy's heart was beating fast as the glass door swung behind him, and his tongue was dry as he stepped into the little office on the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... evils which so deeply saddened him, and could not apply it, ate into his soul, and this rage was increased by the inferiority of France at that time, as compared with Russia and England. France a third-rate power! This cry came up again and again in his conversation. The intestinal disorders of his country had entered into his soul. All the contests between the Court and the Chamber, showing, as they did, incessant ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... which was in a sense indicative of the methods and character of the young man himself; a pale, characterless face, a straggling, sandy moustache, and an earnest, not to say convincing, manner. He was dressed in such garments as the head-clerk of Messrs. Waddington & Forbes, third-rate auctioneers and house agents, might have been expected to select. He dangled a bunch ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... threw himself ardently into the investigation of the modes of inflating balloons with this gas, which was then called INFLAMMABLE AIR. Guessing that it was much lighter than that which Montgolfier had been obliged to make use of in his third-rate provincial town, Charles leagued himself with his two assistants to constrict a balloon of taffeta, twelve feet in diameter, covered with india-rubber, and to inflate ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... history, we must, in a debate about literary property, draw our illustrations from literary history. Now, Sir, I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works, to third-rate and fourth-rate works, a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. It is impossible to account for the facts which I have laid before you by attributing them to mere accident. Their number is too great, their character too uniform. We must seek for some ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet of the "madman of the North." The alliance of 1699 precipitated the Great Northern War which was to last until 1721 and slowly, but no less inevitably, lower Sweden to the position of a third-rate power. It was amid the most spectacular exploits of the boy-king that the ruin of Sweden was accomplished. It was a grander but more tragic fate than in the same ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Esq., Sometime Field-Coronet in His Majesty's Troop of Horse," and was sown thick with objurgation—"Ods-wounds!" "Body o' me!" "A murrain on thee!" "By my halidom!" and all the rest of the sweepings and tailings of Scott and the third-rate romanticists. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... been unusually gay and the opera most stupidly brilliant; stocks continue to fluctuate; another old woman was tossed and gored by a mad motor this morning. . . . More time, Alixe? . . . With pleasure; Mrs. Vendenning has bought a third-rate castle in Wales; a man was found dead with a copy of the Tribune in his pocket—the verdict being in accordance with ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... M. Bocardon, of the Hotel de la Curatterie at Nimes, whose grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother in Paris who managed the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers, stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream of their modest and ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the mightiest of the ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... representing the old school, may never look on the new school with the patronizing airs of "Old Fitz"[1] and Fanny Kemble. I wish that I could see the new school of acting in Shakespeare. Shakespeare must be kept up, or we shall become a third-rate nation! ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... politician, the saloon-keeper, and the policeman, there are others who take an interest in the breadwinner. If he is injured, or his property is injured, there are third-rate lawyers ready to bring suit for half the proceeds—an unduly expensive arrangement for the man that has a good claim. If he would save, there are agents of unsound financial schemes ready to take advantage of his ignorance. If he would borrow, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... and the ordinary work of his followers is confined within narrow limits, and not easily perceived at a glance. The difference between blank verse in the hands of its few masters and in the hands of a third-rate imitator strikes the ear in every line. Far more is left to the individual idiosyncrasy. But it does not at all follow, and in fact it is quite untrue that the distinction which turns on an apparently insignificant element is therefore unimportant. The value of all ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the "smart" and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture, which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by men of genius;—nor does it in the least require men of genius to produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can carve ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... low down in it; with the bench, which, with some gilding, might be likened to a gingerbread imitation of a throne; the royal arms above it and the little witness box to one side, where so many honest poor people are bullied, insulted and laughed at by third-rate blackguardly little "lawyers," and so many pitiful, pathetic and noble lies are told by pitiful sinners and disreputable heroes for a little liberty for a lost self, or for the sake of a friend—of a "pal" or a "cobber." The same overworked and underpaid magistrate trying to keep his ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... men belonging to these soul-forsaken years: Third-rate canvassers, collectors, journalists and auctioneers. They are never very shabby, they are never very spruce — Going cheerfully and carelessly and smoothly to the deuce. Some are wanderers by profession, 'turning up' and gone as soon, Travelling second-class, or ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... you knew you would not judge me harshly. If only you could know what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned in a third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat, with associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... dramatic author in France is entitled, every night that his play is performed, to a fixed sum per act, viz. 10 francs, for Paris; 5 francs for the large theatres in the country; 3 francs for the second-rate provincial theatres; and 2 francs for the third-rate. A bureau is established by government, to receive the contributions, and any manager neglecting to make a return, is punished by a heavy fine; the amount of which goes to the author. The advantages arising from this system are also enjoyed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... so much of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin— mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I'm so sick of that expression; I have heard it since I was six years old. Who is Madame Galopin—who thinks anything of her here? She is nobody; she is perfectly third-rate. If I like America better than mamma, I also ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... lady, and wears collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously. There is a largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a second or third-rate man. The hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon the broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old experience of a great poet can reach. The lips of the prophetess are for the moment closed, but she has been prophesying all the morning, and the people round the ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in The Verdict a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... On our knocking, however, the door was instantly thrown open by a Hindoo servant clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash. There was something strangely incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace door-way of a third-rate ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Protestant population of Livonia and Estland to the Greek church by force and by alluring promises, the liberal Sultan Abdul Medjid grants full religious liberty to all sects of Protestantism. But we are accustomed to look upon Turkey as upon a third-rate power, only because in 1828 it was defeated by Russia. Let us now see how the balance stood at that time, and ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... and examined the list of arrivals. Reader, if you have never been a slave, you cannot imagine the acute sensation of suffering at my heart, when I read the names of Mr. and Mrs. Dodge, at a hotel in Courtland Street. It was a third-rate hotel, and that circumstance convinced me of the truth of what I had heard, that they were short of funds and had need of my value, as they valued me; and that was by dollars and cents. I hastened with the paper to Mrs. Bruce. Her heart and hand were always open to every one in distress, ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... effectually destroys the souls of men than the former. Nevertheless in our poor money-grubbing land, the creeping paralysis of tricks of trade, &c., is thought little of; and the shopman who has just sold a third-rate article for a first-class price goes home with respectable self-complacency and glances with holy horror at the man who reels past ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... wholesale devices for shocking and diverting the proletariat would undoubtedly cause a great decline in lynching. The art is practised, in the overwhelming main, in remote and God-forsaken regions, in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided political campaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it is imitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but these are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do with ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... of tennis, Toni, who had only played occasionally at a third-rate suburban club, was at first no match for them; but the two Tobies, who were the essence of good nature, coached her so well and so vigorously that before long she was a capital player; and when once Toni realized that Owen wished her to be as hospitable as she could possibly ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... eager to catch me. I have all the business I want. I can make a living for myself and my small family, and we do not hanker after riches. A larger business would make me a human machine, and I'd rather just drift along and be an ordinary good husband and father. I'd rather be running a little, third-rate detective agency as I am, making just enough to get along, and have a lot of friends. I wouldn't throw down a friend for a million dollars! I suppose I'm the only man in town that thinks this way, but I'm a sort ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... unpreparedness. This burned indelibly into his memory. It stimulated all his subsequent appeals to make the Army and Navy large enough for any probable sudden demand upon them. "America the Unready" had won the war against a decrepit, impoverished, third-rate power, but had paid for her victory hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives; what would the count have mounted to had she been pitted against a really formidable foe? Would she have won at all against ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... already "troops of friends." The fact is, in our original steam-packet there were some agreeable fellows, officers, whom I believe I never mentioned to you. They have been long expecting your worship's offspring, and have gained great fame in repeating his third-rate stories at second hand; so in consequence of these messengers I am received with branches of palm. Here the younkers do nothing but play rackets, billiards, and cards, race and smoke. To govern men, you must ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... lifelong following of one's own funeral." And indeed, it is not any gross fear of death that comes to one at all here in the mysterious sunshine, but a new delight in life. Those joyful pleasant paintings of Benozzo Gozzoli, a third-rate master, but one who is always full of joy and sunshine, with a certain understanding and love, too, of the hills and the trees, seem to confirm us in our delight at the sun and the sea wind, here in Italy, in Italy at last. For, indeed, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... situation of which the gay flags were the outward and visible sign. For in these latter days of April, 1898, a first-class Republic had, from purely philanthropic motives, announced its intention of licking a third-rate Monarchy into the way it should go. Whereat the good citizens had flung broadcast their national emblem to express a patriotic enthusiasm they did not feel, while the wiser heads among them were already whispering ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Bruyere, that 'the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... Marguerite de Lorraine, Gaston de France had three daughters, and being devoid of energy, ability, or greatness of character, they did not object when the King married them to sovereigns of the third-rate order. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... was occupied by the principal player, who wore a humorous wig and a brilliant and expensive scarlet costume. He was a fairly able judge, but he had mistaken his vocation; his rare talent for making third-rate jokes would have brought him a fortune in the world of musical comedy. His salary was a hundred a week; better comedians have earned less. On the present occasion he was in the midst of a double row of fashionable hats, and beneath the hats were the faces of fourteen feminine relatives and ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... that principality, and the only prince in Europe who had refused to recognize Louis Philippe. "It was a singular proof of the mutations of fortune that the direct descendant of Louis XIV. deemed himself fortunate upon being admitted into the family of a third-rate Italian potentate."[AQ] ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... his importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but mischief.[54] He never compassed even a smoothness approaching this description of a nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... it. And it may be remarked in passing that the Gladstone government, thus far, though pursuing this policy more moderately than the Beaconsfield government, shows no intention of abandoning it. Almost everybody admits that if it is abandoned England must sink to the position of a third-rate power like Holland. For what does abandonment mean? It means to have no weight, except that of moral example, in Continental affairs: to relinquish her advantages in the Mediterranean; to let Turkey be absorbed by Russia; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a beautiful face has a wonderful influence. I have known women without a tithe of your beauty, Leone, rise from quite third-rate society to find a place among the most exclusive and noblest people in the land. Your face would win for you, darling, an ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... so familiar with millions it seems small, almost insignificant; but, in reality, it has a great importance. You now see, my friends, what a part of your money-making mechanism may achieve. There is no bank, even of third-rate importance, in this city, whose receiving teller or paying teller may not do exactly as I have done. On any day, at any hour, they may load themselves with valuables and go away. You, and all directors, depend servilely ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Asked Hopalong in surprise. "Well, well," laughed the clerk. "You punchers are easy. Any third-rate actress that looks good to eat can rope you fellows, all right. Now look here, Laura, you keep shy of her corral, or you'll be broke so quick you won't believe you ever had a cent: that's straight. This is the third year that she's been here and I know what I'm talking about. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... Bentley turned to look at his niece, and their eyes met—his full of suppressed mirth. The son!—the unsatisfactory son! Doris remembered that his name was Herbert. In the train of this third-rate sorceress! ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... terrace of the Hotel Casa Bellini, by the dear old shores of Lake Maggiore, which, as the programme advised me, is in Italy. It seemed, too, the most natural thing in the world that the author, Miss LAURA WILDIG, should have collected Priscilla and Cynthia (the latter in tow of a third-rate millionaire husband whom she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... may be had perhaps. Move to Cheveleigh, and look out for it at leisure, if nothing else will content him. But we'll have this drudgery given up. I'll not go home and show my nephew, heir of the Dynevors, keeping a third-rate grammar-school,' said Oliver, with his one remaining Eton quality of ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his brush. Perseverance does instead of talent up to a certain point; he got so far, but no further. This honest lad's perseverance and ambition are praiseworthy; he will always be respected for his industry and steadfastness of purpose, but his paintings will always be third-rate. Who would not have been deceived by his zeal and taken it for real talent! There is all the difference in the world between a liking and an aptitude. To make sure of real genius or real taste in a child calls for more ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... territory of itself alone far more extensive than the European continent. In other respects there is, of course, no point of comparison between these two regions. This Siberian world, where vast wildernesses still remain to be explored, has a foreign trade surpassed by that of many a third-rate European seaport, such as Dover or Boulogne. Embracing a thirteenth part of the dry land on the surface of the globe, its population falls short of that of London alone; it is even more sparsely peopled than Caucasia and Turkestan, having little ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... for Munich. It lies on a large flat plain sixteen hundred feet above the sea and continually exposed to the cold winds from the Alps. At the beginning of the present century it was but a third-rate city, and was rarely visited by foreigners; since that time its population and limits have been doubled, and magnificent edifices in every style of architecture erected, rendering it scarcely secondary in this respect ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... endowments are numerous, but so small that, taken altogether, they are not equal to the revenue of a single third-rate English college. They are scholarships, not fellowships; aids to do work—not rewards for such work as it lies within the reach of an ordinary, or even an extraordinary, young man to do. You do not think that passing a respectable examination is a fair equivalent for an income, such as many a ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... process has consisted. Its backbone has been the teaching of Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks English, and of Ancient Greek by teachers who at best half know this fine lost language. They do not expect any real mastery of either tongue by their students, and naturally, therefore, no real mastery is ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... relief of outraged propriety, expressed in the Supplement, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little improper at times. Very spirit of the Salvation Army, when some third-rate scientist comes out with an explanation of the vermiform appendix or the os coccygis that would have been acceptable to Moses. To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty places at once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided, the peoples will remember that England had stood by, an inert, immovable, sceptical witness of their sufferings and efforts.... England will find herself some day a third-rate power, and to this she is being brought by a want of foresight in her statesmen. The nation must rouse herself and shake off the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... other to the brasserie in the basement. I liked to spend an hour or so there occasionally, smoking and watching the crowd. Every sixth visit on an average I would happen upon somebody interesting among the ordinary throng of medical students and third-rate clerks—watery-eyed old fellows who remembered Cremorne, a mahogany derelict who had spent his youth on the sea when liners were sailing-ships, and the apprentices, terrorised by bullying mates and the rollers of the Bay, lay howling in the scuppers and prayed to be thrown overboard. He ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... is to be done?" said Elizabeth next day as she sat on the floor and massaged the blue Axminster. "No housemaid, and a bedroom carpet disguised as a third-rate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... afterward, though he did not live to see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George: 'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn't I fry eggs in butter—now? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven knows ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... part in the Miser of "Furnish, an Upholsterer," was taken by a third-rate actor, whose surname has been productive of no little misconception among Henry Fielding's biographers. This was Timothy Fielding, sometime member of the Haymarket and Drury Lane companies, and proprietor, for several successive years, of a booth ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... was its first creation in the twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital — without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored — but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk from ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares—so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness—that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... quality of mate, to the surgeon of a merchant ship, bound to Guinea on the slaving trade; when, one morning, a young fellow, of whom he had some acquaintance, came to his lodgings, and informed him that he had seen a warrant made out in his name at the Navy Office, for surgeon's second mate of a third-rate. This unexpected piece of good news he could scarcely believe to be true, more especially as he had been found qualified at Surgeons' Hall for third mate only; but that he might not be wanting to himself, he went thither to be assured, and actually ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... first experience of an important naval action, and Pallisser was complimented by the Lords of the Admiralty for his gallant conduct. The Duc d'Aquitaine was purchased for the Navy, and was entered under her own name as a third-rate, 64 gun ship, with a ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... when the population becomes relatively dense that land, apart from what it produces, is of any value. A time, however, would soon be reached when land would have a value of its own. The good soil would soon be taken up, and in the days of a primitive mode of culture third-rate land would be valueless. Then the house-father would be forced by circumstances to make provision, ere his death, for the sons sharing the ancestral domain ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... to send over a salesman. Would you despatch the office boy? Or would you send your star salesman? Yet if that prospect lived a hundred miles away and sent in a letter of inquiry, one out of two firms would entrust the reply to a second or third-rate correspondent—entirely forgetful that an inquiry is merely a clue to a sale, and not a result in itself. This chapter shows how to GET THE ORDER ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... of paper then in his pocket—courtesy of Stryker. He had sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry, and had spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker was to give him he would be able to get back to London and his third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over to pay that one ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... J.W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple. Here was a family which had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this temple. They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water from the river to a ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... washed-out brick and well-ripened wood, there was comfort and cleanliness and quiet. The front room, with its stiff cane rocker and chairs, its round table and well-adorned mantelpiece, its cretonne-covered lounge and tapestry carpet, was not a bad sample at all, of a drawing-room in a third-rate boarding house. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... not done much in Latin. I have been employed in turning over several third-rate and fourth-rate writers. After finishing Cicero, I read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son. There is a great deal in the Controversiae both of curious information, and of judicious criticism. As to the son, I cannot bear him. His style affects me in something the same way with ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... as bold an adventurer as had ever moved up and down Europe "working the game" in search of pigeons to pluck. His shabbiness was assumed. He had alighted at Bordighera station from the rapide from Paris, spent the night at a third-rate hotel in order not to be recognised at the Angst or any of the smarter houses, and had met him by appointment to explain the present situation. His remarks, however, were the reverse of reassuring. What ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... have been sound," said Pensee, "if Caroline Lennox had been a third-rate woman. A man can be desperate so long as his choice, on the whole, justifies, either by her beauty, or her talents, or something uncommon, an extreme measure. Now, Robert may not have made a wise choice, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... estimate—the men who play all manner of games, and the men who speak several languages. I begin with the latter, and declare that, after a somewhat varied experience of life, I never met a linguist that was above a third-rate man; and I go farther, and aver, that I never chanced upon a really able man who had the talent ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, "they're not half so good as the foreign servants. They've been brought up in homes of their own, and they're uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate boarding-house cooking, and they're always hoping to get married, so that, really, you have no peace of ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... her east-south-east with an occasional rise. Finally we brought her to, not very far from the Kentish coast, and the search- lights of our pursuers were far on the western skyline. There we lay quietly all night, for a submarine at night is nothing more than a very third-rate surface torpedo-boat. Besides, we were all weary and needed rest. Do not forget, you captains of men, when you grease and trim your pumps and compressors and rotators, that the human ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... again make any reference to what she had told me. A fortnight later she returned home and I went my way back to the world. During the following winter I wrote several letters to Miss Sylvia and received replies from her. Her letters were very like herself. When I sent her the third-rate magazine containing my story—nothing but a third-rate magazine would take it in its rewritten form—she wrote to say that she was so glad that I had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he said. Then, with a dry smile, "If you call occupying a hall bedroom and eating at a third-rate boarding-house table living. However, it's my own fault. I've been a newspaper man since I left college. But I threw up my job six months ago. Since then ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... may be, in their way, very respectable schoolmasters, who, in small villages, cannot support themselves entirely on their own bottoms,—ushers in metropolitan academies, whose annual salary rarely exceeds twenty pounds, with some board, and a little washing—third-rate actors on the boards of the Surrey or Adelphi, who have generally a literary turn—a player on the hautboy in some orchestra or other—unfortunate men of talent in the King's Bench—a precocious boy or two in Christ's hospital—an occasional ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... possesses the power of being able to shape events; he can mould them to a certain form; that he cannot breathe into them the spirit of life I have already said, but "Lorna Doone" reminds me of a third-rate Italian opera, La Fille du Régiment or Ernani; it is corrupt with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a single passage of real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent defects of the art of which it is a poor specimen. Wagner made the discovery, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the first words of Mr Sampson Levi. In form they were the greeting of a third-rate chimney-sweep, but, strangely enough, Theodore Racksole liked their tone. He said to himself that here, precisely where no one would have expected to find one, was an ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... ingenious plan of procuring this. They would issue forth from Balmoral in hired carriages, with horses to match, and would drive to some Highland town, and dine and dress at its inn, under assumed names. It was no doubt great fun to Her Majesty to put up with the accommodation of a third-rate provincial inn, where 'a ringleted woman did everything' in the way of waiting at table, and where in place of soup there was mutton-broth with vegetables, 'which I ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... recalled another little boy who, years before, had listened in much the same way to another man playing the violin, and the comparison is not so far-fetched as it seems, for although the blind fiddler of the sunny day in Normandy had been only a third-rate scraper of the bow, and Joyselle one of the world's very greatest artists, yet in one thing they joined issue. Each of them gave to the listening child before him his ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the religious, philosophical, and poetical revolution, Calvin, Montaigne, and Ronsard, born in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, did not do anything that exercised any power until the later. One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I. Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period. The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Darkness is only smoke that hangs suffocatingly over the low red heat of the sunken day. Such was Helena's longed-for night. The tramcar was crowded. In one corner Olive, the third friend, rose excitedly to greet them. Helena sat mute, while the car swung through the yellow, stale lights of a third-rate street of shops. She heard Olive remarking on her sunburned face and arms; she became aware of the renewed inflammation in her blistered arms; she heard her own curious voice answering. Everything was in a maze. To the beat of ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence |
