"Uncouthness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aristocratic, and comments on Quaker opposition to the theater and the inconsequence of the Peale Museum, which travelers a generation later highly praise. Proceeding to New York at a cost of six dollars, he is struck by the uncouthness of the public buildings, churches excepted, the widespread passion for music, dancing, and the theater, the craze for sleighing, and the promise which the harbor gave of becoming the finest in America. Not a few travelers in this early period gave expression to their belief ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... land o' cakes to the land of biscuits upon a tour of investigation. These twain shared the enthusiasm with which the auditors applauded Mr. Riley's charming recitations. They marvelled that so versatile a genius could have lived in a land reputed for uncouthness ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, there come out details of coarseness—of the uncouthness of the rustic mingled with the sharpness of the tradesman—of irregularity and fierce lawlessness—that rather mar the vision of pastoral innocence and simplicity. Still, as it is the exceptional and exaggerated characteristics of any period that leave the most vivid memory ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... as the tariff or internal improvements. He had now outgrown the uncouthness of his earlier days and had become stately and dignified in his manner. Around this unique personality there began to gather all those democratic forces which we have noted as characteristic of the interior of the country, reinforced by the democracy of the cities, growing into self-consciousness ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... personality into the chair of state,—where, I presume, it was his first impulse to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I exaggerated still ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... special objection. Every man has a right to heap virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the subordinates; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should keep within the bounds of natural laws. If he chooses to introduce time-honored personages, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... gentleman to treat it ungratefully. Yet it was as if for the purpose of saying, "You are a nuisance to me, or worse!" that he had asked her to his study. Her presence had hitherto chiefly roused in him the half-amused, half-tender feelings of one who strokes a foal or calf, watching its soft uncouthness; now, about to say good-bye to her, there was the question of whether ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... William on his landing, with a graphic vigour, which would be wholly lost by transfusing their racy Norman couplets and terse Latin prose into the current style of modern history. It is best to follow them closely, though at the expense of much quaintness and occasional uncouthness of expression. They tell us how Duke William's own ship was the first of the Norman fleet. "It was called the Mora, and was the gift of his duchess, Matilda. On the head of the ship in the front, which mariners call the prow, there was a brazen child bearing an arrow with ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... sufficiently interested. The elder of the two—a tall, slender, middle-aged woman, with a somewhat severe, though delicate face—sat quietly apart, looking on at the rough dances and games with a keen relish of their primitive uncouthness; but the younger, a slight, alert creature, moved here and there, her large, changeable eyes looking larger through their ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had spoken of Caliban's new language.] Whence these critics derived the notion of a new language appropriated to Caliban, I cannot find: they certainly mistook brutality of sentiment for uncouthness of words. Caliban had learned to speak of Prospero and his daughter, he had no names for the sun and moon before their arrival, and could not have invented a language of his own without more understanding ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... late in Autumn half the world's asleep, And half the wakeful world looks pinched and pale; For dampness now, not freshness, rides the gale; And cold and colorless comes ashore the deep With tides that bluster or with tides that creep; Now veiled uncouthness wears an uncouth veil Of fog, not sultry haze; and blight and bale Have done their worst, and leaves rot on the heap. So late in Autumn one forgets the Spring, Forgets the Summer with its opulence, The callow birds that ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... blazed on the ranges, guns were fired, and a procession of boats escorted theirs home. As a strictly bachelor community, we felt some hesitation about going to call and congratulate the couple. This was owing to our own shyness and uncouthness, you understand, not to any disfavour with which we looked upon matrimony as an abstract thing. For we were previously unacquainted with the bride. However, some demon prompted us to give them a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... a serener season for the chastened spirit of Baptista Heddegan. She had, in truth, discovered, underneath the crust of uncouthness and meagre articulation which was due to their Troglodytean existence, that her unwelcomed daughters had natures that were unselfish almost to sublimity. The harsh discipline accorded to their young lives before ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al. |
