"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all. In her way, she has been educated. Neefit pere is utterly illiterate and ignorant. He is an honest man, as vulgar as he can be,—or rather as unlike you and me, which is what men mean when they talk of vulgarity,—and he makes the best of breeches. Neefit mere is worse than the father,—being cross and ill-conditioned, as far as I can see. Polly is as good as gold; and if I put a house over my head with her money, of course her father and her mother ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... should not be regarded either as the origin or as a subdivision of this latter. Nor did the rustic compositions exercise any permanent influence on the pastoral drama; the most that can be said is that an occasional text shows signs of being affected by the low vulgarity of the kind. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... new to me, of course, this pageant, although it never lacked of interest. There were in the throng representatives of all America as it was then, a strange, crude blending of refinement and vulgarity, of ease and poverty, of luxury and thrift. We had there merchants from Philadelphia and New York, politicians from canny New England and not less canny Pennsylvania. At times there came from the Old World ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... She stretched slowly, lazily, her muscles one by one, and stood taller and freer for the act. The debauch of the last night, the debauches of other and worse nights, the acid-like corrosion of that vulgarity which is more subtle than sin even, all these things faded into a past that was dead and gone and buried forever. The present alone was important, and the present brought her, innocent, before an innocent nature. As she stood there dewy-eyed, wistful, glowing, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... perhaps the most interesting. At the Trafalgar Square riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck"; sees "a wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing to break over us"; and already holds that strange delusion of his that "the French are the most civilised of European peoples." He develops this on the strength of "the intelligence of their idea-moved classes" in ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... and hear what was going on there; it was revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... probable share in this regency; and by a very curious coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. The desire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral law from their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fictitious pedestals of a forensic heaven and hell, reveals incompetency of thought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is a procedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation be conceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all its parts by the immanent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... can see very well that a great deal here is revolting and oppressive and painful to your own self. For example, this fool quarrel with Boris or this flunky who beats a woman, and—, in general, the constant contemplation of every kind of filth, lust, bestiality, vulgarity, drunkenness. Well, now, since you say so—I believe that you don't give yourself up to lechery. But then, still more incomprehensible to me is your MODUS VIVENDI, to express myself in the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... made her start and listen as to something familiar. Surely she had heard that loud, uncultivated voice before, and after a moment it came to her—the tea party in the dear old garden at home when Mrs. Rossiter-Browne was the guest, and had so disgusted her with her vulgarity. And this was Mrs. Browne, who had come in state to call, and who, after declaring the weather hot enough to kill cattle, and saying that Gusty was in Saratogy, and had had twelve new dresses made to take with her, spoke next of Allen and Lord Hardy, who were in Idaho, or Omaho, or some other ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... and bluntness of her thoughts and the vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though she had been brought up ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... remained calmly amazed at the commonness of her own speech, the astonishing surface streak of unsuspected vulgarity which she was naively exhibiting ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... genius—we suppose we must say that he had genius. The best piece of painting of his hand in the room is the boy in Harlowe's picture of the "Kemble Family;" a picture of considerable artistic merit, but ruined by the coarse vulgarity of a caricature of Mrs Siddons. How unlike the Lady Macbeth! The corpulent velvet dark mass and obtruding figure is most unpleasant. It is much to be regretted Mr. Harlowe did not redesign that principal figure. There are several landscapes of Gainsborough's, and one portrait—the latter excellent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often goes along with these constitutes ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Sir David Dundas, then Solicitor-General, Lord Charles, and my father. "His," said Lord Charles, "was the finest speech, and Sir David Dundas remarked to me, as Mr. White concluded, 'Why that is old Cobbett again MINUS his vulgarity.'" He became acquainted with a good many members during his stay at the House. New members sought his advice and initiation into its ways. Some of his friends were also mine. Amongst these were Sir John Trelawney and his gifted wife. Sir John belonged to the scholarly ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... creative force in the world; it has made thousands of saints and thousands of heroes; it has revolutionized innumerable individual lives. It has changed people from selfishness to unselfishness; from cowardice to courage; from despair to hope; from vulgarity to decency; from barrenness of life to fruitfulness. When religion can change the lives of millions, when it can produce supreme creations in art, it is ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... almost invariably turns on vexing, grieving, or maltreating some victim, who is an inferior as regards wit, fortune, or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, which, emanating ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... part of the public, and then ignominious flight. He shuddered as he thought of the dull, wet days on the Atlantic and his hideous week in America. He had been in a perpetual state of protest against everything from the hotel service to what he termed the "crass vulgarity of the States." ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... may style most preposterously ugly; her figure was large and masculine; her hair red; and her face very deeply indented with the small-pox. As a man, she would have been considered the essence of vulgarity; as a woman, she was the quintessence: so much so, that she had arrived at the age of thirty-six without having, notwithstanding her property, received any attentions which could be construed into an offer. As we always seek ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... either by way of research or of publication. For example, the standard dictionaries of France, Germany and England are the work, not of academies, but of individual scholars, of Littre, Grimm and Murray. Matthew Arnold's plea for an English academy of letters to save his countrymen from the note of vulgarity and provinciality has met with no response. Academies have been supplanted, socially by the modern club, and intellectually by societies devoted to special branches of science. Those that survive from the past serve, like the Heralds' College, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... common to several other fine gentlemen who have combined letters and haut ton, of being ashamed of the literary character. The vulgarity of the court, its indifference to all that was not party writing, whether polemical or political, cast a shade over authors in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... originally intended for the virtual representatives of the people. Mr. Hunt, on the whole, bore himself well; and, by a total absence of affectation, of either tone or manner—that surest test of the gentleman, at least of Nature's forming—disappointed his audience of their ready smiles at demagogue vulgarity. But once, and that for a moment, did his self-possession seem to fail him while going through the ceremonies preceding a new member's taking his seat. After the member has signed his name and taken the oaths, he is formally introduced by the Clerk of the House to the Speaker, who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... may say without offense that in the course of time the personnel has apparently worked down to the level of vulgarity defined by the ways and means of this modern warfare; which means the level on which runs a familiar acquaintance with large and complex mechanical apparatus, railway and highway transport and power, reenforced concrete, excavations and mud, more particularly mud, concealment ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... owned that she could no more have snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface. Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended and her vulgarity began. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... by the ever repeated phenomena of the squalid street. Block after block, mile after mile, it was the same thing. No other city on the globe could present quite this combination of tawdriness, slackness, dirt, vulgarity, which was Cottage Grove Avenue. India, the Spanish-American countries, might show something fouler as far as mere filth, but nothing so incomparably mean and long. The brick blocks, of many shades of grimy red and fawn ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the character of Aeschylus) ridicules Euripides for the vulgarity of deriving pathos from the rags, etc., of his heroes, he ought not to have omitted all censure of the rags and sores of the favourite hero of Sophocles. And if the Telephus of the first is represented as a beggar, so also is the Oedipus at Coloneus of the latter. Euripides ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... combining them is beginning to be understood. When one remembers how their houses are furnished, and what their general style of living is it is astonishing to find Melbourne ladies dressing so brilliantly and yet with so little vulgarity. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... said we must do for the polish of our style. Take off; do not put on. Polish away this rudeness, that awkwardness. Correct everything self-assertive, which includes nine tenths of all vulgarity. Imitate no one's behaviour; that is to paint. Do not think about yourself; that is to varnish. Put what is wrong right, and what is in you will show itself ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... your minds," Tai-yue put in, "to initiate a poetical society, every one of us will be poets, so we should, as a first step, do away with those various appellations of cousin and uncle and aunt, and thus avoid everything that bears a semblance of vulgarity." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... exhibitions of a cattle show! Such females as we have noticed, can admire the living, moving beauty of animal life, with the natural and easy grace of purity itself, and without the slightest suspicion of a stain of vulgarity. From the bottom of our heart, we trust that a reformation is at work among our American women, in the promotion of a taste, and not only a taste, but a genuine love of things connected with country life. It was not so, with the mothers, and the wives, of the ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... reflective state Mercie Mind, the intellectual state Mode simpliste Modest people turn out the elbow Mohere Monsabre, Father Moral or affective state Mother, the voice of the Mother vowel, the Motion, distinction and vulgarity of Mouth, the no contraction of back part openings of, for various vowels a vital thermometer Movements from various centres flexor, rotary, and abductory initial forms of Mucous membrane, transmitter of sound Muscular ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... talkative person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter rather ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... shoulder in blue and red letters such a phrase as this: "Try the Jigamaree Bitters!" Very much like this is the sort of advertising I am speaking of. It is not likely that I shall be charged with squeamishness on this question. I can readily enough see the selfishness and vulgarity of this ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... DIAZ DEL CASTILLO, regidor of the loyal city of Guatemala, while composing this most true history of the conquest of Mexico, happened to see a work by Francisco Lopez de Gomara on the same subject, the elegance of which made me ashamed of the vulgarity of my own, and caused me to throw away my pen in despair. After having read it, however, I found it full of misrepresentations of the events, having exaggerated the number of natives which we killed in the different battles, in a manner so extraordinary as to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... eternal principles of taste. He was aware, on the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their own places, follow ancient rules with fastidious precision, and are easily shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they would have to call the vulgarity of visitors from town. And he, who was so cavalier with men of his own class, was sedulous to shield the more tender feelings of the peasant; he, who could be so trying in a drawing-room, was even punctilious in the cottage. It was in all respects a happy virtue. It renewed his life, during ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mucked up immediately by the trampling farm-boots of her brothers. She madly wanted her little brother of four to let her swathe him and stifle him in her love; she went to church reverently, with bowed head, and quivered in anguish from the vulgarity of the other choir-girls and from the common-sounding voice of the curate; she fought with her brothers, whom she considered brutal louts; and she held not her father in too high esteem because he did not carry any mystical ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... character about its situations, though it seems to be all head, with a minimum of apparent heart, it none the less is universal in the sense that Restoration comedy is universal. It presents a type of vulgarity, of sporting spirit, that is common in every generation, whether in the time of Congreve and Wycherley, whether in the period of Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Its wit is not dependent on local colour, though ostensibly it is written about New York. On its first presentment, it challenged good writing ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... certainly do not mean homely, which marks a wholly different quality. No writer can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alike in his choice of particulars to dwell upon, and in the terms or images in which he describes or illustrates them, but there is also no writer further removed from vulgarity. Nor do we mean that Macaulay too copiously enriches the tongue with infusion from any Doric dialect. For such raciness he had little taste. What we find in him is that quality which the French call brutal. The description, for instance, in the essay on Hallam, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... her vapid talk and faded prettiness, to be the mistress of a great literary salon. When he could prevail upon Gemma to come he always felt that the evening would be a success. Her quiet graciousness of manner set the guests at their ease, and her very presence seemed to lay the spectre of vulgarity which always, in his imagination, haunted ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... to enter a protest against the convention which forces the pipe into a position of inferiority, and exalts to a pinnacle of undeserved pre-eminence the cigar, and still more the cigarette ... why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity, of plebeianism, to inhale tobacco-smoke through the stem of a briar, and the hall-mark of good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine—a cigarette?" To these questions there can be but one answer: and the future, there can be little ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... regular subscribers, or at least, they do not depend upon subscribers for a support. They are hawked about the streets, the steamboats and taverns by boys, and are, for the most part, extravagant stories, caricature descriptions, police reports, infidel vulgarity and profanity, and, in short, of just such matter as unprincipled, selfish, and bad men know to be best fitted to pamper the appetites and passions of the populace, and so uproot and destroy all that is valuable ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs and plume whose smooth ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... a surprised and distant gaze upon him; but Baldassare was not to be discouraged. He had that tough skin of true vulgarity which is impervious to any ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the next tale are omitted by Lane (iii. 254) on "account of its vulgarity, rendered more objectionable by indecent incidents." It has been honoured with a lithographed reprint at Cairo A.H. 1278 and the Bresl. Edit. ix. 193 calls it the "Tale of Ahmad ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... be as large as life, and complete statues, it is gross vulgarity to carve a temple above them, or distribute them over sculptured rocks, or lead them up steps into pyramids: I need hardly instance Canova's works,[63] and the Dutch pulpit groups, with fishermen, boats, and nets, in the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... these unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, as with our Pundit's famous countryman Mr. Jaberjee, though they use the purest language, they can instantly express every shade of thought with grace and completeness without resorting to slang:—that ready cloak wherewith puny minds strive to cover their vulgarity ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... influence of refined, cultivated families could do more for the people at Scrub Oaks than anything else. If they did not alienate the plain people by exclusiveness and pride, they would soon tone them up and refine away uncouthness and unconscious vulgarity in manners. Let me give you a practical instance of this that occurred to-night. I asked a pretty young girl why she and the little group around her had given up the kissing games, and she replied that 'Miss Marsden had said that no lady played such games, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... whether things are vulgar or not. Cecilia says that is because they are so vulgar they don't know it. I wonder if it be. But Cecilia says—she said I was not to repeat it, though—that my Aunt Kezia and Sophy are below vulgarity. When we were dressing one morning, I asked Flora what she thought. She is as genteel in her manners as Cecilia herself, only in quite a different way. Cecilia behaves as if she wanted you to notice how genteel she is. Flora is just herself: ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... positively unbearable about him except a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed for half an inch from each corner, a finicking arthulation, and a set of horribly corrupt vowels, notably ow for o, this being his chief means of bringing Oxford refinement to bear on Hackney vulgarity. Morell, whom he has won over by a doglike devotion, looks up indulgently from The Church Reformer as he enters, and remarks) Well, Lexy! Late ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... I thought Rose the most graceful of the two in her carriage, but there could be no doubt as to Helen's being the most dignified; both girls were almost rustic in their manners, but rusticity and vulgarity are very distinct in their feelings and attributes. They could not do or say aught that was vulgar or at variance with the kindnesses of life—those tender nothings which make up so large a something ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... like an inundation, toward the deserted palace. The doors were forced open, and the interior of the palace was instantly filled with the swarming multitudes. The mob from the streets polluted the sanctuaries of royalty with every species of vulgarity and obscenity. An amazon market-woman took possession of the queen's bed, and, spreading her cherries upon it, she took her seat upon the royal couch, exclaiming, "To-day it is the nation's turn to take their ease." One ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... you will give it up at once. You will bewilder your brains till you are ready to believe anything, if only it be absurd enough. Nay, you may come to find the element of vulgarity essential to belief. I should be sorry to the heart to believe concerning a horse or dog what they tell you nowadays about Shakespeare and Burns. What have you been ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... for this temporary edifice with its complete stage apparatus. It required all the love of his friends, especially of that rarest of all friends, to dispel at times his deep anger when he was compelled to see how mediocrity, even actual vulgarity, again and again held captive the minds of his people to whom he had such high and noble things to offer. "In the end I must accept the money of the Jews in order to build a theatre for the Germans," he said, in the spring of 1873, to Liszt, when during that period of wild stock-speculations, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... was! how free from any attempt at display of style! yet equally free from any trace of vulgarity or ill-natured gossip. Mousie had added grace to the banquet with her blooming plants and dried grasses; and, although the dishes had been set on the table by my wife's and children's hands, they were daintily ornamented and inviting. All had been within ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... may grow mephitic When Papist struggles with Dissenter, Impregnating its pristine clarity, —One, by his daily fare's vulgarity, Its gust of broken meat and garlic; —One, by his soul's too-much presuming To turn the frankincense's fuming An vapors of the candle starlike Into the cloud her wings she buoys on. Each that thus ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to a certain aristocratic exclusiveness in his speech, Keith had through his association with Murray become something of a prude in this respect. He could still descend to obscenities when his "manliness" had to be proved, but vulgarity repelled ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... somehow he seemed the most human person there. No doubt he was crudely egotistical; and yet, if he was interested in himself, he was also interested in other people, while among Mrs. De Graffenried's intimates it was a sign of vulgarity ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... lowered was the hand of an artist. He might be a bad man, a very bad man—his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him that she loved him, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... social welfare of mankind. There is many a man, moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. Vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality. In these cases, as we shall see hereafter, the social sanction requires to be corrected by the moral and religious sanctions, and it is the special province of the moral and ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... been a series of desperate experiments with me. I progressed by inspiration. But these fellows—Arnold especially—discredit all such performances. And he does it with the air of an English gentleman inspecting a naked cannibal. He makes my flesh creep! He regards an inspiration as a sort of vulgarity that must be dressed and stretched before it can be used. From his point of view I infer that he considers genius as a dangerous kind of drunkenness that fascinates the world, but is really closely related to bad form in literature. On the other hand, father says that if Matthew ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pressure of that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in something bourgeois and ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... and display which are so much in accordance with his own taste, has been unable to use the same judgment as those whom he has taken as his models. Few would deny that there reigns throughout his work that quality which is best expressed by the term—barbaric magnificence. This is not vulgarity: such a term is not applicable; it is the outcome of the desire which is to be found amongst all nations who have attained a certain degree of civilization and riches to impose respect and awe by a lavish display of material wealth or by the use of gorgeous colour, which always ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... [Note 7: "Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art, in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt."—Prof. JOHN ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... forced into a more human companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to have menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow" carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he could not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the only ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... she was so wild with jealousy that I suppose vulgarity ought to be forgiven her. I hardly know myself how I managed it, but, somehow, I got the poor thing out of the room and the house and into the cool night air, and then I talked to her, and fairly made her be quiet ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... continued a quiet conversation with the Princess Wilhelmina, and appeared wholly unconscious of this rudeness and vulgarity; but her face was pallid, and her eyes filled ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... were established within the sacred enclosure. There were sold beasts for the sacrifices; there were tables for the exchange of money; at times it seemed like a bazaar. The inferior officers of the temple fulfilled their functions doubtless with the irreligious vulgarity of the sacristans of all ages. This profane and heedless air in the handling of holy things wounded the religious sentiment of Jesus, which was at times carried even to a scrupulous excess.[2] He said that they had made the house of prayer into a den of thieves. One day, it is even said, that, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... which increased rapidly with the cheapening of paper and the invention of printing. They vary greatly in content and have no common character except a certain artlessness, which is sometimes pleasing but often runs into extreme vulgarity. Special favor was enjoyed by certain collections of anecdotes, specimens of which are given in the first three numbers. The text of Nos. 1, 4, and 5 follows Braune's Neudrucke (Nos. 55-6. 34-5, 7-8); that of Nos. 2 and 3 the Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... hollow-eyed skeletons of villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of it—is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... had seen that same head lying side by side with Jack's head on the pillow at Mrs Nash's. And as I stood for a moment to look, I could almost have believed that the sleeping figure there, with all his vulgarity and dishonesty, had as good a title to call himself Jack ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... whose whole nature was so healthy. What cared I for the languid accomplishments of city belles? Here was a real woman, kind and strong, and unhurt by the world's ways. Even in the excitement of the hardest gallop I saw no trace of vulgarity, no sign of unwomanly jockeyship, only a true, unconcealed interest in her horse and his performances,—an interest worthy of her English heart. We rode home in high spirits, feeling sure that the race would be ours, even Nathan entering into the gayety of the moment, and actually ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,—whether indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... in invention, even for Haydn at his best; it is full of jollity far removed from vulgarity; the atmosphere is continuously fresh, almost fragrant, and there are endless touches of poetic seriousness. The Adagio is as profound as anything he wrote. Perhaps, on the whole—and it may be wrong to indicate a choice at all—the slow movement of the symphony in C is fullest of sustained ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... periodical literature it accepts.... Criticism in periodical journals is apt to be slightly malignant, ... and more often the result of personal sentiment than impartial literary or artistic judgment: so that I rather admired the article in question for its ignorance and vulgarity than the qualities which it exhibited in common with other criticisms to be met with in our own periodical literature, which, however unjust or partial in their censures and commendations, are decidedly inferior to Mrs. Griffith's composition ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... sound instruction of the people is an effect of the high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... and continued to be the boldest fox-hunter of the district, even to the verge of eighty. The poet's aunt spoke her native language pure and undiluted, but without the slightest tincture of that vulgarity which now seems almost unavoidable in the oral use of a dialect so long banished from courts, and which has not been avoided by any modern writer who has ventured to introduce it, with the exception of Scott, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... "Empfindsame Reise der Prinzessin Ananas nach Gros-glogau" (Riez, 1798, pp. 68, by Grfin Lichterau?) in its revolting loathesomeness and satirical meanness is an example of the vulgarity which could parade under the name. In 1801 we find "Prisen aus der hrneren Dose des gesunden Menschenverstandes," aseries of letters of advice from father to son. Aplay of Stephanie the younger, "Der Eigensinnige," produced ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Her beautiful dark hair, the mere sight of which at one time stirred me to passion, had from sitting so long with her head bent c ome loose from the comb and was untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if it had not been for her unfortunate character; ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... have deserved more consideration. But Arnold was well known in the city. He had often come to Quebec from New England to buy horses for the West Indies trade in which he was engaged. Indeed he was nothing better than a Horse Jockey, with all the swagger, vulgarity and bounce appertaining to stablemen. He had been appointed to head this expedition, chiefly because of his local knowledge of the country. He boasted that he had friends in Quebec who could help him. It was well therefore to treat him ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... to step entirely out of his own century, like my brother Ernest, for instance; but I've never heard his opinion on the subject of colour-harmonies, and I should suspect it of having been distinctly tinged with nascent symptoms of renaissance vulgarity. This is a lovely bit of Venetian, really, Berkeley. How the dickens do you manage to pick up all these pretty things, I wonder? Why can't I ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions." Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal. Now, soon, it would ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... society, and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and true gentlemanliness—based as it is on intense sensibility and sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of vulgarity, I shall have to speak ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye of authority ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... ladies of Cranford had moaned over the invasion of their territories by a man and a gentleman. Then Captain Brown had started badly, very badly, by openly referring to his poverty. If he had whispered it to an intimate friend, the doors and windows being previously closed, his vulgarity—a tremendous word in Cranford—might have been forgiven. But he had published his poverty in the public street, in a loud military voice, alleging it as a reason for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... names, odd and uncouth enough, are better imagined at least than those which Hopkins contrived for the imps which he discovered—such as Pyewacket, Peck-in-the-Crown, Sack-and-Sugar, News, Vinegar-Tom, and Grizell Greedigut, the broad vulgarity of which epithets shows what a flat imagination he brought to ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... which nature had given to his features, he was a presentable person. Flying side-whiskers made his mouth appear grotesquely wide, and the play of strong feelings had produced vicious wrinkles on his spare face. He appeared to be a man of energy, vivacity and vulgarity, reminding one of a dinner of pork and cabbage. He was soon forgotten in the excitement of a delightful day, whose glories came to a brilliant end in that banquet which introduced the nephew of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... fond of him. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman in ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... in her seat, so loud was it, so stern, so eloquent of displeasure. She herself was astonished at the white heat of anger which possessed her as she listened to Mrs Moffatt's questionings. "Picked him up," indeed! What insolence; what vulgarity! What an indignity to speak of him in such words. Her indignation seemed almost as much on Guest's account as her own. A vision of his face rose before her, she seemed to see the curl of the lip, the droop of the eyelid with which he would have ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... seldom disgusted with the coarseness, both of subject and manner, that prevailed in some of their contemporaries and immediate successors. In no branch of art is this improvement more shown than in scenes of familiar life—which meant, indeed "Low Life." Vulgarity has given place to a more "elegant familiar." This has necessarily brought into play a nicer attention to mechanical excellence, and indeed to all the minor beauties of the art. We almost fear too much has been done this way, because it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Anaxagoras, and became deeply interested in grand speculations, which gave him a haughty spirit and a lofty style of oratory far removed from vulgarity and low buffoonery, and also an imperturbable gravity of countenance and a calmness of demeanor and appearance which no incident could disturb as he was speaking, while the tone of his voice never showed that he heeded any interruption. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Dress Women's Dress The Story of Dress The Dawn of Fashion The Fashions of To-day Harmony in Dress Importance of Color The Charm of Personality Gaudiness versus Good Taste "Extravagance the Greatest Vulgarity" Inappropriateness in Clothes The Eccentric Dresser Comfort in Clothes If One is Not Average Tall and Short People The Well-Dressed Woman Not a Slave to Fashion The Well-Dressed Man The Charm of Old Age The Elderly Woman Imitation and Over-Dressing The Older ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... looks; the incomparable Stuart's beauty had been fatally marred by small-pox. Of all the fair and frail women who had held Charles in thrall there was none left to dispute the palm with the French maid-of-honour except Nell Gwynn, the Drury Lane orange-girl, whose sauciness and vulgarity gave to the jaded Sybarite a piquant relish ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... must confess. I swear it is enough at times to make you swear You would almost rather be anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... and as often as they tried they failed. "Ah, it's not like the old days!" he thought, and a mood of sadness came over him. He had begun to observe in Glory the trace of the life she had passed through—words, phrases, ideas, snatches of slang, touches of moods which had the note of a slight vulgarity. When the dog took a bone uninvited she cried: "It's a click; you've sneaked it"; when John broke down in the singing she told him to "chuck it off the chest"; and when he stopped altogether she called him glum, and said she would "do ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... lieutenant at Naples, who said "She was a very handsome, vulgar woman." All her portraits confirm what the sailor says about her beauty, and the most reliable records are confirmatory so far as his view of her vulgarity is concerned. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without a certain unconscious ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... bowing to the young member who was present, and forgetting that very useless old gentleman, her cousin, who had sat for the borough for many years. "In this country it doesn't do to go too fast," said Mr. Kennedy. "And then the mixture of vulgarity, falsehood, and pretence!" said Lady Laura, shuddering as her mind recurred to the fact that Mr. Quintus Slide had contaminated Loughton by his presence. "I am told that they hardly let him ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... imperiousness laid him open to flattery, and the necessity of playing first-fiddle betrayed him into second-rate friendships, which were thrown after the discarded hobbies—that Mr. Clinton was ill-bred, and with that vulgarity of mind which would make him rather proud than ashamed of getting the best of a bargain with his friend—these things were not the less ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... long after this loathsome convulsion! While tears lie and cheat by aping heavenly feelings, laughter is awkwardly trying to let the craziness of evil demons skulk behind it, hides itself from vulgarity for the sake of being seen, feigns terrour when our unsubdued struggling feelings are detected, and saunters about in the midst of whatever is disgusting and impure, perpetually clapperclawing with some outcast among the rabble ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... island to such luxury as this. It took but the first glance to perceive that this young captain had not been limited in resources in the furnishing of his ship. Within the small compass of a stateroom he had compressed comfort and luxury. Yet there was no ostentation or vulgarity displayed. The owner had been guided by the one desire for decent ease and a certain regard for the eye. The left side of the room was occupied by the two bunks made up with the immaculate neatness characterizing ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at present, and Catherine's clever ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... that she would have to meet people who were not of her class and who would shock her by their vulgarity. But his situation demanded that he should not disdain anybody. At all events, he counted on her tact ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... even to a man of ordinary appearance and breeding, he did the same in his reply; and when I touched my hat to a liveried coachman or waiting man, his hat was immediately under his arm. So much may be done, and such advantages gained, by simply avoiding coarseness and vulgarity, and being well bred and agreeable. Nor can the case be otherwise. For the foundation of good breeding is good nature and good sense—two of the most useful and indispensable attributes of a well-constituted ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... said before, astonishing. She was of a just and proper height. Her complexion was extremely fair, but not pale, blooming, but not ruddy. Her countenance was serious without being severe, mild and pleasant without levity or vulgarity. Her eyes were sparkling, but without indication of pride or conceit. Her whole figure was so finely proportioned that amongst other women she appeared with superior dignity, yet free from the least degree of formality or affectation. In walking or ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger |
