"Conventionally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... living en garcon in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way. But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally "innocent" is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... get cold," he had no thought of other than a kindly and respectful regard for their welfare, and was glad to modify his form of address on being told that it was not what could be described as conventionally military. When one of our sentinels, who had with much labor learned the manual of arms, saluted with great pride as I passed, and added, with a friendly nod, "Good-evening, Colonel," this variation in the accepted formula on such occasions was meant, and was accepted, as ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by intemperance. The conventional type is so easy—so accepted—so popular; it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table all through the dreadful hours—I write the word down conventionally, and yet it is not the right word at all, because I have merely been stunned and numbed. I simply could not suffer any more. I smiled to myself, as the man in the story, who was broken on the wheel, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... becomes more developed. It is an indisputable truth that the influence of myth on thought and fancy, a survival from prehistoric ages, still prevails among the common people both in town and country, among those who are uncultivated, and even in the higher classes conventionally ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... and pattern-colouring of their perineal bands, dancing aprons and ribbons. As regards the latter, the designs are of a very simple nature, never apparently representing anything either realistically or conventionally, and being confined to geometric designs of straight lines and bands, rectangular and zig-zag patterns with coloured triangles within the zig-zag patterns, and spots. The patterns of the perineal bands and ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... income, Scott now meditated a literary life. A hundred years ago such a life was impossible without independent means, if a man would mingle in society and live conventionally, and what was called respectably. Even Burns had to accept a public office, although it was a humble one, and far from lucrative; but it gave him what poetry could not,—his daily bread. Hogg, peasant-poet of the Ettrick forest, was supported in all his earlier years ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a kind of mute despair. He was a very average young American, very conventionally in love, and the trifling remnant of self-assertiveness which had triumphed over the crescent humility natural to his condition inevitably evaporated into thin air at the approach of Mrs. Rathbawne; and always, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... society. Its inhabitants, by nature acquisitive and cautious, economical, tenacious, had learnt to worship the word "smart." The result was a kind of heavy froth, an air of thoroughly domestic vice. In addition to the conventionally fast, Shelton had met there one or two ladies, who, having been divorced, or having yet to be, still maintained their position in "society." Divorced ladies who did not so maintain their place were never to be found, for the Casserols had a great respect ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the first person whom they saw at Willow Lawn. Two letters had passed, both so conventionally civil, that her state of mind could not be gathered from them, but her first tones proved that coherence was more than ever wanting, and no one attempted to understand anything she said, while she enfolded Sophy in an agitated embrace, and marshalled them to the drawing-room, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... even in France under the Code Napoleon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is, conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the home,—the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,—this state of things is held to ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt was anything but conventionally proper. He was not. He only yearned to be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... were masters certainly of what we call "the ideal" in art. Yet for Raphael, so loyal hitherto to the traditions of Umbrian art, to its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing still somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural matter—for Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, Urbino, to sharp-witted, practical, masterful Florence was in immediate effect a transition from reverie to [50] realities—to a world of facts. Those masters of the ideal were for him, in the first instance, masters ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... life—think that he would be let to do so? Alone in a forest, very far back, they might, at this point, have flown at each other's throat. But they had felled many forests since the day when just that was possible.... The thing conventionally in order for such a moment as the present was to act as though that annihilation which each wished upon the other had been achieved. All that they had shared since the day when first they met, boys on a heath in Scotland, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... an end sometime to be reached by mankind and the individual and by means of a moral order of the world; and the third is the acknowledgment of the full worth of personality. Evil—to which of course no objective valid moral law, but only one conventionally established, stands opposed—is to ethical naturalism nothing but the action of an instinct which in this given case is not beneficial to man in his struggle for existence; the category of good and evil is entirely replaced by the category ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... murmured conventionally, as Steele dropped slightly back among the others who had by this time drawn near. "To arrive at such an ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... verandas and its overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... constitutional weakness. Capable, cultivated, companionable, affectionate, she was a determined looker at the bright side of things, and hence better skilled, perhaps, to shut her eyes to troubles or differences among those she loved than understandingly to compose or heal them. Conventionally minded one might have thought her, but for the surprising readiness with which in later life she adapted herself to conditions of life and travel the most unconventional possible. The son and only child of these two, Robert Louis (baptized Robert Lewis Balfour[3]), was born on November 13, 1850, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her, and would pour itself out in words to him, but that his tone, his manner, his look keep it back absolutely, as a firm hand holds down the rising cork upon the exuberant wine. And now, at this sentence of his, her words fail her. They are strangers practically, that is conventionally—quite strangers, she remembers confusedly—but for this secret bond of passion, knit up between them, which both can feel but ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... wandering from his not very pressing occupation to the other side of the shop, where stood, behind the opposing counter, a young woman, in attendance upon the wants of a well-dressed youth in front of it, who had just made choice of a pair of driving-gloves. His air and carriage were conventionally those of a gentleman—a gentleman, however, more than ordinarily desirous of pleasing a young woman behind a counter. She answered him with politeness, and even friendliness, nor seemed aware of anything unusual in ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... her brother's marriage wholly and consistently. In her eyes, he had committed an unpardonable sin in allying himself with Diane Wielitzska. It was his duty to have married a woman of the type conventionally termed "good," whose blood—and religious outlook—were alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect, she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... unfortunate wretch will revive, even temporarily, then?" commented the lady, conventionally compassionate, playing with her ringed fingers, turning her diamond solitaire in various directions to catch the firelight. "How unlucky he should have strayed upon our grounds! Was he on ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... people, and don't be sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... with delight in these tales, reading beneath the terse lines of Haney's slang something epic, detecting a perfect willingness to take any chance. The fact that his bravery led to nothing conventionally noble or moral did not detract from the inherent interest of the tale; on the contrary, the young fellow, being of unusual imaginative reach and freedom, took pleasure in the thought that a man would risk his life again and again merely for the excitement of it. Occasionally ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... snow. In like manner Giotto, Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if, with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the relative ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... were covered with book-shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were packed to overflowing with books in most unusual and bizarre bindings. A red carpet was on the floor and a red-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling, which was conventionally white-washed. Although there was no fireplace, the room was immoderately hot, and heavy with the perfume of roses. On three little tables were great bowls filled with roses, and there were other bowls ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... of this kind, however, was so obviously introduced on the spur of the moment, so refreshingly spontaneous and so ludicrously apropos, that it was always cheered to the very echo, or, to put the fact not conventionally but literally, was received with peals of laughter. Thus it was in one instance, as we very well remember, in regard to Mr. Justice Stareleigh—upon every occasion that we saw him, one of the Reader's most whimsical ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... the Eagle, God of the Upper regions, and his younger brothers of the other regions (K'iae[']-k'iae-li we-ma-we) are represented on Plate VIII. They are characterized merely by rude bird forms, with wings either naturally or very conventionally carved (Figs. 3 and 6). Further details are rarely attempted, from the fact that all the other principal prey animals are quadrupeds, and the simple suggestion of the bird form is sufficient to identify the eagle among any ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... of the invitations sent them and rudely refused such as were received. Since he had returned to find her at Stornham, he had insisted that no invitations should be declined, and had escorted his wife and herself wherever they went. What could have been conventionally more proper—what more improper than that he should have persistently have remained at home? And yet there came a time when, as they three drove together at night in the closed carriage, Betty was conscious that, as he sat opposite to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my mind lately—but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... from mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... better illustration than the state of what we conventionally know as Christendom. Christendom as we see it is a purely Caucasian phase of man's struggle upward, with Caucasian merits and Caucasian defects. Nowhere is its defectiveness more visible than in what ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... reason of the nobility and elevation of the thought. She was full of prejudices, but she was always prejudiced against her own interest. There was nothing she set more value on than regularity of conduct, precisely because her own conduct was conventionally irregular.[411] She was very religious, because religion rigidly condemned her mode of life. In conversation she frowned on pleasantries which would have seemed quite innocent to other women, because she feared that her circumstances might encourage ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... voice awoke the recruity from his reverie—a voice of authority which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster's stores to get his conventional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M. Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but of the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... that she would often look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... a system-man. When he travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. It was built for dividends, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... a word are shown in {braces}. Other italics are shown conventionally with lines. Superscripts are ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... point proportional to the intensity of the field, and the curves that are traced show their direction. To finish the definition of the field, it remains to determine the direction of these lines of force. Such direction is, by definition, and conventionally, that in which the north pole of a small magnetic needle, free to move in the field, would travel. It results from this definition that the lines of force issue from the north pole of a magnet and re-enter the south ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... man he was, thought what a dainty little lady she would make if he had the making of her, and at once began talking as he never would have talked had she been what is conventionally called a lady—with a familiarity, namely, to which their old acquaintance gave him no right, and which showed him not his sister's keeper. She, poor child, was pleased with his presumption, taking it for a sign that he regarded her as a lady; and from that moment her head at least was full of ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... him; and it is round his head that success sheds its halo. The American Government is described truly as a Government composed of three members, of three powers distinct from one another. The English Government is likewise so described, not truly, but conventionally. For in the English Government there has gradually formed itself a fourth power, entering into and sharing the vitality of each of the other three, and charged with the business of holding them ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... took her offered hand and said "How do you do," in his turn, and merely to repeat the ordinary words seemed magically to restore the situation to the normal. Indeed, he was so much relieved, and it was so natural to be shaking hands, to be conventionally greeting, that he forgot he had only a towel on and his professional manner came back to him. He forgot what he was looking like, but he did not forget that this was Lady Caroline Dester, the lady he had come all the way to Italy to see, and he did not forget that it ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, with a printed certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the nationality ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... law into his own hands, and chooses to stand against what is conventionally deemed fitting:—against the world, as we say, is open to these moods of degrading humility. Robert waited for the sound of the bells with the emotions of a common culprit. Could he have been driven to the church ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... concentrates itself on demonstrations and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible and continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with economic treatises entitled "What is Property? Theft!" and with histories of "The ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... again, though lingeringly. It could be only a cupboard, or a particularly secure wine cellar, perhaps, behind this dwarfish door, yet had I discovered it in a house not English, but of a country less conventionally civilised than our own, I should have told myself that I had chanced upon ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... us. Even at times when our whole personality ought to vibrate, finding itself at the cross-roads, it fails to rise to the occasion. But, says Bergson, "it is at the great and solemn crises, decisive of our reputation with others, and yet more with ourselves, that we choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible reason, is the more striking the deeper our Freedom goes." [Footnote: Time and Free Will, p. 170 (Fr. p. 130).] At such times the self feels itself free and says so, for it feels itself to be creative. "All determinism ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... minutes to thank him again, graciously, conventionally; nor did she mention the present by name, because it was a good-naturedly accepted neighborhood fact that Miss Gregget listened. Then she told him the Colonel had been there, that Miss Liz had been there, that Nancy had been there; that ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... time she was already wondering what she should do about it that night—take it with her or leave it alone? Dared she wear it on her finger under her glove? Clara might notice the unfamiliar form of the jewel through the thin kid. Harry's warning had been phrased conventionally enough, but the hints his words conveyed had expanded in her mind—fear not only of Clara's laughter, that such a jewel had come from a junk shop, but of her wonder, her questions, her ability of getting out the story ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... whether he was going in the right direction, noting, meanwhile, her general appearance so far as to infer that she was a farmer's daughter; or, rather, as he thought with a half smile, what a farmer's daughter is conventionally supposed to be like. Thick leather shoes, a plainly made gown of some light grey stuff, and short enough for country walking; a large brown straw hat, with neither flower nor feather to adorn it; and ungloved hands, in the one swinging by her side a strap buckled ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of the rose-tree hang on one side a violet, and on the other a pansy, each worked in the same way as the rose, and edged with fine gold thread. The back is divided into four panels, containing respectively a cornflower, a pomegranate, a fruit, perhaps meant for an apple, and a honeysuckle, all conventionally treated and very delicately worked. The edge is bound all round with a strong braid, and there is one tie of broad, cherry-silk ribbon. With this book is its canvas bag, embroidered in silver ground with coloured-silk flowers and tassels of silver, the general design and workmanship of which ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... grotesque strangeness he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden. The art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and not the art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this people conventionally signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an attitude which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or niggling labour. Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard to say; they ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... petulant self-assertion, but by quietly considering the why and wherefore of the whole thing. In doing so we can fortify ourselves with another maxim, that "Principle is not limited by Precedent." When we spread the wings of thought and speculate as to future possibilities, our conventionally-minded friends may say we are talking bosh; but if you ask them why they say so, they can only reply that the past experience of the whole human race is against you. They do not speak like this in the matter of flying-machines or carriages ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... woman grown, but the child lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Above all she was natural—that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... smartened up for the occasion. He was plain of feature, but wore a pleasant, honest look, and his demeanour to the girl showed not only good breeding but unmistakable interest of the warmest kind. His age might perhaps be thirty; he was dressed well, and in all respects conventionally. ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... but in a humble way. He must have life eternal, as well as matter eternal; and the life and the matter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul to one another. Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who repeat phrases conventionally, but as people who would have their words taken according to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he will feel that the main difference between him and many of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereas both he and they use the same language, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises. Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling. People with completely theatrified imaginations ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... hasn't had a bite to eat since yesterday," she exclaimed practically, while preparing to divest herself of her pack. "Everybody get busy here and we'll get him some lunch. Shane, you and Kayak see what you can spare in the way of clothes, and in the meantime, Mr. Harlan—" her conventionally polite tone as she turned to that young man caused Boreland and Kayak Bill to exchange an amused wink—"you may take this blanket that Jean has wrapped about her violin, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... she left me to my own taste. I was pleased with an outline of yellow upon a background of dark blue, or a combination of red and myrtle-green. There was another of red with a bluish-gray that was more conventionally used. When I became a little familiar with designing and the various pleasing combinations of color, a harder lesson was given me. It was the sewing on, instead of beads, some tinted porcupine quills, moistened and flattened between the nails of the thumb and forefinger. My ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... Fatigue, conventionally recognized, is something acute and urgent. As such it means a violent draining of the endocrine wells. But there is also a chronic fatigue, which has been dignified with the name of Fatigue Disease. Bernard Shaw once asked for someone to tell him the name of the germ ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of his last illness, and in my sympathising with her upon his loss. It was, in fact, far more a visit of condolence than of congratulation upon her future prospects of happiness. As to the latter, I found it difficult to be quite truthful and yet conventionally ecstatic. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... to be a perfect ogre. In this variation it was always the Prince Charming, that looms large in every young girl's dreams, who finally, after a brief period of unhappiness, came to the rescue and everything ended happily if somewhat conventionally. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... till March 24. On the morning of that day, the newspapers published his second letter, copies of which had been received by the ten chief politicians of the United States—ten leading men in the political world who were conventionally known as "statesmen." The letter, with the same superscription as ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... have retired more conventionally. He might have had a dismal explanatory interview with Joanna, and ordered a fly to convey himself and his luggage to the Railway Station the next morning. Perhaps if Joanna had found him in the November Sunday afternoon garden this might have occurred. But Joanna ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... showing them the sights of the capital, having them to dine with him, and taking them in the evening to some theatre. We have already seen that his most intimate friends were Poles, and this was so in the aristocratic as well as in the conventionally less-elevated circles. However pleasant his relations with the Rothschilds may have been—indeed, Franchomme told me that his friend loved the house of Rothschild and that this house loved him, and that more ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and perfectly calculated mechanism; hated its utilitarian stability; hated its conventions, its greed, its blind cruelty, its huge hypocrisy, the foulness of its want and the insolence of its wealth. Morally, it was monstrous; conventionally, it was brutal. Depths of degradation unfathomable it had shown him, but no ideals equal to the ideals of his youth. It was all one great wolfish struggle;—and that so much real goodness as he had found in it could exist, seemed to him scarcely less than miraculous. ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... announced it, and the three passed directly into the next room, furnished so conventionally there was absolutely nothing upon which to let the eyes rest in surprise, or pleasure. But it was painfully neat and regular, and both aunt and nephew were secretly satisfied that it must impress even this young heiress as a perfectly ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... in the arts people became more sophisticated. The puppets were left to children and to the simplest rural population, not because the mores improved, but because people were treated to more elaborate entertainments and the puppets became trivial. Punch is now a blackguard and criminal, who is conventionally tolerated on account of his antiquity. He is not in modern mores and is almost unknown in the United States. He is generally popular in southern Europe. To the Sicilians "a puppet play is a book, a picture, a poem, and a theater all in one. It teaches and amuses at the same time."[2084] Then ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... but with an eagerness of greeting merged a little in the sweet predominance of wonder as well as in the habit, at such moments most perceptible, of the languid lily-bend. Nothing in general could have been less conventionally poor than the kind of reception given in Mrs. Brookenham's drawing-room to the particular element—the element of physical splendour void of those disparities that make the question of others tiresome—comprised ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... patriotism, civil obedience. They have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have arraigned theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower than they have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly and conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this saturnalia ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage? I was too bewildered—too conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach—to speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again that first broke the ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... letter; and as he read the tappa mallets at work in the Fijian houses hard by seemed to thump in unison with the dull beats of his heart as he stared at the correctly-worded and conventionally-expressed lines that mocked at his fond imaginings of but a ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... than it is commonly made in modern times; and at the back of the stage is a wall architecturally adorned to represent a house or "palace" front, and containing one central and two side doors, which served for separate purposes conventionally understood. Over the stage is a roof, which slopes backward to join the wall. The entrances to the ordinary tiers of seats are from openings reached by stairs from the outside arcade surrounding the building; those ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the others we were still merrier, for the spectacular contingent plumed themselves like peacocks on their fearsomeness, and guyed us conventionally garbed fellows unmercifully. ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... that the state of affairs between them, while conventionally correct, was thoroughly unnatural and full of peril. Alice, a very good girl, obedient and tractable, was in danger of becoming a recalcitrant and sour old maid. Will, a healthy and normal young man, with no bad habits, was in danger ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... who posed in Richmond for a passed mistress of flirting. She had, unless rumor was badly at fault, jilted an appalling list of the striplings who believed that beard-growing and love-making were conventionally contemporaneous events. But they had "mooned" about her and made themselves absurd in vain, while this unconscious Adonis calmly walked, talked, and acted as if she could know nothing else than love him, and one day she started in delicious misery to find that she ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... mantel-shelf for roasting. The plain kitchen table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, with a candle on it in a tin sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, is uncushioned and unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seat conventionally moulded to the sitter's curves, it is comparatively a chair of state. The room has three doors, one on the same side as the fireplace, near the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the opposite end of the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... compromised, and confess their emotions without being ashamed. We are a particularly shy and reserved people, and set about nothing so awkwardly as the simple art of getting really acquainted with each other. We meet over and over again in what is conventionally called "easy society," with the tacit understanding to go so far and no farther; to be as polite as we ought to be, and as intellectual as we can; but mutually and honourably to forbear lifting those veils which each spreads over his inner sentiments ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,—I don't know at what remote period,—when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... under the circumstances, have, been a merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing alley, the interpreter made himself still more our ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... almost as soon as anxiety gave place, the impulse to utterance began again to urge him. What this impulse is, who can define, or who can trace its origin? The result of it in Walter's case was ordered words, or, conventionally, poetry. Seldom is such a result of any value, but the process is for the man invaluable: it remained to be seen whether in Walter it was for ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... trustworthy wife. He ought to be very happy. He had never known such perfect health before; he had lost his reckless habits; his handsome, nervous face had grown more placid and contented; his long curls had been conventionally clipped; he had gained flesh unmistakably, and the lower buttons of the slim waistcoat he had worn to church that memorable Sunday were too tight for comfort or looks. HE WAS happy; yet as he glanced over the material spring landscape, full of practical health, blossom, and promise of fruition, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... text, words and phrases supplied by the translator (Riley only) were printed in italics. In this e-text they are shown in {braces}. Italics in the notes and commentary are shown conventionally with ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... natural tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of individual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has been regarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that century, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born classicists. There are ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... in her peasant sketches was naturally over-estimated by those who, never having studied the class, could not conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor. The very just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure artist in Le Chateau des Desertes, might seem over-flattered to such as imagine that all opera-singers must be persons of riotous living. The types she prefers to present, if exceptional, are not impossible ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... he, the smile of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For myself——" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally, flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but in some way her sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have done anything to ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... to maintain our individuality. We must not be a mere copy of everybody else. We must put into our words the cordiality we put into our daily demeanor. If we greeted friend or stranger carelessly, conventionally, we should soon be regarded as persons of no force or distinction. So of our speech and our writing. Nothing, to be sure, is more difficult than to give them freshness without robbing them of naturalness and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and a great artist, a guinea pig and half a god. The essential thing about Carrie Meeber is that she remains innocent in the midst of her contaminations, that the virgin lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art of fiction as it is conventionally practised and understood. It is not explanation, labelling, assurance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper criticism, it does not "satisfy." But the great artist is never one who satisfies in that feeble sense; ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... contemporary Assyrian art, which delights in [203] this sort of conventional spacing out of its various subjects, and especially with some extant metal chargers of Assyrian work, which, like some of the earliest Greek vases with their painted plants and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate in their ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... there is some difficulty in choosing among alternative meanings of this contention. In the first place, it should be observed that the author of Waverley is not a mere name, like Scott. Scott is merely a noise or shape conventionally used to designate a certain person; it gives us no information about that person, and has nothing that can be called meaning as opposed to denotation. (I neglect the fact, considered above, that even proper names, as a rule, really stand for descriptions.) But the author ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... whether she were "at home" was conventionally put, for it seemed practically certain that she must be in the hotel. Where could she, who had no other friends than they, and no chaperon, go at night? It was with blank surprise, therefore, that he and Stephen heard the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... intensely interested in the latter's career. It seemed to him that Cowperwood was probably destined to become a significant figure. Raw, glittering force, however, compounded of the cruel Machiavellianism of nature, if it be but Machiavellian, seems to exercise a profound attraction for the conventionally rooted. Your cautious citizen of average means, looking out through the eye of his dull world of seeming fact, is often the first to forgive or condone the grim butcheries of theory by which the strong rise. Haguenin, observing Cowperwood, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... had come down from Brineweald Park to "The Fastness," as was his wont after breakfast, he had scarcely felt a fibre of pity or remorse stir in his body while Mrs. Delarayne had described Cleopatra's second fainting fit to him. He had expressed his sympathy formally, conventionally, like one who had but a few moments to spare for such considerations, and even before Mrs. Delarayne had completed her narrative, had allowed his eyes to wander eagerly all over the garden for a ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because he projected marriage with Nona, he had that very morning rejected settling down. He was not to marry her; therefore, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... subordinate to the symphony, but is even trifling in length as compared with it, and very inferior in style. While in Mendelssohn's work the symphony is subordinated to the choral part, and serves only as an introduction to it, they are yet conventionally connected; but in Beethoven's work the chorus was the product of necessity, as the idea could not have been developed without it. The instruments had gone as far as possible; ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... native earth, and we would hardly venture to predict the future of our sonneteer; but the fact remains that now three hundred years after his time, his lifelong devotion to the prototype of Idea constitutes, as he conventionally asserted it would, his most valid claim to interest, and that the sonnets where this love has found most potent expression mount the nearest to the true ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... realism—anything resembling the exaggerated horrors of such efforts of 1830 itself as Janin's own Ane Mort and part of Borel's Champavert. In her splendour as in her misery, in her frivolity as in her devotion and self-sacrifice, repulsive as this contrast may conventionally be, Marguerite is never impossible or unnatural. Her chief companion of her own sex, Prudence Duvernoy, though, as might be expected, a good deal of a proxenete, and by no means disinterested in other ways, is also very well drawn, and assists ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and mechanically closed the door behind him. She noticed the action, but did not move. He passed round the table, behind Aunt Judy's chair, and they shook hands conventionally. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... extremely unsatisfactory to find pretentious writers of the present day glossing over essential facts or not taking the trouble to get them. A "popular writer," who has pretended to deal with the origin of one of the great present fortunes, the Astor fortune, and has given facts, although conventionally interpreted, as to one or two of Astor's land transactions,[49] passes over with a sentence the fundamental facts as to Astor's shipping activities, and entirely ignores the peculiar special privileges, worth millions of dollars, that Astor, ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... not convincing; the phrase did not sound natural on his lips. It was not thus that she had hoped to hear him speak. Whilst he expressed himself thus conventionally he did not love her as she desired ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... short syllable have almost equal weight in this prosody, for the musical tone can be prolonged or shortened upon either. So now the cantilena, rather than the metron, rules the flow of verse; but, at the same time, antique forms are still conventionally used, though violated in the using. In other words, the modern metres of the modern European races—the Italian Hendecasyllable, the French Alexandrine, the English Iambic and Trochaic rhythms—have been indicated; and a moment has been prepared ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... that they know not, the more learned that he never did. But should I ask with what letters the name "Aeneas" is written, every one who has learnt this will answer me aright, as to the signs which men have conventionally settled. If, again, I should ask which might be forgotten with least detriment to the concerns of life, reading and writing or these poetic fictions? who does not foresee what all must answer who have not wholly ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... tenderness; Delafield pressed her hand, and his deep, kind eyes gave her a lingering look, of which, however, she was quite unconscious; Meredith renewed his half-irritable, half-affectionate counsels of rest and recreation; Mrs. Montresor was conventionally effusive; Montresor alone bade the mistress of the house a somewhat cold and perfunctory farewell. Even Sir Wilfrid was a little touched, he knew not why; he vowed to himself that his report to Lady Henry on the morrow should contain no food for ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and descent of the lower order of property becomes generally recognised, and by a gradual course of innovation the plasticity of the less dignified class of valuable objects is communicated to the classes which stand conventionally higher. The history of Roman Property Law is the history of the assimilation of Res Mancipi to Res Nec Mancipi. The history of Property on the European Continent is the history of the subversion of the feudalised law ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... see I'd done them a service. You know, Terebyeva (who is in the community now) was blamed because when she left her family and... devoted... herself, she wrote to her father and mother that she wouldn't go on living conventionally and was entering on a free marriage and it was said that that was too harsh, that she might have spared them and have written more kindly. I think that's all nonsense and there's no need of softness; on the contrary, what's wanted is protest. Varents had been married seven ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... have been erected earlier than other portions. Of this porch two pillars are supported by life-sized figures, one bearded, one beardless, both dressed in the girdled smock of the early Middle Ages. The enormous weight of the porch is resting, not conventionally (as in the antique caryatid) on the head, but on the spine; and the head is protruded forwards in a fearful effort to save itself, the face most frightfully convulsed: another moment and the spine must be broken and the head droop freely down. Before the portals, but not supporting anything, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... with a single before the word; large drop capitals are shown with two . Mid-word italics, representing expanded contractions, are shown in {braces}. Elsewhere, boldface and italics are shown conventionally. Superscripts are shown with ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... devotion to some great principle or regenerating idea,—the thoughtful reader will question the instruction. The adjectives "extreme" and "fanatical" have, during the last twenty years, been applied to most valuable men of various parties and beliefs; they have been so applied by masses of conventionally respectable and not insincere citizens. But that the persons thus stigmatized have, on the whole, advanced the interests of civilization, freedom, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... did," she replied. "I'll admit that it was better than an ordinary sermon, because the subject was more personal. But don't you think we admitted the sufficing reason at the start, and isn't it natural that a girl who has been conventionally brought up is pretty well satisfied in her own mind of the moral status? Of course," she added, with a toss of her pretty head, "I am not asking you or anybody else to kiss me. I am merely curious to know if this ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... they are investigating what had happened, advantage will be taken of the opportunity to tell new readers something of the former books in this series, so they may feel better acquainted with the two young men who are to pose as "heroes," as it is conventionally termed, though, in truth, Joe and Blake would ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... that time a suspicion has now become practically a certainty. Spectrum-analysis yields results wholly irreconcilable with the assumption that the conventionally-named simple substances are really simple. Each yields a spectrum having lines varying in number from two to eighty or more, every one of which implies the intercepting of ethereal undulations of a certain order by something oscillating in unison or in harmony with them. Were iron ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... nine-lâkh necklace, is a favourite incident in Indian folk-tales. Nau-lakkhâ means worth nine lâkhs, or nine hundred thousand rupees. Frequently magic powers are ascribed to this necklace, but the term nau-lakkhâ has come also to be often used conventionally for 'very valuable,' and so is applied to gardens, palaces, etc. Probably all rich Rajas have a hankering to really possess such a necklace, and the last Mahârâjâ of Patiâlâ, about fifteen years ago, bought a real one of huge diamonds, including the Sansy, for Rupees 900,000. It is on show always ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... settling differences which otherwise would never end. For, as Grotius says, time has no power to produce effects; all things happen in time, but nothing is done by time. Prescription, or the right of acquisition through the lapse of time, is, therefore, a fiction of the law, conventionally adopted. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... with a scarlet string about a long, slim neck, and a cap of sheer cambric with a knot of black ribbons. Her eyes were widely opened and dark, her nose short, and her mouth full and petulant. She, too, was conventionally adequate; but her insincerity was clearer than her husband's, it was pronounced quickly, in an impertinent and musical voice, without the slightest pretence of the injection of any interest. Howat Penny felt, in a manner which he was unable to place, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... his palette is his own. He is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes, a very intense one. He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic. He detests design, prearranged composition. His studio is an open field, light the chief actor of his palette. He is never conventionally decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative. He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any ugliness. Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous as Correggio. He does not seek for the correspondences of light with ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Australasian Critic once rightly observed, respecting a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers, stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences are weatherboard homesteads with ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... conventionally: "You are very kind, Dr. Marmion, and I am much obliged." Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement at her own paraphrase of her father's speech, and she added: "Mrs. Callendar and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very important in having ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... freedom of speech, in his directness. His manner touched a spark somewhere in her, she felt strangely elated, exhilarated. When she reflected that this was only their second meeting and that she had not been conventionally introduced to him, she was amazed. Had a stranger of her set talked to her so familiarly she would have resented it. Out here it seemed to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... interest superior to that of State B in the financial soundness and stability of insurance companies doing business in State B,—which is obviously more the language of arbitration than of adjudication, as conventionally regarded. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... is always really both—and he has almost convinced us. The expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. The "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. Every line of his poetry is ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... something at once fascinating and repellent in this talk. She was attracted by Mrs. Frostwinch. The perfect breeding, the grace, the polish of the woman, won upon her strongly, while yet the subtile air of taking life conventionally, of lacking vital earnestness, was utterly at variance with the sculptor's temperament and methods of thought. She no sooner recognized this feeling than she rebuked herself for shallowness and a want of charity, ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... in the middle phase of the strike, some half dozen of the law-makers of a sovereign state, top-hatted and conventionally garbed in black, accustomed to authority, to conferring favours instead of requesting them, climbing the steep stairs and pausing on the threshold of that hall, fingering their watch chains, awaiting recognition by the representatives of the new and bewildering force that had arisen in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... turned to the left, he would have come presently to a public beach and would have had his swim conventionally and in due time. But some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander westward along the edge of the cliffs—always on his left hand, space and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by cactus plants in urns, and behind these ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to the world not only to show themselves to the best ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... presently, still in the cathedral, all very polite and conventionally interested in each other's affairs. Pilar ingenuously hoped that we might meet again in Madrid. The Duke said he hoped so too, but did not know, as they were motoring, and stopped each day where fancy prompted. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... this gesture by Strabo." Mr. Washington Matthews informs me that, with the Dakota Indians of North America, contempt is shown not only by movements of the face, such as those above described, but "conventionally, by the hand being closed and held near the breast, then, as the forearm is suddenly extended, the hand is opened and the fingers separated from each other. If the person at whose expense the sign ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... the diversity of opinion on this point shows the difficulty the mind finds in departing from the truths of phenomena to the uncertainties of hypothesis; but if hypothesis be justifiable, which it is only on the ground of absolute necessity to link together, and render conventionally intelligible, certain undoubted, undeniable facts, which have been associated together under the terms electricity, magnetism, &c.—how difficult and dangerous it must be when the facts which it seeks to associate are denied by the mass of thinking men, when they are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Sheriff is still a highly honourable one, nor are the duties light or unimportant which devolve upon these functionaries. The honour, moreover, is as costly as it is onerous; not only do the sheriffs receive no salary, but they are conventionally expected to disburse several thousand pounds in charities and hospitality. The inspection of the city gaols occupies no small portion of their time, nor do they enjoy much intermission from the incessant demands for eleemosynary aid. That an office ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... the great masters of the Flemish school, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavor to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain poetical meaning—in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... within words are shown in braces {}; other italics are shown conventionally with lines. Boldface type is shown by marks. Individual bold or CAPITALIZED words within an italicized phrase should be read as non-italic, though the extra lines have been ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Baronage; and they, led by Stephen Langton, the archbishop who had been thrust on the unwilling king by the Pope, united together and forced from him his assent to Magna Charta, the great, thoroughly well-considered deed, which is conventionally called the foundation of English Liberty, but which can only claim to be so on the ground that it was the confirmation and seal of the complete feudal system in England, and put the relations between the vassals, the great feudatories, and the king on a stable ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris |
