"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Banks, from a variety of experiments, and the experience of many years, recommends a general revival of the now almost obsolete practice of laying straw under strawberry plants, when the fruit begins to swell; by which means the roots are shaded from the sun, the waste of moisture by evaporation prevented, the leaning fruit kept from damage, by resting on the ground, particularly in wet weather, and much ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... physic," replied the spectre, "is obsolete, and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books," said this candid apparition, "appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I don't know that any new discoveries have been made ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and inconsistent hyphenation. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been fixed. Corrections [in brackets] in ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... and self-indulgent day the very word 'to fast' has become an out-of-date and an obsolete word. We never have occasion to employ that word in the living language of the present day. The men of the next generation will need to have it explained to them what the Fast-days of their fathers were: when they were instituted, how they were observed, and why they were abrogated and given ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... words was no doubt well known to the men of the later Paleolithic Age before them, but evidently the gentleman in the engraving never heard of it. If he had kept this simple little rule of social correspondence in mind he would have avoided the painful experience of hearing his obsolete emotions exposed to the eager ears of twelve perfect strangers. It is customary nowadays for unmarried elder sons of our most aristocratic families to express their appreciation of the qualities of fascinating bachelor girls over ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... of society has greatly changed since that day, and customs, which were then deemed essential, have since become obsolete. For instance, the whipping-post, the pillory, and the stocks, were prominent in the market-place and were in frequent use. There was a public whipper, who, for his repulsive services, received a salary of fifty dollars a year. Until as late as ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism. It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal—every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... allotted for the reception of those articles (short of course), which students and literary men in general, transfer to their common-place books; such as notices of scarce or curious books, biographical or historical curiosities, remarks on ancient or obsolete customs, &c. &c. &c. Literary men are constantly meeting with such in the course of their reading, and how much better would it be if, instead of transferring them to a MS. book to be seen only by themselves, or ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... was indeed their Lycurgus. If before his advent among them they had any laws, these had become obsolete, and his edicts adopted universally. Their traditions represent him as living to extreme old age, seeing his descendants of the fourth generation. These were all little suns, and constituted the nobility of their nation, which extended at one time to the country above, as far as St. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... present situation; that he had seen the tomb opened at its removal; there were still some bones remaining, but no positive vestige of the decapitation. The equestrian statue[374] of which I have made mention in the third act as before that church is not, however, of a Faliero, but of some other now obsolete warrior, although of a later date. There were two other Doges of this family prior to Marino; Ordelafo, who fell in battle at Zara, in 1117 (where his descendant afterwards conquered the Huns), and Vital Faliero, who reigned ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... told me plainly at last that she could not stand our round of services. They seem empty and obsolete to her, and she could not feign to attend them or vex us, and cause remarks by staying away, and of course she neither could nor would teach anything but secular matters. 'My coming would be nothing but pain to everybody,' ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... While in Plato there are errors of all kinds, "reaching even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares, in literal truth no reason why any of Christ's words should ever pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of human knowledge—whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or elsewhere—has had to discount which seems to him one of the strongest ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... was considered the proper thing to shut down on all lightheartedness after a death in the family, and she was adhering steadfastly to the old principles. She was yet to learn that she could not force obsolete customs upon a girl who had lived for sixteen years in the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... taught manners. The office of critic is now, in fact, virtually extinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is universal and imperative; classic appeals to the intellect, and passions not purely domestic, have grown obsolete. There are captains of the legions, but no critics. The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... duty of man, under which Art foundered and middle-class morality flourished, one grows uneasy. And if one cannot forget the stragglers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-Revolutionary people who, in the reign of Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism, blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues beneath the scandalized brows of neo-Catholic grandchildren, one becomes exceedingly sorry ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... at your attempt to deceive, but at the implication that you took him for a fool. A good tip on the stock exchange? It might go a little way, if artfully tendered. Perhaps an apt and unexpected quotation from the pages of some obsolete jurist—the intellectual method of approach; for there is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. In any case, it would be a desperate venture to override the conscience of such a man. May I never ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... was our duty regarding it? This question having come up in one of our division- room debates, Professor Hadley, presiding, gave a decision to the following effect: "On the statute books of all countries are many laws, obsolete and obsolescent; to disobey an obsolete law is frequently a necessity and never a crime. As to disobedience to an obsolescent law, the question in every man's mind must be as to the degree of its obsolescence. Laws are made obsolescent ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but "Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry Fielding's must even go to the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes "with a purpose" like Dickens—obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, if l'Art pour l'Art is all the literary law and ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... first month of the war. The houses lie in a hollow, and just beyond it the ground rises and spreads into a plateau waving with wheat and backed by wooded slopes—the ideal "battleground" of the history-books. And here a real above-ground battle of the old obsolete kind took place, and the French, driving the Germans back victoriously, fell by thousands in ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... in her father's voice of a name she hated and hoped never to hear again, a name she was trying to forget. But as she was unable to trace anything which had led to it, there remained only the conclusion that her nerves were not what they should be. The vapors having become obsolete for young ladies as an explanation for all unpleasant sensations, they were instructed to have "nerves." This was Miss Betty's first consciousness of her own, and, desiring no greater acquaintance with them, she told herself it was unwholesome to ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Craik remarks on this title: "In modern language this might well have been entitled, 'The theories of political economy proved to have no application to Ireland.'" The word "controlled" is used in the now obsolete sense ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... happening was not wholly unexpected, since, in choosing a dentist, he had let his heart, rather than his head, guide his selection, and had given the work to an old and struggling man whose methods were undoubtedly obsolete. "But ye see," he concluded, "I knew at the time that the work would far outlast the necessity for it, since I'll not be needin' anny teeth very long"—a statement the full meaning of which fortunately escaped the comprehension of his two young hearers. "But ye might say," ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Services Commission, though now too obviously obsolete to be discussed, caused both disappointment and resentment; for it showed that, in the eyes of the majority of the Commissioners, English domination in Indian administration was to be perpetual, and that thirty years hence she would ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... more likely that MR. HALLIWELL may have misunderstood Shakspeare's system, than that the latter should have used intelligible words, and precise forms of words, so at random? And, moreover, does not the critic confound two meanings of the word delightful; the one obsolete, full of delight, the other the common ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... worked out of the very soul of the preacher; and the language, clear, vigorous, and modern, clothed these thoughts in the most impressive manner. There were none of the conventionalisms of the pulpit orator, who often weakens the strongest ideas by the hackneyed or obsolete ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... and the spelling of proper names, dialect and obsolete word spellings, have been maintained as ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... bible you cannot trace the hand of diligent piety. It is shoved back into some part of the room, as a worthless thing, obsolete and superfluous. And see! it is not even kept in decent order. The dust of many day's neglect has gathered thick upon its lids. Oh, Christian parents, when you thus close up the wells of salvation by the trash of degenerate taste and vitiated morals, you are despising ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... fact this original wolfish attitude of nations is already obsolete, if it ever existed. The expansion and growth of political and moral relations is a gradual process, and the fact that for the sake of brevity and clearness we fix and describe certain arbitrary points in ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... word applies only in part to my paraphrases. Some of the Fables in this book are translations in a true sense, and keep closely to the text. From others I have erased such political, mythological and literary allusions (in which La Fontaine abounds) as are either obsolete or unintelligible ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... had long been rejected by most of his contemporaries, but he painted one of the last for a church in Recanati, in carved and gilt compartments, and he painted predellas long after they had become generally obsolete. We ask ourselves how it was that Lotto, who had so susceptible and easily swayed a nature, escaped the influence of Giorgione, the most powerful of any in the Venice of his youth—an influence which acted on Bellini in his ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... of social transition, professions, like dogs, have their day. A calling honourable in one century, becomes infamous in the next; and vocations grow obsolete, like the fashioning of our garments or figures of speech. In barbarous communities, the strong ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... take away their goods. Man did the same in days of old: he stripped and ate his fellows. We continue to rob one another, both as nations and as individuals; but we no longer eat one another: the custom has grown obsolete since we discovered an acceptable substitute in ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... an indescribably slight movement which seemed to draw the three of them into alliance together. Katharine's tone and glance made Mr. Hilbery once more feel completely at a loss, and in addition, painfully and angrily obsolete; but in spite of an awful inner hollowness he ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Spanish Colonies from the mother-country, together with subsequent political events, have wrought great changes in the governments of the South American States, as well as in the social condition of their inhabitants. One consequence of these changes has been to render obsolete some facts and observations relating to subjects, political, commercial, and statistical, interspersed through this work. However useful such matter might have been on its original publication, it is wholly irrelevant to the existing state of things, and consequently it has been ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... war, with the exception of a silicol plant at Kingsnorth, now of obsolete type, and a small electrolytic plant at Farnborough, there was no facility for the production of hydrogen in this country for ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... scripture and science, that the upward path was never intended to be easy. The scriptural passages to this effect you can find all through the gospels and epistles, and I need not quote them to you. I will, however, tell you honestly that many are of the opinion that these passages are now obsolete, being applicable only to the first centuries, or to especially critical times in the history of the church. I cannot share that view, but, lest I seem too old-fashioned, will merely quote the ringing words of our own Dr. Hitchcock, that "no man ever enters heaven save on his shield." And allow ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... other progressive nations. With a view to improving the business administration of the federal government, the President obtained from Congress a large appropriation for an economy and efficiency commission charged with the duty of inquiring into wasteful and obsolete methods and recommending improved devices and practices. The chief result of this investigation was a vigorous report in favor of a national budget system, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... bairn! a boy, or a child, I wonder?" For some hundred years, editorial ingenuity has been strained to the utmost to explain why child should be thus used in opposition to boy; and nothing would do but to surmise an obsolete custom of speech which made child signify girl. The simple explanation is, that boy is a misprint for god. For this felicitous restoration we are indebted to Mr. R.G. White, of New York, who was guided to it by the corresponding passage of the novel: "The ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... obsolete words is usually given at the bottom of the page. For explanation of the more common peculiarities of the Scottish dialect, the English reader is referred to the excellent glossary annexed to the last edition of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... the king himself procured for his old "torconnier" a young orphan in whom he took an interest. Louis XI. called Maitre Cornelius familiarly by that obsolete term, which, under the reign of Saint-Louis, meant a usurer, a collector of imposts, a man who pressed others by violent means. The epithet, "tortionnaire," which remains to this day in our legal phraseology, ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... against those evil laws to every one of the forty branches of the Society. The effort proved, however, of little avail. The laws had not been put in force for a long time, and were regarded with apathy as being obsolete, and it has needed the cruel imprisonments inflicted by Mr. Justice North on Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp, to arouse the Freethought party to a sense of their ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Tristram,"[267] or any other given "Auchinleck MS." with or without a grammar or glossary; and to most apprehensions it seems evident that none but a native can acquire a competent, far less complete, knowledge of our obsolete idioms. We may give the critic credit for his ingenuity, but no more believe him than we do Smollett's Lismahago,[268] who maintains that the purest English is spoken in Edinburgh. That Coray may err is very possible; but if he does, the fault is in the man rather than in his mother tongue, which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... chasms: the first, between individuals and the ideas which have a common name; the second, between the ideas in us and the ideas absolute. The first of these two difficulties mankind, as we may say, a little parodying the language of the Philebus, have long agreed to treat as obsolete; the second remains a difficulty for us as well as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the stumbling-block of Kant's Kritik, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation of Kant, as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that 'you cannot criticize Revelation.' 'Then ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... ceiling to floor with swing, candlestick stands, chimney pot-hook, spinning wheel, bottle of leeches, flint gun, pillow and bobbins for lace, rush-lights, leather breeches, and a host of other things now nearly obsolete. In the better class houses there was a grandfather's clock, and possibly a "windmill" clock, but in many villages if you could not fix the time by the sun "you might have to run half over the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... anathematised by three ecumenical councils. The forged Decretals gave a more positive sanction to absolutist claims; and interpolations in the Greek Fathers deceived St. Thomas Aquinas into giving his powerful authority to infallibilism. This method cannot be called obsolete, for the present Pope recently informed the faithful that 'the Hebrew patriarchs were familiar with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and found consolation in the thought of Mary in the solemn moments of their life.'[56] But ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... This clause is practically obsolete. It applies only to arrests in civil suits, which were still common in this country at the time the Constitution was adopted.[180] It does not apply to service of process in either civil[181] or criminal cases.[182] Nor does it apply to arrest in any criminal case. The phrase "treason, felony ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... lost in the desert. In the manoeuvres the troops were usually led in line, the flanks being supported by two or three companies in quarter column, and the centre having in rear a few sections of companies ready to fill gaps. Save for a little noise in passing orders, the result of a fast-becoming obsolete school of training, even captious criticism could find no actual fault with their work. Advancing across wadies and scaling knolls upon the desert, the troops were instructed to open fire with ball cartridge. The range given was 500 yards, and the ammunition used was the tip-filed Lee-Metford ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... score of years he had exceeded his due claim upon earth's good offices to man. He was a trespasser and an alien in this strange present—he with his ancient interests, fogy ways of speech and thought, obsolete images and ideals, and mind that could only regard without attempt at comprehension the little and great innovations ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... since the writings of Johnson were first published, has amply developed their intrinsic merits, and destroyed the personal and party prejudices which assail a living author: but the years have been too few to render the customs and manners alluded to so obsolete as to require much illustrative research.[a] It may be satisfactory to subjoin, that care has been exercised in every thing that we have advanced, and that when we have erred, it has been on ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... key and opened the door of the hut. On one side stood a dilapidated cook stove of an obsolete pattern, surrounded by a few kitchen utensils. In the far end were two bunks, one above the other, and on a chair beside them a pile of blankets neatly folded. In the middle of the room was a table littered ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... from that these pedants are presented by. Those were envied for raising themselves above the common sort, for despising the ordinary actions and offices of life, for having assumed a particular and inimitable way of living, and for using a certain method of high-flight and obsolete language, quite different from the ordinary way of speaking: but these are contemned as being as much below the usual form, as incapable of public employment, as leading a life and conforming themselves to the mean and vile manners ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... execution. Formerly, it was customary in courts of oyer and terminer, and of jail delivery, to authorize the execution by a precept under the hands and seals of three or more commissioners, of whom one, at least, should be of the quorum; but this custom had become obsolete at the time of this trial, and only a calendar, or abstract of the record, subscribed by the judge, was put into the hands of the sheriff for this purpose; and such is the practice in England, I ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... realize the extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred thousand ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Power is, in fact, becoming as obsolete as the Monopoly of Power enjoyed by the Roman Empire. It is a bankrupt policy which went into liquidation in 1914, and the high court of public opinion demands a reconstruction. The principle of that reconstruction ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... "impression-stone." Modern machinery has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome-Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it plays a part in this chronicle of ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... remember that you're obsolete," laughed Fairy. "The twins have attained to the dignity of boys, and aren't satisfied with the fond but sober arm of father any more. Our little twins have dates to-night, as ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... regularly reimbursed by the government for a slave legally executed, and in 1714 there was a complaint in South Carolina that the treasury had become almost exhausted by such reimbursements. In Massachusetts hanging was the worst legal penalty, but the obsolete common-law punishment was revived in 1755 to burn alive a slave-woman who had killed ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... took heart, seeing that the proceedings were clearly veiled in an obsolete and cryptic language, and it was simply matter of rite and custom to applaud at fixed intervals, so I did at Rome as the Romans did, and was laughter holding both his sides as often as I beheld the canes in ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... a decade since, is, to-day, almost obsolete. He has only produced a current record of facts, and places, at the period he wrote. This is especially the ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... map recently in use in one of the public schools of New York City was a curious example of ignorant compilation. It exhibited the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, the Bangweolo of Livingstone, and the Upper Congo of Stanley, all obsolete for practical purposes years before this map was printed. Most of our home map-makers were very slow in availing themselves of the rich materials constantly supplied for the maps by the army of explorers in Africa. But the most alert cartographers, particularly between 1880 and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... opinion of women had been formed from the commonplace jests of my companions, and from my own acquaintance with the worst part of the sex. I had never felt the passion of love, and, of course, believed it to be something that might have existed in former ages, but that it was in our days quite obsolete, at least, among the knowing part of the world. In my imagination young women were divided into two classes; those who were to be purchased, and those who were to purchase. Between these two classes, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Arthur," suggested Bok; "with your consent, I will rectify both the inaccuracy and the injustice. Write out a correct version of 'The Lost Chord'; I will give it to nearly a million readers, and so render obsolete the incorrect copies; and I shall be only too happy to pay you the first honorarium for an American publication of the song. You can add to the copy the statement that this is the first American honorarium you ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... Spain.' He was provisioning Western ports, paying their garrisons, and reckoning the cost of maintenance of captive Spaniards. He was scolding a presumptuous nephew, John Gilbert. He was upholding the ancient tenures of the Duchy of Cornwall, and resisting the exaction of obsolete licences for drying and packing fish. He was relieving miners from extortions by merchants. He was advocating an Irish policy of terrorism, in the course perhaps of a visit to Munster, as Mr. Payne Collier has inferred from the language of his letter ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... spelling or arithmetic do to the mind of a child. It was long before the new world of ideas which had been sought after with such passionate yearning was set in order and made ready for use. To us the fallacies which arise in the pre-Socratic philosophy are trivial and obsolete because we are no longer liable to fall into the errors which are expressed by them. The intellectual world has become better assured to us, and we are less likely to be imposed upon by ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... the musical oracle of the family; the father must forego his favourite old songs, written by "honest Harry Carey," (as Ritson insists on his being called); the mother is laughed to scorn if she mentions "Auld Robin Gray," "Mary's Dream," "Oh, Nanny, wilt thou gang wi' me?"—or such obsolete stuff;—and even the brothers, who might stickle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... prosaic or commonplace. He had a vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home—he thought the phrase with difficulty—and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age. ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... and the demands, of Andronicus were eluded with cold and stately indifference. The kings of France and Naples declined the dangers and glory of a crusade; the pope refused to call a new synod to determine old articles of faith; and his regard for the obsolete claims of the Latin emperor and clergy engaged him to use an offensive superscription,—"To the moderator [2] of the Greeks, and the persons who style themselves the patriarchs of the Eastern churches." For such an embassy, a time ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... literature that so much interests us and holds us, it is her religion; and it is its depth, its intensity, and the way it grows in winter. After a long and racy introduction, sometimes difficult to decipher, from its Fife idioms and obsolete spelling, she goes on thus: 'Did you get any heart to remember me and my bonds? As for me, I never found so great impediment within. Still, it is the Lord with whom we have to do, and He gives and takes, casts down and raises up, kills and makes alive as pleases His Majesty. . . . My ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... only in being derived from different languages; the one from Sclavonic, the other from the Latin, just as feminine and womanly are respectively of Latin and Saxon origin. The Saxon synonym thrall has become obsolete in our language, but some of its derivations, as thralldom, are still in use. In Greek the same idea was expressed by doulos, and in Hebrew by ebed. The one idea of servitude, or of obedience to the will of another, is accurately expressed by ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... at large. No matter how many laws they passed increasing the severity of the punishments inflicted on those who ate meat in secret, the people found means of setting them aside as fast as they were made. At times, indeed, they would become almost obsolete, but when they were on the point of being repealed, some national disaster or the preaching of some fanatic would reawaken the conscience of the nation, and people were imprisoned by the thousand for illicitly selling and buying ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... examine too minutely into the whole of this extraordinary passage of the Abbe, lest I should appear to treat it with severity; otherwise I could shew, that not a single declaration is justly founded; for instance, the reviving an obsolete act of the reign of Henry the Eighth, and fitting it to the Americans, by authority of which they were to be seized and brought from America to England, and there imprisoned and tried for any supposed offenses, was, ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... continent of Europe were now more than ever embroiled. The king of Prussia had demanded of the court of Vienna part of Silesia, by virtue of old treaties of co-fraternity, which were either obsolete or annulled; and promised to assist the queen with all his forces in case she should comply with his demand; but this being rejected with disdain, he entered Silesia at the head of an army, and prosecuted his conquests with great rapidity. In the meantime ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... obsolete, is derived through Old French from the Latin gesta, 'deeds' or 'exploits.' But as the word was particularly applied to 'exploits as narrated or recited,' there came into use a secondary meaning—that of 'a story or romantic tale in verse,' or 'a metrical chronicle.' ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... the least; but they who have once tasted the delights of a cultivated mind would not exchange them for the gifts of fortune, and to have beheld the fair face of wisdom is to be forever her votary. Words spoken for the masses grow obsolete; but what is fit to be heard by the chosen few shall be true and beautiful while such minds are found on earth. In the end, it is this little band—this intellectual aristocracy—who move and guide the world. They see what is possible, outline projects, and give impulse, while the people do the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... I may inform DR. KENNEDY, is from the obsolete French dein or dain, delicate; which probably came from the still older ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... that the Convention of Young Liberals had had a waking-up. Cargill had addressed them on what he called the true view of citizenship. He had dismissed manhood suffrage as an obsolete folly. The franchise, he maintained, should be narrowed and given only to citizens, and his definition of citizenship was military training combined with a fairly high standard of rates and taxes. I do not know how the Young Liberals received ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... out the cold—next winter. And you oughtn't to bring it out in such rainy weather." She went to the door and held it open in all finality. And Zenie, with much secret and inner scorning for a ritual so antiquated and a gift so obsolete, could do naught but depart. Miss Susie had somehow managed to keep the advantage, and the two white women watched the departing figure shuffle down the walk, out through the sagging, screaky gate. The clouds had broken in the west and a soft golden radiance suffused the row of maples that lined ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... silver; but whether such a vessel is round or square, ornamented with a wreath of acanthus or ivy, supported by tigers or by fawns, may be a trivial consideration, or even worse; for the fashion of your plate, after it has once become obsolete, may count against you for so much loss as something that will cost a good deal of money to alter. Here, then, is another contradiction to the material, and therefore another expression for the trivial: matter, as against vacancy or the privation ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... might, on a second conviction, be banished, and that if he should return from banishment, he might be transported. How often was this law put in force? Not once. Last year we repealed it: but it was already dead, or rather it was dead born. It was obsolete before Le Roi le veut had been pronounced over it. For any effect which it produced it might as well have been in the Code Napoleon as in the English Statute Book. And why did the Government, having solicited and procured so sharp and weighty a weapon, straightway hang it up to rust? Was ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by Mr. NICHOLAS TRÜBNER. I am not aware that he had any assistance in writing it. I mention this because I have never met with any person who was so equally familiar with obscure and obsolete old German facetious literature (as the text indicates), and at the same time with Americanisms. I should say that in all of the later ballads, or at least in fully one half of all in the book, the author was indebted ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... territory was probably extended to about 190 square miles. Another very early achievement of the Roman arms was preserved, although in a legendary dress, in the memory of posterity with greater vividness than those obsolete struggles: Alba, the ancient sacred metropolis of Latium, was conquered and destroyed by Roman troops. How the collision arose, and how it was decided, tradition does not tell: the battle of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... I believe, sir, the winged word in daily use to mark those of us who may still cling to the effete and obsolete belief that music remains a science, difficult of acquirement and not either a toy art, or a mere nerve titillater. We are not, sir, by any means ashamed to bear the stigma of being academic; on the contrary, we feel it a genuine compliment—gratifying because, although perhaps unintentionally it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... creditable to the courtesy of that body than to its just appreciation of the shortness of human life. There is rarely a debate of importance in the House of Lords during which some one of the Chesterton family does not contribute his morsel of pompous imbecility, or unfold his budget of obsolete and exploded prejudices, or add his mite of curious misinformation. That such painful exhibitions of callow and contracted bigotry should so frequently be made in a body claiming for itself the finest culture and the highest civilization in Christendom is certainly a most mortifying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... about her, was not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly "nice." And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the lady ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... old dealer, who was said to be a mandarin of high rank, but his exact association with the deaths first of the Chinaman Pi Lung, and second of Cohen, remained to be proved. Certain critics have declared the Metropolitan detective service to be obsolete and inefficient. Kerry, as a potential superintendent, resented these criticisms, and in his protege Durham, perceived a member of the new generation who was likely in time to produce results ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... were to be utterly unknown; the peasantry were to live rent free, under a visionary scheme of which he had all the absurd particulars; the old sporting maxim reminding farmers that landlord shooting begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st was to become obsolete by reason of a complete extinction of the species—only an odd one being occasionally dug out of the bogs along with trunks of bog-oak and skeletons of the great Irish elk; while the family pig, which, having for ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... cit., pp. 229, 230, where several laws are mentioned restricting the liberty of expressing religious opinion which are, however, obsolete, though they have ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... in the Press, on occasion of an untoward incident of recent notoriety, and has been described by some as the parent of the "grossest tyranny," ruinous to the future of any school from which the institution is inseparable. We had thought this view of the system obsolete, or correct only of schools subject to obsolete conditions. If we were mistaken, it may be worth while to record an experience which tends ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... confession obligatory. The priestly prerogative of regulating the amount of penance according to circumstances, with greater flexibility than the rigid Penitentials admitted, was first absolutely asserted by Peter of Poitiers. Then Alain de Lille threw aside the Penitentials as obsolete, and declared that the priest himself must inquire into the circumstances of each sin and weigh precisely its guilt (Lea, op. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... more than his predecessors, was a slave to etiquette. His obstinacy in subordinating the greatest interests and most urgent duties to the smallest exigencies of an obsolete ceremonial, had more than once caused serious loss to the monarchy, and had involved the realm in formidable perils. Of all these perils and losses, those to which Cloche had exposed his house by refusing to stretch a point of etiquette in favour of a fairy, without birth, yet formidable ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... the serious part. It could have far-reaching results; results whose gravity might transcend all guessing. It might be the initial step toward a return to government by force, a restoration of the irresponsible methods of obsolete times. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... edition—identified by {curly brackets}—to translate most of the French words and expressions which Cooper frequently employs, to define occasional now-obsolete English words, and to identify historical names and other references. Cooper frequently alludes, in the beginning of the work, to events and persons involved in the French Revolution of 1830, which he had witnessed ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... exists also as a fact in living consciousness. It is the function of psychology to investigate that consciousness. We must say that, accurately speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. There are philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete. These are Christian only in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the Christian consciousness. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Christian consciousness. There is the human consciousness, operating with and operated upon by ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... early settlers, added to that short sighted and now obsolete policy of Europe in the seventeenth century, which jealously sought to keep all specie within her borders, produced a general dearth of the precious metals in the currency of the New World, and all kinds of shifts ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward
... that we had seen pass away made that emotion hackneyed and wearisome; with the death of some friend and comrade as regularly an event of each day as roll call and drawing rations, the sentiment of grief had become nearly obsolete. We were not hardened; we had simply come to look upon death as commonplace and ordinary. To have had no one dead or dying around us would ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... exceptions to this rule, he considers the valves of the jugular veins as in process of becoming obsolete, and the rudimentary azygos valves as a recent development. Valves in the haemorrhoidal veins would be out of place in quadrupeds, but their absence in man is a serious defect in his organization, since the resulting ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... was from the muzzle, a process so slow that one of the favorite tactics of the time was to await the fire of the enemy and then charge quickly and bayonet him before he could reload. The old method of firing off the musket by means of slow matches kept alight during action was now obsolete; the latest device was the flintlock. But there was always a measure of doubt whether the weapon would go off. Partly on this account Benjamin Franklin, the wisest man of his time, declared for the ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... will continue for long to enjoy the situation. With no great instinct for politics, nor any marked gift of tact and discernment, unsuccessful as a rule as colonists,[17] and with no understanding of how to govern—except on the Prussian lines, which are every day becoming more obsolete and less adapted to the modern world—the role which their empire-building philosophers set out for them is one which they are eminently unfitted to fulfil. It is sad, but we cannot blame them for the defect. They blame the world in general ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... new material, especially from the unceasing spade-work always going on in every quarter of the island, makes modern books on Roman Britain tend to become obsolete, sometimes with startling rapidity. But even when not quite up to date, a well-written book is almost always very far from worthless, and much may be learnt from any in the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... entities. It may be explained in a manner consistent with the most just philosophy. He used, as every writer must do, the scientific language of his own time. I only assert that, to those who are unacquainted with ancient systems, his philosophical vocabulary is obsolete and unintelligible. ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... ardent—no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money matters, reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus—ecus of all money units in the world!—as though Louis Quatorze were still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit that in ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Schneiderinn, she-cutter, of Germany. Palsgrave likewise gives this use of the verb "to shape," expressed in French by "tailler." He says, "He is a good tayloure, and shapeth a garment as well as any man." It is singular that Nares should have overlooked this obsolete term; and Mr. Halliwell, in his useful Glossarial Collections, seems misled by some similarity of sound, having noticed, perhaps, in Palsgrave, only the second occurrence of the word as before cited, "sheres for shepsters." He gives that author as authority for the explanation "shepster, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... of Aristotle and Moses should continue to satisfy Jewish readers, when Aristotle had been dethroned from his position of dictator in European thought. But the "Guide" of Maimonides was a great achievement for its spirit more than for its contents. If it inevitably became obsolete as a system of theology, it permanently acted as an antidote to the mysticism which in the thirteenth century began to gain a hold on Judaism, and which, but for Maimonides, might have completely undermined the beliefs of ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... In the sense, now obsolete, of a person having scientific attainments. "The moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views" (Milton, referring to Galileo). Probably Giles had some knowledge of navigation. See his testimony in doc. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... wide plateau just above Government House, where the best view in the whole island was to be obtained, above which towered the old battery on Richmond Hill, armed with obsolete and worm-eaten thirty-two pounders, once deemed sufficient protection for the Carenage or harbour below, which it commanded. Fort George, another fortification equally powerless nowadays either for attack ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... computers, along with a host of other forces, such as ubiquitous computing, advances in interface design, and the on-line transition, is prompting the consumers of computation to do their own computing, and is thus rendering obsolete the traditional distinction between ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... imitations of the heads of armadillos, and other animals. Some of these had formed the feet of urns, others were rattles, containing small balls of baked clay. The old Indians used these rattles in their solemn religious dances, and the custom is probably not yet quite obsolete, for as late as 1823 Mr. W. Bullock saw, in Mexico, Indian women dancing in a masque representing the court of Montezuma, and holding rattles in their right hands, to the noise of which they accompanied their motions. Several stone axes have been found, which are called "thunderbolts" ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... the scales are convex, distant from each other, smooth at the edge, and fringed with long hairs. In G. squamifera they are convex, closely placed, scalloped at the edge, and without hairs. In G. nexa the scales are obsolete, tufts of hair representing the supposed edges. In G. depressa, n. sp., the scales are broad, less convex than in G. strigosa and G. squamifera, smooth, closely set, and fringed with short hairs. In G. Andrewsii they are small, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... quincunxes, the lichened statues of that garden; and from the roof of the house still floats, creaking in the wind, regardless of the triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of the many banners which have been thrown, mere heaps of obsolete coloured tatters, on the dust-heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the standard that was ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... documents, held them out to Lord Ruthven, and bowing with great dignity, withdrew slowly into her room, accompanied by Mary Seyton. Ruthven looked after her, and when she had disappeared, "It doesn't matter," he said; "she has signed, and although the means you employed, Lindsay, may be obsolete enough in diplomacy, it is not the less efficacious, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... became afflicted with many illusions about the possibilities of prosperity under capitalism. Now, however, American capitalism, like the world capitalist system of which it is a part, has exhausted its constructive role of building the industries. It is now obsolete and gradually sinking into decay. Industrial crises follow each other with increasing severity and the masses are becoming more and more pauperized. The growth of fascism and war is the attempt of this outworn capitalist system to keep in existence although ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... Gardiner corrects, and out of the abundance of his learning he stops a moment to show how Carlyle has misled the learned Dr. Murray in attributing to Cromwell the use of the word "communicative" in its modern meaning, when it was on the contrary employed in what is now an obsolete sense.[154] ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... joined the European Union on 1 January 2007, began the transition from Communism in 1989 with a largely obsolete industrial base and a pattern of output unsuited to the country's needs. The country emerged in 2000 from a punishing three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Domestic consumption and investment have fueled strong GDP growth in recent years, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... no gateway to it—no farther field toward which the steps may be turned. Kate was getting hold of certain significant similes. She saw that it was past the time of walls and limits. Walled cities were no longer endurable, and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete. If the departure of the "captains and the kings" was at hand, if the new forces of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... in charge of Commander Alfred F. B. Carpenter, with two ferryboats, the Daffodil and the Iris, were to escort six obsolete British cruisers filled with concrete and sand to the harbor mouths at Ostend and Zeebrugge and to sink them there in the channels. The ferryboats carried sailors and marines who were to attack and destroy the mole. It was thought that this attack would divert the attention of the defenders ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Hamil seriously; and he often attempted to appreciate it seriously, but his sense of humour was too strong. They were all good people, kindly and harmless snobs; and when he had made his adieux under the shadow of the white portico, he lingered a moment to observe the obsolete gallantry with which Mr. Classon and Colonel Vetchen ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... latter ceremony is generally regarded as a mere introduction into life. In the canton of Berne, no person can enter the most menial station as a domestic, without exhibiting his certificate of communion; and so far is this from being an obsolete law, that we have known a person incur its penalty, because he delayed for a few days the exhibition of this certificate to the police. In this canton, (and we believe in most others,) no person can be excluded from the communion, except by government; and, as a necessary ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the numerous Assyrian officers and garrisons would be seriously jeopardised, all of whom must be maintained there if the country was to be permanently retained. The inclination to meddle in the affairs of Syria always displayed by the Pharaohs, and their obsolete claims to rule the whole country as far as the Euphrates, did not allow of their autonomy being restored to them at the risk of the immediate renewal of their intrigues with Tyre or Judah, and the fomenting of serious rebellions among the vassal princes ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... good and evil is absolutely denied. The Hindoo Pantheists declare that they can not sin, because they are God, and God can not offend against himself; there is no sin—it is all maya—delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology. Evil, we are told, "is good in another way we are not skilled in."[32] So says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making; that pure malignity can exist is ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... obsolete in this country—is made on the hand. The custom is retained in Germany and among gentlemen of the most courtly ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... and another boat, both of which in their day were the pride of the Navy. The Powerful was the boat which made such a name for herself in the Boer War. Now both of these vessels are training ships and obsolete so far as ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... Principle of man speaks through immortal sense. If a material body - in other words, mortal, material sense - were permeated by Spirit, that body would 72:6 disappear to mortal sense, would be deathless. A con- dition precedent to communion with Spirit is the gain of spiritual life. Spirits obsolete ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... call you a liar," undisturbed. "You wrote it down yourself, and I simply agreed to it. A duel? Well, I shall not fight you. Dueling is obsolete, and it never demonstrated the right or wrong of a cause. Since my part in this affair is one of neutrality, and since to gain that knowledge was the object of your invitation, I will take my ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... future of cavalry is at present one of great interest among military investigators; for notwithstanding its brilliant achievements during our civil war, the fact is apparent that its sphere has been entirely changed, its old system has become obsolete, and former possibilities no longer lie within its scope. Since Waterloo there had not been, until our war commenced, any opportunity to test the action of cavalry; for its operations in the Crimea and in Italy were insignificant. The art of warfare had, meanwhile, in many respects, become ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... apples was passed round! When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were complete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in the country, known as "apple cuts," now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so many things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and more loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... me also in the dark," replied Legrand, "for a few days, during which I made diligent inquiry, in the neighborhood of Sullivan's Island, for any building, which went by the name of the 'Bishop's Hotel'—for of course I dropped the obsolete word 'hostel.' Gaining no information on the subject, I was on the point of extending my sphere of search, and proceeding in a more systematic manner, when, one morning, it entered into my head, quite suddenly, that this 'Bishop's Hostel' might have some reference to an ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... one will take the trouble to consult Perrault's Cendrillon in the original French, he or she will find that Cinderella went to the ball with her feet encased in "des pantoufles de vair." Now, vair means grey or white fur, ermine or miniver. The word is now obsolete, though it still survives in heraldry. The translator, misled by the similarity of sound between "vair" and "verre," rendered it "glass" instead of "ermine," and Cinderella's glass slippers have become a British tradition. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... from the brickfields. These brickfields have long been a thing of the past, surviving only in "Brickfield Hill," the hilly part of George Street, between the Cathedral and the Railway Station. The name, as denoting a cold wind, is now almost obsolete, and its meaning has been very curiously changed and extended to other colonies to denote a very hot wind. See below (Nos. 2 and 3), and the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... been imperfect, inasmuch as they have been so largely altered from the original text that the language in many instances has not been that of Defoe but of his revisers. The present volume has been carefully printed from the original edition, and all obsolete or little-known terms and obscure phrases are explained in brief foot-notes. The "Editing" is not a corruption or pretended improvement of Defoe's ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"— celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,—states that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII, was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... at Darminster. He is sub-editor to the Politician, the Liberal county paper. I do not suppose Aunt Lilias will let me see him, for she does not like anything that dear mother did. There is a childish obsolete tone of mind here; I suppose it is because they have never lived in London, and the children are all so young of their age, and so rude, Wilfred most especially. Even Gillian, who is sixteen, likes quite childish games, and Mysie, who is my age, is a mere child in tastes, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... manner of corruption. This arbitrary standard they were not afraid to hold out to both Houses; while an idle and inoperative Act of Parliament, estimating the dignity of the Crown at 800,000 pounds, and confining it to that sum, adds to the number of obsolete statutes which load the shelves of libraries without any sort of advantage to ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... again, but they worshipped him as the national demigod. After Sedan he was pulled down literally and metaphorically from his pedestal; and the old feelings about him which half a century ago even foreign nations seemed to share, now seem obsolete and extravagant to readers of Lanfrey and the books ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... entered into between the King and all classes of his people. Of the sixty-three articles which constitute it, the greater part, owing to the changes of time, are now obsolete; but three ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... nomenclature, new words and electrical terms being constantly employed by the various writers of that day. Among these writers was the English scientist William Watson, who was not only a most prolific writer but a tireless investigator. Many of the words coined by him are now obsolete, but one at least, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Chairman, that all these obsolete and exploded notions had their origin in very mistaken ideas of the true nature of commerce. Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others. It has not the tendency ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... magistrates, and senators, and his precarious indulgence communicated some rays of their glory to their wives and children. But in the eye of the law all Roman citizens were equal, and all subjects of the empire were citizens of Rome. That inestimable character was degraded to an obsolete and empty name. The voice of a Roman could no longer enact his laws, or create the annual ministers of his powers; his constitutional rights might have checked the arbitrary will of a master; and the bold adventurer from Germany or Arabia was admitted with ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... Mr. Tucker's book is that in which he proves "the greater permanence and steadiness of our American speech as compared with that of the mother country" by going through Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, and picking out 76 words which Halliwell regards as obsolete, but which in America are all alive and kicking. (The vulgarism is mine, not Mr. Tucker's.) Now as a matter of fact not one of these words is really obsolete in England, and most of them are in everyday use; for instance, adze, affectation, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... his grandfather on the paternal side, Samuel Verplanck, passed much of his time during our revolutionary war, in which, although he took no share in political measures, his inclinations were on the side of the mother country. This Samuel Verplanck, by a custom which seems not to have become obsolete in his time, was betrothed when but seven years old to his cousin Judith Crommelin, the daughter of a wealthy banker of the Huguenot stock in Amsterdam. When the young gentleman was of the proper age he was sent to make the tour of Europe, and bring ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant |
