"Undistinguished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... platforms, now disappeared, the one by the door for the Usher's desk, the one by the Library for the Master. The Modern Language Room opened into it. There were two doors, one the main entrance chiefly used by the boys, the other smaller and undistinguished for the Masters only. It led into the Library and into a Tower, where the School bell was. The Library was not very big but a long narrow room, and inset in the wall was a fire-proof safe, for the ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... and while he studiously extolled the plays of Lord Orrery, as affording an exception to his general sentence against rhyming plays, he does not extend the compliment to Dryden, whose defence of rhyme was expressly dedicated to that noble author. Dryden, not much pleased, perhaps, at being left undistinguished in the general censure passed upon rhyming plays by his friend and ally, retaliates in the Essay, by placing in the mouth of Crites the arguments urged by Sir Robert Howard, and replying to them in the person of Neander. To the charge, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... tribes; but I believe that "Tahoma," proposed by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... everything they had done. Mr. Polly was convinced he had never been so absolutely correct in all his life as when he planted his foot in the sanitary dustbin, and Mr. Rusper considered his clutch at Mr. Polly's hair as the one faultless impulse in an otherwise undistinguished career. But it was clear in their minds they might easily become ridiculous if they were not careful, if for a second they stepped over the edge of the high spirit and pitiless dignity they had hitherto maintained. At any cost they perceived they ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... but a calm man, still more subdued by disease—a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful, introspective look. In his attractive reserved manner and in a ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... thought the binding was very pretty. The author had shuddered no less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the University had been equally undistinguished. But now that, like Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in no mood to remember these past vexations. As soon as he had finished breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay on ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... months Defoe had been vehemently but vainly striving to accomplish by argument what had been wrought in an instant by the French King's insufferable insult. It is one of the most brilliant periods of his political activity. Comparatively undistinguished before, he now, at the age of forty, stepped into the foremost rank of publicists. He lost not a moment in throwing himself into the fray as the champion of the king's policy. Charles of Spain died on the 22nd of October, 1701; by the middle of November, a few ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... in one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was one long success. When he ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... interests which the world supposes every man to have, and which therefore are properly enough termed worldly; but the world is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which constitute our happiness or misery, they bring to an undistinguished scale the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or grandeur, and of the other with their contraries. Philosophers and poets have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have been despised as declamatory, or ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... an example nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in appearance, and were admirably suited to the woods. It was thought that the fringes, form, and colour, blended them so completely with the foliage, as to render them in a manner invisible to one at a distance; or at least, undistinguished. They were much in favour with all the forest corps of America, and formed the usual uniform of the riflemen of the woods, whether acting against man, or only against ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... called, in a ratio inverse and descending, he might have gone on from bad to worse; and so, as many do, putting a grave face upon it, he might have had his degree. But his animal spirits, and love of bustle, could not go off thus undistinguished; and so, after coolly attempting to throw a tutor into the Cam—after shaking all Cambridge from its propriety by a night's frolic, in which he climbed the sign-posts, and changed the principal signs, he was rusticated; till the good-humour of the university returning, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... till they've learned to betray; Undistinguished they live, if they shame not their sires; And the torch that would light them thro' dignity's way Must be caught from the pile where their ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... under fifteen are always pressed for time and uniformly breathless, this appellation was shortened to "Motherdy," and Peter being unable to struggle with that term, had abbreviated it into "Muddy." "Muddy" in itself is undistinguished and even unpleasant, but when accompanied by a close strangling hug, pats on the cheek, and ardent if somewhat sticky kisses, grows by degrees to possess delightful associations. Mother Carey enjoyed it ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from above, He took me, He drew me out of many waters.' So that scene by the margin of the Nile, so many years ago, is but one transient instance of the working of the power which secures deliverance from encompassing perils, and for strenuous, though it may be undistinguished, service to all who call upon Him. God, who put the compassion into the heart of Pharaoh's dusky daughter, is not less tender of heart than she, and when He hears us, though our cry be but as of an infant, 'with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... this rarely allotted portion, this crowning incident of an heroic career, it is after all but an incident. It the man has not contrived; but to it he has contributed much, without which his passing hour would have faded to memory, undistinguished among those of the myriads, great and small, who have died as nobly and are forever forgotten. A sun has set; but before its setting it has run a course, be it long or short, and has gathered a radiance ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound from Palzig ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mankind. We come, as Americans, to mark a spot which must forever be dear to us and our posterity. We wish that whosoever, in all coming time, shall turn his eye hither, may behold that the place is not undistinguished where the first great battle of the Revolution was fought. We wish that this structure may proclaim the magnitude and importance of that event to every class and every age. We wish that infancy may learn the purpose of its erection from maternal lips, and that weary and withered age may behold ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... soul. How could they have? They were made by machines for undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the auto is still ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... peasants, millionaires and paupers, become a common, undistinguished crowd! But the hero, the poet, the saint, defy the ages and remain luminous and separate like ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Ilkeston she was always an alien. She had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom she met were significant to her. They seemed part of a herd, undistinguished. She did not ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Its rubbish back once more. And lie down, undistinguished, In the rough rock as before? Does the costly diamond, blazing On that crowned and queenly one, Look back with sorrowful gazing ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... retired, And his own native Nysa less admired. Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the mischiefs ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... merchants, circumnavigating Africa, discovering Great Britain, and trading with India, ten centuries before Christ, had no equals on the ocean until the time of the Portuguese discoveries, twenty-five centuries after. The Arabs alone, of the seven Semitic families, remained undistinguished and unknown till the days of Mohammed. Their claim of being descended from Abraham is confirmed by the unerring evidence of language. The Arabic roots are, nine tenths of them, identical with the Hebrew; and a similarity ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... especially claimed his interest. The men were nice but undistinguished—athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various—the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women "who understood," and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and "flappers." ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... keen interest in life. Lincoln eventually stands out as a surprising figure from among the other lawyers and little politicians of Illinois, as any great man does from any crowd, but some tribute is due to the undistinguished and historically uninteresting men whose generous appreciation gave rapid way to the poor, queer youth, and ultimately pushed him into a greater arena as ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... to the superscription of one of them, and saw—"George Denbigh, Esq." in the well known hand-writing of Dr. Ives.—Mrs. Wilson felt herself overcome to a degree that compelled her to lower a glass of the carriage for air. She sat gazing on the letters until the characters swam before her eyes in undistinguished confusion; and with difficulty she rallied her thoughts to the point necessary for investigation. As soon as she found herself equal to the task, she examined the letters with the closest scrutiny, and opened them both to be sure there was no mistake. She saw the dates, the "dear George" ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... is, paradoxically, the partial character of their privations. If the unknown were to them practically non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery of wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an unperceived, unimagined ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... glorious actions that might claim Triumphant laurels and immortal fame, Confused in crowds of gallant actions lie, And troops of heroes undistinguished lie." ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... generally been the sword. The Gospel has met and mastered them all. It, and it only, has had power to draw men to itself out of every faith. The ancient gods who bewitched Israel, the gods of Greece, the gods of our own ancestors, the gods of the islands of the South Seas, lie huddled together, in undistinguished heaps, like corpses on a battlefield, and the deities of India and the East are wounded and slowly bleeding out their lives. 'Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, the idols are upon the beasts,' all packed up, as it were, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... plain breastpin with hair in it, who taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person, as if he rather preferred ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... granted on condition of her returning, or, in exchange for her liberty and that of her two slaves, to remit 50 captives, and, failing to do either, the Sultan and his suite were to be deprived of their dignities and treated as common slaves, to work in the galleys, and to be undistinguished among the ordinary prisoners. On these conditions, the Princess left, and forwarded 50 slaves, and one more—a Spaniard, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... to peer. Come and peer, Sylvia." They all leaned over the side of the pool. "See that little starfish? He's lost a leg already in his short career; and those pretty anemones! Why didn't I bring a pail. I shall make an aquarium for you on the piazza, and we'll have anemones, and undistinguished urchins who will never be in a cabinet or hold candles, and starfish, and barnacles. Oh, there's a baby, John. Quick, there! Oh, I can get it myself." She reached down in a flash and drew forth a ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the funeral—Sala, Sampson, Hood, Reid, and the undistinguished others, including this present Sole Survivor of the group. As each cast his handful of earth upon the coffin I am very sure that, like Lord Brougham on a somewhat similar occasion, we all felt more than we cared to express. On the death of a political antagonist ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... applicant. One found his mercantile tenders always rejected, while another, by some unintelligible process, engrossed the custom of the crown. A youthful stranger was invested with the honors of a justice, when colonists of long standing were left undistinguished. The infractions of rule involved one master in public disgrace; another, was a licensed transgressor. Such was the complaint, which might be easily illustrated by examples; but they are such as a knowledge of mankind will amply explain, and are inevitable when the form of ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... rugged mountain, the barren waste, the rudest fragment of barbaric history, spoke the language of elevation, harmony and hope. The circle, of which he was the beloved centre, was composed of men equally sincere, resolute and hopeful; there was not one of them undistinguished. Some of them had now the first literary distinction. The character of each was remarkable for some distinctive and bold feature of originality. I, of course, exclude myself from this description. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... only dead men wear a gown, On theatres of turf, in homely state, Old plays they act, old feasts they celebrate; * * * * * The mimic yearly gives the same delights; And in the mother's arms the clownish infant frights. Their habits (undistinguished by degrees) Are plain alike; the same simplicity Both on the stage and in the pit you see. In his white cloak the magistrate appears; The country bumpkin the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... her evenings with Craven in her imagination, keeping the conversation exactly as it had been, but giving him a thoroughly plain face, a bad complexion, mouse-coloured feeble hair, undistinguished features, ordinary eyes, and a short broad figure. Certainly it would have made a difference. But how much difference? Perhaps a good deal. But he had enjoyed the conversation as much as she had, and there was nothing in her appearance now to arouse the lust of the eye. Suddenly it occurred to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... earthquake in Japan or a plague in South America with a callousness he would never display towards some untimely death or some painful accident in his immediate neighbourhood, and in general the suffering of a prominent and isolated individual strikes us much more forcibly than that of an undistinguished multitude. Few deaths are so prominent, and therefore few produce such widespread compassion, as those of conspicuous criminals. It is no exaggeration to say that the death of an 'interesting' murderer will often arouse much stronger feelings than were ever excited by the death of his ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... letting Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... This, however, is a tale not so much about boys as about masters, the real hero being not Maurice Leigh (with whose adventures school-novelists of an earlier day would solely have concerned themselves), the pleasantly undistinguished lad who enters Hornborough in the first chapter and leaves it in the last, but Quirk, the young and energetic master, whose efforts to vitalize the very dry bones of Hornborough education hardly meet the success that they deserve. Concerning this I am bound to add that I found some difficulty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... of the sheets of copper, he raises one of the stirrups with the other hand, so as to make it catch a nail higher up. The same operation he performs on behalf of the other leg, and so on alternately. And thus he climbs, nail by nail, step by step, and stirrup by stirrup, till his starting-point is undistinguished from the golden surface, and the spire dwindles in his embrace till he can clasp ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... then Ellen was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... public functionaries in undistinguished raiment before Franklin's time; and the change would not have come if he had been an obscurity. But he was such a colossal figure in the world that whatever he did of an unusual nature attracted the world's attention, and became a precedent. In the case of clothes, the next representative ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the famed engineer, no task was impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the right man for the name, all right. But the wrong man ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... Homer has it, others fresh, with substance yet in them, Egyptians chiefly, these—so long last their embalming drugs. But to know one from another was no easy task; all are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phaeacian ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... servant problem," an undistinguished voice remarked two hours later; and the Poet, settling to an uneasy sleep in his chair, mentally ruled ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning to use ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... unlikely now. The hour generally makes the man, and the necessities of the moment often call forth talents and energies, the existence of which was wholly unsuspected by their possessors. For aught we know, many a hero may be now among the ranks, and many a gallant officer now before the mast, undistinguished from lack of opportunity, unknown because circumstances have not developed his dormant powers. How then can the hour be hastened, and the opportunity of developing our musical powers be afforded? The answer is, by the establishment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... out of this troublesome world; the other, if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding-stick and a broken rung of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the right was a hoe-handle, and the left an undistinguished and miscellaneous stick from the wood-pile. Its lungs, stomach, and other affairs of that kind, were nothing better than a meal-bag stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and entire corporosity of the scarecrow, with the exception of its head, and this was ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of the young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty, that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway—though not, perhaps, while he ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Esher gave its welcome not merely to men and women of distinction; the humble undistinguished were made joyous guests there, whether commonplace or counting among the hopeful. Their hostess knew how to shelter the sensitively silent at table, if they were unable to take encouragement and join the flow. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... which enabled her to write 'Northanger Abbey' long before she resided there herself. After the death of their own parents, the two young Coopers paid long visits at Steventon. Edward Cooper did not live undistinguished. When an undergraduate at Oxford, he gained the prize for Latin hexameters on 'Hortus Anglicus' in 1791; and in later life he was known by a work on prophecy, called 'The Crisis,' and other religious ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... plaything. In the northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either for ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... steadiness which they imparted—suggested excellent son-in-lawlike qualities to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. He had the promise of a fair moustache, but his complexion generally was colourless. His features, except for a certain regularity, were undistinguished. His speech was modest and correct. His manner varied with his company. To-night it had been pronounced, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of Shakspere, and of Moliere are closely akin to the plays of their undistinguished contemporaries. It is in their content that they are immeasurably superior. They differ in degree only, never in kind. Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood that Kyd had made popular; and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the lowly brave, who bled While cheerly following where the Mighty led—[309] Who sleep beneath the undistinguished sod Where happier comrades in their triumph trod, To us bequeath—'tis all their fate allows— The sireless offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy auguries disclose The Highland Seer's anticipated ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... christians understood these to be the doctrines of christianity, there can be no doubt. The Presbyters and the Asceticks, I believe, changed the Palluim for the Toga in the infancy of the christian world; but all other christians were left undistinguished by their dress. These were generally clad in the sober manner of their own times. They observed a medium between costliness and sordidness. That they had no particular form for their dress beyond that of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Coming to Athens I spent six months with Antiochus, the most distinguished and learned philosopher of the Old Academy, than whom there was no wiser or more famous teacher. At the same time I practiced myself diligently under the care of Demetrius Syrus, an old and not undistinguished master of eloquence." To Athens, then, Cicero always looked back with affection. He hears, for instance, that Appius is going to build a portico at Eleusis. "Will you think me a fool," he writes to Atticus, "if I do the same at the Academy? 'I think so,' you will say. But I love Athens, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... himself, his teeth almost to their stumps, he proceeded to the metropolis, taking for his wife and young children a miserable lodging on Hog-hill. Term after term, without either profit or professional reputation, he paced the hall of the Four Courts. Yet even thus he was not altogether undistinguished. If his pocket was not heavy, his heart was light—he was young and ardent, buoyed up not less by the consciousness of what he felt within, than by the encouraging comparison with those who were successful ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... impostors, the terror of quacks." I have gone over the names of those who might be Smith's contemporaries at Balliol as they appear in Mr. Foster's list of Alumni Oxonienses, and they were a singularly undistinguished body of people. Smith and Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have made any mark in the ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Bishop of Bath and Wells, was nominated by the pope with the king's consent on the recommendation of Chichele. He also held the office of chancellor for ten years, but was undistinguished in either office. He lies in the south aisle of ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... indeed a delightful spot of earth, though undistinguished by any very prominent beauties, being merely a nook in the shelter of a hill, with the prospect of a distant lake in one direction, and of a church-spire in another. There were vistas and pathways leading onward and onward into the green woodlands, and vanishing away in the glimmering shade. ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... guests, and by reason of this virtue, one not too common, the host and hostess might be pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality of the host was charming. As to Sir John Oglethorpe, the question ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... all the romantic aroma of the men, who, in defence of England, "swept the Spanish Main," and so long successfully singed the Bang of Spain's beard, men whose exploits never fail to stir the best blood of Englishmen, and among whom my direct ancestors had the privilege of playing no undistinguished part. On the other hand, my visits thither have—romance aside—convinced me that the restricted foreshore and the precipitous cliffs are a handicap to the development of youth, compared with the broad expanses of tempting sands, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... only excepted, there was a stone, and on each stone, illegible as it might be, there was an inscription. The undistinguished grave, it was presumed, by its size and its position, was that which contained the bones of those who fell in the night of the burning. There was another, which bore, in deep letters, the name of the Puritan. His ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... circumstances, the circle of Milton's intimates contains few, and those undistinguished names. One exception there was. In Andrew Marvel Milton found one congenial spirit, incorruptible amid poverty, unbowed by defeat. Marvel was twelve years Milton's junior, and a Cambridge man (Trinity), like himself. He had had better training still, having ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... among the Chinese, as their devoted family life, the honesty of their merchants, and the ethics of Confucius indicate. We find them among the negroes, not only in the case of exceptional persons like Booker Washington or Dubois or Atkinson, but also in the undistinguished life of many an obscure man and woman, whom to know more intimately is to learn to respect as a neighbor and a moral equal. What we need to build up our faith in human goodness is the clairvoyance ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... know—while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... tell you whether this house of worship was of the Methodist, Episcopal, or Baptist creed, whether it had a chancel or altar, or painted windows? Whether the pews had doors to them and were cushioned or not? Whether the minister wore a gown and bands, or plain suit of black, or was undistinguished in his dress? Will it not suffice if I tell you, as the very belief of my soul, that it was a christian house, that there were seats for all, that things were well intended and decently ordered, and that with a hymn sung with such purity of heart that its praises naturally ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... I knew what she was as well as if I had seen her. I knew she was well enough; there were girls like her in Madame Beck's school—phlegmatics—pale, slow, inert, but kind- natured, neutral of evil, undistinguished for good. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... nothing to do, but read it all the same. Good day, gentlemen! [To VERSHININ] My name is Kuligin, I am a master of the local High School. [Note: He adds that he is a Nadvorny Sovetnik (almost the same as a German Hofrat), an undistinguished civilian title with no English equivalent.] [To IRINA] In this book you will find a list of all those who have taken the full course at our High School during these fifty years. Feci quod potui, ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... pedagogic eloquence and Latin culture at the service of a mind childish rather than undistinguished, and limited in its notions of attack and defence to the defiant attitude of schoolboys. Not an idea, not a happy turn of phrase, or a telling hit: a storm of declamation that leaves us bored. After a dose of this ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... further privilege of being his only son. The boy was delicate and of a strumous habit. This fact, combined with his parents' ingrained conviction that a public school is synonymous, morally speaking, with a common sewer, caused his education to be conducted at home by a series of tutors as undistinguished by birth as by scholarship—tentative apologetic young men, the goal of whose ambitions was a wife and a curacy, failing which they resigned themselves to the post of usher in some ultra- Protestant ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... respect, was more fortunate than Lincoln. Although born to poverty, he came of a Virginia family which was neither unknown nor undistinguished, and as showing the influences which went to form his character, its history and ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... while thus entangled by a bond of enduring material, a bait for a fierce brute which eagerly pressed forward to snap at me. Believe me, boys, this was not the happiest moment of my life. I knew no reason why I should resignedly submit to so undistinguished a fate. My knife, however, was in the boat, so that my release could only be attained by extreme exertion. Accordingly I writhed and jerked with my 'best violence,' all the time denouncing the whole race of bears, from 'Noah's pets' down; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... or whether he had better remain hidden among the leaves. If you go now to look for the tree, it is indeed plain and easy to be seen. But though now so shorn and lonely, there is no doubt that two hundred years ago it stood undistinguished among a thousand others that thronged the woodland about the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... of the last heir, fallen into the hands of the Jews. On the fortunate demise of the young gentleman who had brought it to this untimely end, it was put up for sale with all its contents. And Sir Morton Pippitt,—a rich colonial, whose forebears were entirely undistinguished, but who had made a large fortune by a bone-melting business, which converted the hoofs, horns and (considering that some years ago it had been a mere roofless ruin, and that the people had been compelled to walk or drive to Riversford in order to attend church at all on Sundays) Sir Morton thought ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... has been among the non-combatant community; what handshaking; what embracing; what fervent delight! This unique life is to end; we are to become reasonably clean and quite ordinary mortals again, lost among the world's population of fifteen hundred millions—undistinguished, unknown—that is, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... huge war hung heavily over the nation, and the question as to Hiram's heirs did not appear to interest very many people either in or out of the house. The bill, however, was read and re-read, and in some undistinguished manner passed through its eleven stages without appeal or dissent. What would John Hiram have said in the matter, could he have predicted that some forty-five gentlemen would take on themselves to make a law altering the whole purport of his will, without in ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... especially in history, was at least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... tortured themselves in vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers to recognize their sons. The mournful gratification of bending over the lifeless bodies of dear relations and gazing with intense anxiety on their pallid features, was denied them. Undistinguished, though not unmarked, all were alike consigned to the silent grave, amid sighs of sorrow ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... with near and distant music, as if Ariel and his sprites had lost their way in it, the tinkling of a mandolin, the singing of a clear, rich voice that had the tenor's golden strain, and yet, in floating through the mist, was sweet and sighing as a flute. The melody and the undistinguished words it bore upon its wings, delicious tune and passionate meaning, seemed the speech of another planet, an orb of song, the delicate sound lost when at sunset the threaded mist broke up and streamed away in fire, but coming again, as if they were haunted by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sought the conversation of the learned, but was especially eloquent in speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers of the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of Virtue.] or converted into tomb-stones, or carried off to be preserved in one or two churches of Nice. At present, the work has the appearance of a ruinous watch-tower, with Gothic battlements; and as such stands undistinguished by those who travel by sea from hence to Genoa, and other ports of Italy. I think I have now described all the antiquities in the neighbourhood of Nice, except some catacombs or caverns, dug in a rock at St. Hospice, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 1755 came Braddock's defeat. In 1756 Montcalm arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In 1757 Wolfe distinguished himself by formulating the plan which, if properly executed, would have prevented the British fiasco at Rochefort on the coast of France. But Carleton remained as undistinguished as before. He simply became lieutenant-colonel commanding the 72nd Foot, now the Seaforth Highlanders. In 1758 his chance appeared to have come at last. Amherst had asked for his services at Louisbourg. But the king had neither forgotten nor forgiven the remarks about the Hanoverians, and so refused ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo puffed by every quill; Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand in song. His library (where busts of poets dead And a true Pindar stood without a head) Received of wits an undistinguished race, Who first his judgment asked, and then a place: Much they extolled his pictures, much his seat, And flattered every day, and some days eat: Till grown more frugal in his riper days, He paid some bards with port, and some with praise; To some a dry rehearsal was ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... somewhat like the figure of Joseph Choate. A rather funny, square, box-like body on little legs. An English look to his clothes. Under his arm an odd-looking club of a walking-stick. Mr. Brownell turned quickly to this rather amusing though not undistinguished figure, and said, "Mr. James—Brownell." The quaint gentleman took off his big hat, discovering to our intent curiosity a polished bald dome, and began instantly to talk, very earnestly, steadily, in a moderately pitched voice, gesticulating with an even rhythmic beat ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... I have passed it many a time, stopping to look at it, when it was occupied, if I remember rightly, by a silk-dyer, or other such tradesman, exhibiting on his sign the peculiar name of "Heaven," and using the lower part of it for his shop. Though jammed in with other houses and undistinguished in the line of bustling street, it had the appearance of having once been a commodious enough house in the old fashion; and I have been informed that some of the old windows, consisting of thick bits of ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... irritating to him; and this doubtless had much to do with it. He lies buried in the garden of his home, without a stone to mark the spot. It is a reproach to the people of Georgia that her most eminent son should be neglected to sleep in an undistinguished grave. But this neglect does not extend alone to Mr. Crawford. I believe, of all her distinguished men, James A. Meriwether is the only one whose grave has been honored with a monumental stone by the State. Crawford, Cobb, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... frequently met with in the annals of Denmark. A singular anecdote is connected with one of the bravest individuals who ever bore the name—the renowned Admiral Tordenskiold, of the days of Frederick IV. While he was yet a young and undistinguished naval officer, he chanced to be in the hall of the royal palace at the time that the king, wearied with the flatteries of some courtiers, who were congratulating him on the success of his war with Sweden, exclaimed, "Ay, I know what ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... insurmountable points on the mountain chain of circumstance that lay between him and his heart's dearest wish. The Commodore's inherent reverence for birth and breeding, and his comparative indifference to brain, was one of them. The obstinate pride of Allan's undistinguished ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... is first of all a natural surprise. It was natural that the elder brother should feel perplexed and hurt. When a sinner seems to be rewarded with more happiness than a saint, it appears as if good and evil were alike undistinguished in God's dealings. It seems like putting a reconciled enemy over the head of a tried servant. It looks as if it were a kind of encouragement held out to sin, and a man begins to feel, Well if this is to be the caprice of my father's dealing; if this rich feast of gladness be the reward ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... the impulse of genius is apparent in MURILLO. This young artist was undistinguished at the place of his birth. A brother artist returning home from London, where he had studied under Van Dyk, surprised MURILLO by a chaste, and to him hitherto unknown, manner. Instantly he conceived the project of quitting his native Seville and flying to Italy —the fever of genius ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... second-cabin, beginning the inquiry there. It was even more drastic than it had been in the first, and the victims emerged from it heated, angry, and with the fixed determination never again to travel by a German boat. Neither the Captain nor the purser could vouch for any of the undistinguished people here, and so each one of them was most thoroughly examined. Even those with passports did not escape. Pachmann examined all such documents minutely, compared the written description point by point with the appearance of the passenger, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office for ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... important that these varieties should be preserved, and that each should be applied to the purposes for which it is best adapted. No philo-zoost, I believe, has suggested it as desirable that these varieties should be melted down into one equal, undistinguished race of curs or ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... stomach of this generation will not bear a discourse long enough to make a separate volume, those religious and godly-minded children (those Samuels, if I may call them so) of the brain must at first be buried in an undistinguished heap, and then get such resurrection as is vouchsafed to them, mummy-wrapped with a score of others in a cheap binding, with no other mark of distinction than the word 'Miscellaneous' printed upon the back. Far be it from me to claim any credit for the quite unexpected ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and so on, many elementary solid forms. It is matter of regret that in common language we have no easy, convenient words for many of these forms, and instead of being learnt easily and naturally in play, they are left undistinguished, and have to be studied later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. It would be quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way to distinguish cube, cylinder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate spheroid (which might ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... disbelieved the story, (which possibly may have been long known to the public,) on the ground that even George III. would not have differed so widely from princes in general as to leave a brother of his own, however unaspiring, wholly undistinguished by public honors. But having since ascertained that a naval officer, well known to my own family, and to a naval brother of my own in particular, by assistance rendered to him repeatedly when a midshipman ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of the Coronation Oath. The ablest members of Pitt's government, Grenville, Dundas, and Windham, retired with their leader. Addington, Speaker of the House of Commons, became Prime Minister, with colleagues as undistinguished as himself. It was under the government of Addington that the negotiations were begun which resulted in the signature of Preliminaries of Peace ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... then unites the traditions of two old halls, and of its own predecessor, and from all of them it derives some famous names. Hart Hall was the home of John Selden, one of the greatest of English scholars; Hertford College had an undistinguished English prime minister in Henry Pelham, and a most distinguished leader of opposition in Charles James Foxe; while Magdalen Hall was even more rich in traditions, as being the home of the translator of the Bible, William Tyndale, as the centre of Puritan ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. "Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them." The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his, and none of them knew what a fateful moment they had passed through. Ah, brethren! there are many such in our lives when we make decisions that influence our whole future, and no sign shows that the moment is any way different from millions of its undistinguished fellows. It is eminently so in regard to our relation to Jesus Christ and His Gospel. These three had been in the light; they were never so near it again. Probably they never heard the Gospel preached any more, and they went away, not knowing what they had done ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... punishment, and he did not crave to have it abated. She remarked that it must end soon. He made a dim allusion to the littleness of humanity. She laughed. "It's the language of an unfortunate lover," she said, and straightway, in some undistinguished sentence, brought the name of Countess Alessandra Ammiani tingling to his ears. She feared that she could not be of service to him there; "at least, not just yet," the lady astonished him by remarking. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doubting feelings had risen to meet him, but sank down again on finding herself undistinguished in the dusk, and unthought of. With a friendly shake of his son's hand, and an eager voice, he instantly began—"Ha! welcome back, my boy. Glad to see you. Have you heard the news? The Thrush went out of harbour this morning. Sharp is the word, you see! By G—, you ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... poetical fury; and in these peculiar moments of inspiration, his amanuensis, who was generally his daughter, was summoned by the bell to arrest the verses as they came, and to commit them to the security of writing.... Some days would elapse undistinguished by a verse, while on others he would dictate thirty or forty lines.... Labor would often be ineffectual to obtain what often would be gratuitously offered to him; and his imagination, which at one instant would refuse a flower to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Ned with a pair of as yet undistinguished officers, both of whom were to be heard of again in after time, and it did not occur to the very much elated "scout," as he now considered himself, to correct General Scott's apparent idea that Lieutenant ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon, Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the culminating peaks of a nearly limitless Oberland ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the pretexts of state, was more likely to use an advantage in which there is a certain grim humour, and to take the adversary in his own toils, than such an inexperienced politician as young Mar, or any of the undistinguished nobles who carried out that stratagem. Whether Buchanan supported his old pupil, Mar, in his attempt to seize the governorship of the castle and the King's person out of the hands of his uncle, or in what aspect he was regarded when Morton returned ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and saw an old man, a man who for him had always been old, generally harsh, often truculent, and seldom indulgent. He saw an ugly, undistinguished, and somewhat vulgar man (far less dignified, for instance, than Big James); a man who had his way by force and scarcely ever by argument; a man whose arguments for or against a given course were simply pitiable, if not despicable. He sometimes ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... man. So, too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... father, Major James Brooks, late of the 4th (King's Own) Regiment, had married twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon and evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he was wearing, so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn't notice. She didn't. She came knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a khaki suit, with low thick boots and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a world as this, where men set themselves to contract their heart, and close it to all interests but their own. It is by no means to be opposed to mercy, but always accompanies it: the distinction between them is only that the former leads our thoughts to a more promiscuous and undistinguished distribution of favours; to those who are not, as well as those who are, necessitous; whereas the object of compassion is misery. But in the comparison, and where there is not a possibility of both, ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... of gentlemen, dressed as if to attend a court, but whose garb, although rich enough to have adorned a royal drawing room, could not distinguish them in such a high scene as this. Amongst these we wandered for a few minutes, undistinguished and unregarded. I saw several young persons dressed as I was, so was under no embarrassment from the singularity of my habit, and only rejoiced, as I hung on my uncle's arm, at the magical splendour of such a scene, and at his goodness for ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... mysterious secret society, with titles and offices and ceremonies: an old alcoved arbour in the garden, with a seat running round it, and rough panelling behind, was the chapter-house of the order. There were robes and initiations and a book of proceedings. Hugh held the undistinguished office of Servitor, and his duties were mainly those of a kind of acolyte. I think he somewhat enjoyed the meetings, though the difficulty was always to discover any purpose for which the society existed. There were subscriptions and salaries; and to his ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... low chair near the fire. She was a little, insignificant woman, rather unfashionably attired, with neat grey hair and an entirely undistinguished face, but as she stood there, motionless, waiting for Magda to come up to her, she was quite unconsciously impressive—transformed by that tragic dignity with which great sorrow invests even the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something like a personal yet universal ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... the coldness of the wealthy or the titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the poet, during ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... literary men in public life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even walking ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... search of objects of more stirring interest. The ordinary traveler, who has no time to dive very deep beneath the surface of human life, is not satisfied to find things nearly as he finds them at home; streets, shops, and houses undistinguished by any peculiarity save the inconveniences and oddities of age; people every where around him who dress like all other civilized people, and possess the standard virtues and weaknesses of humanity; the proprieties ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... last larger and more populous and various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth, transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory of to-day will still perhaps ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Apostolic group at all. Nobody can tell. What does it matter? The lesson to be gathered from their presence in this group is one that most of us may very well take to heart. There is a place for commonplace, undistinguished people, whose names are not worth repeating in any record; there is a place for us one- talented folk, in Christ's Church, and we, too, have a share in the manifestation of His love. We do not need to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the franchise was the most indubitable sign of the loyalty of the town, the government ordered that the walls of the surrendered city should be razed and that the town should become a mere open village undistinguished by any civic privilege.[489] A portion of its territory was during the next year employed for the foundation of the citizen colony of Fabrateria.[490] The new settlement was the typical Roman garrison in a disaffected country. But it proved ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... dearest Sal! the flames that you impart, Like chop on gridiron, broil my tender heart! Which if thy kindly helping hand be n't nigh, Must like an up-turned chop, hiss, brown, and fry; And must at least, thou scorcher of my soul, Shrink, and become an undistinguished coal." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... extraordinary scenes of romance and chivalry in which Mary Queen of Scots moved during her captivity under Lord Scrope's care at Bolton Castle in the previous year. He had met in his travels in France one of her undistinguished adherents who had managed to get a position in the castle during ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... preferred by a friend of his father's to a vicarage worth annually sixty pounds, in the most desert parts of Lincolnshire; where, his spirit quite sunk with those reflections that solitude and disappointments bring, he married a farmer's widow, and is still alive, utterly undistinguished and forgotten; only some of the neighbours have accidentally heard, that he had been a notable ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... indiscrimination^, indistinguishability; indistinctness, indistinction^; uncertainty &c (doubt) 475; incomparability &c 464.1. V. not discriminate &c 465; overlook a distinction &c (neglect) 460, confound, confuse. Adj. indiscriminate; undistinguished^, indistinguishable, undistinguishable^; unmeasured; promiscuous, undiscriminating. Phr. valeat ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... time being. The havoc caused by pestilence at Rome was not less than that caused by the sword among the allies: the only surviving consul died, as well as other distinguished men, Marcus Valerius, Titus Verginius Rutilus, augurs: Servius Sulpicius, chief priest of the curies:[12] while among undistinguished persons the virulence of the disease spread extensively: and the senate, destitute of human aid, directed the people's attention to the gods and to vows: they were ordered to go and offer supplications with their wives and children, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... to Mary Makebelieve that marriage was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smolder ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one anxious ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... performs in the grand hymn of Nature. I shall first introduce the Song-Sparrow, (Fringilla melodia,) a little bird that is universally known and admired. The Song-Sparrow is the earliest visitant and the latest resident of the vocal tenants of the field. He is plain in his vesture, undistinguished from the female by any superiority of plumage, and comes forth in the spring and takes his departure in the autumn in the same suit of russet and gray by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... traites."[97] It is not impossible that the English writer used a shorter version which emphasized this reference to the Latin, and that his too-faithful adherence to source had confusing results. But even if such contradictions cannot be explained, in the mass of undistinguished romances there is scarcely anything to suggest that the writer is trying to give his work a factitious value by misleading references to dignified sources. His faults, as in Ywain and Gawin, where the name of Chretien is not ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... stirrups with the other hand, so as to make it catch a nail higher up. The same operation he performed on behalf of the other leg, and so on alternately. And thus he climbed, nail by nail, step by step, and stirrup by stirrup, till his starting-point was undistinguished from the golden surface, and the spire had dwindled in his embrace till he ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, 'the admired virtues' of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... manslaughter. In 1805 Martin was the acknowledged head of the American Bar, but at the same time he was undoubtedly a drunkard and a spendthrift. With an income of $10,000 a year, he was always in need. His mediocre stature, thinning locks, and undistinguished features created an impression which was confirmed by his slovenly attire and ungrammatical speech, which seemed "shackled by a preternatural secretion of saliva." Here, indeed, for ugliness and caustic tongue was "the Thersites of the law." Yet once he was roused to action, his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... thou art, with rev'rence tread These sacred mansions of the dead. Not that the monumental bust, Or sumptuous tomb, here guards the dust Of rich, or great,(let wealth, rank, birth, Sleep undistinguished in the earth.) This simple urn records a name, That shines with more exalted fame. Reader! if genius, taste refin'd, A native elegance of mind; If virtue, science, manly sense; If wit that never gave ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye |
