"Phlegmatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Japanese face is exceedingly expressive. When a native of the Island Empire smiles or scowls, exhibits surprise or fear, he apparently does these things with his whole soul. Such facial plasticity provides far more effective concealment of real emotions than the phlegmatic indifference of the Briton, who, in the words of Emerson, requires "pitchforks or the cry of 'fire!'" to ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... apparent, that she had about exhausted the patience of all the kith and kin on whom she had the remotest claim. Her presence was all the more unwelcome by reason of the faculty for irritating the men of the various households which she invaded. Even the most phlegmatic or the best-natured lost their self-control, and as their wives declared, "felt like flying all to pieces" at her incessant rocking, gossiping, questioning, and, what was worse still, lecturing. Not the least endurable thing about Mrs. Mumpson was her peculiar phase ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... the most ardent and the coolest man alive. When his emotions slumbered he appeared almost phlegmatic; when they were moved he was no less than passionate. And now, without having quite intended an early marriage, he put the question plainly. It came with all the ardour which was the accumulation of long years ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... born on Mafeking night. Just ninety-nine years before this Goodwood meeting, when Napoleon and the veterans of the Imperial Guard were knocking at the gates of Brussels, a famous ball was given. Goodwood of the year nineteen-fourteen, mutatis mutandis, did but repeat that scene, the same phlegmatic enjoyment of the festival, the same light-heartedness and sure confidence under the great shadow, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... with the white visible, I have often observed both in the timid and phlegmatic, and in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... fancying herself really an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... this better, for their quarter is a penal colony. Sleepy-eyed, phlegmatic Martians, self-condemned for minute violations of their incredible and complex mores—without guards save themselves—will return to the subterranean cities, complex philosophies, and cool, ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy
... filatela. Philatelist filatelisto. Philately filatelo. Philologist filologiisto. Philology filologio. Philosopher filozofo. Philosophise filozofii. Philosophy filozofio. Phlegm flegmo, muko. Phlegmatic flegma. Phoenix fenikso. Phonetic fonetika. Phonograph fonografo. Phosphorus fosforo. Photograph fotografajxo. Photographer fotografisto. Photography fotografarto. Phrase frazero. Phraseology frazeologio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... of a little man with the phlegmatic Dutch face. He read the letter stolidly and began to ask questions as to the disposition of our squad. I lied generously, magnificently, my face every whit as wooden as his; and while I was still at it the door behind me opened ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the sofa, "we must talk. I have come, of course you know, to talk about this miserable affair." She put her hand on Karen's; but already something in the girl's demeanour renewed her first displeasure. She looked heavy, she looked phlegmatic; there was no response, no softness ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of displeasure had come over the King's countenance, when Wilton expressed a doubt as to answering the question at all; but whether it was from his natural command over his features, the coldness of a phlegmatic constitution, or that he really was not seriously angry, the cloud upon his brow was certainly not a hundredth part so heavy as it would probably have been with any other sovereign in Europe. He contented ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Isa Heine at the time of which I am writing. We English, in our passion for daily excitement, might call her phlegmatic, but we should call her so unjustly. Life to her was a serious matter, of which the daily duties and daily wants were sufficient to occupy her thoughts. She was her mother's companion, the instructress of both her brother and her sister, and the charm of her father's vacant hours. With such calls ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... songs, and songs of faith. Lady Dorinda, having shut her curtain for the night, declined to take any part in this household festivity, though she contributed some unheard sighs and groans of annoyance during its progress. A phlegmatic woman, fond of her ease, could hardly keep her tranquillity, besieged by cannon in the daytime, and by chattering and laughter, the cracking of nuts and the thump of ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... deep lower jaw, strong legs and neck, semi-hanging ears, truncated tail, and frequent presence of a fifth toe, distinguish the noble Mastiff. They are silent, phlegmatic dogs, conscious of their own strength, seem to consider themselves more as companions than servants, are resolute, and face danger with the utmost self-possession. A cold region, such as the highest ranges of Central ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... teacher. When they cannot reach the teacher they will transfer the feeling to one another. Where this is allowed to pervade the atmosphere of a girls' school, those who escape floods of tears or other acute hysterical symptoms are the dull, phlegmatic temperaments. ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... columns a large knotted rope, one end of which trailed on the flight of steps below. This being done, he began to look on tranquilly, whistling from time to time when a blackbird flitted past. Suddenly, at the moment when the superintendent's assistants were preparing to execute Charmolue's phlegmatic order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his feet, his knees and his hands; then he was seen to glide down the facade, as a drop of rain slips down a window-pane, rush to the two executioners with the swiftness of a cat which ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Moses is notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are both specific ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The phlegmatic German smiled, and in a guttural voice announced that his terms were three dollars a day, including rooms and meals, which, when all the circumstances are considered, was not extravagant. The party carried their luggage to their rooms, where they prepared themselves for the meal, which ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... niin sallittu" ("It is so ordained") is a sort of motto amongst this Northern people. Whether it is that they are phlegmatic, wanting in energy, fatalists, or what, one cannot say, but certain it is that they sit down and accept the inevitable as calmly as the Mohammedan does when he remarks: "It is ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the usually phlegmatic burgher. "We must hasten home. Farewell, Monsieur de Rose. Your news indeed is bad—your ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... dungeon to the chateau, was allowed to wander about the park on his parole, and to receive visits from his friends. One of the most impulsive of these friends was Jean Jacques. Their first meeting after Diderot's imprisonment has been, described by Rousseau himself, in terms at which the phlegmatic will smile—not wisely, for the manner of expressing emotion, like all else, is relative. "After three or four centuries of impatience, I flew into the arms of my friend. O indescribable moment! He, was not alone; D'Alembert and the treasurer ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... threaten to do so, but, amidst her virginal calmness, there was so much contempt for everything foreign to her love, that her father felt her to be capable of acting with the greatest folly in all ingenuousness. Only indifference was manifested by the Prince's wife, a phlegmatic and still beautiful Englishwoman, who considered that she had done quite enough for the household by bringing her husband a dowry of five millions, and bearing him five children. The Prince, anxious and weak despite his violence, in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... are very definite creatures, all of us, with clearly apportioned tastes and energies, preferences and dislikes. The only puzzling thing is that we do not all of us seem to have the bodies which suit us here on earth: fiery spirits should have large phlegmatic bodies, and they too often have weak and inadequate bodies. Beautiful spirits cannot always make their bodies beautiful, and evil people have often very lovely shapes and faces. I confess I find ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... science, in his 'Nova Atlantis,' predicted as the end of human misery has now been actually acquired. We are prevented from enjoying the fruits of this acquisition, from making full use of the discoveries and inventions of the great intellects of our race, by nothing but the phlegmatic faculty of persistence in old habits which still keeps laws and institutions in force when the conditions that gave rise to them have ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the control of Lord Dorchester at Quebec; but his relations with Dorchester were somewhat strained, and he succeeded in making himself virtually independent in his western jurisdiction. Though he seemed phlegmatic, he possessed a vigorous and enterprising disposition, and he planned great things for Upper Canada. He explored the country in search of the best site for a capital; and it is interesting to know that he had such faith in the future of Upper Canada that he actually contemplated placing the capital ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... men with the greatest store of nervous energy came best through this expedition. Having more imagination, they have a worse time than their more phlegmatic companions; but they get things done. And when the worst came to the worst, their strength of mind triumphed over their weakness of body. If you want a good polar traveller get a man without too much muscle, with good physical tone, and let his mind be on wires—of ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... detailed examination than we can bestow upon them. The great body of these people live apart from the other races of their countrymen, in small villages, full of ignorance, suspicion, and bigotry, and displaying an apparent phlegm, from which it would seem impossible to arouse them. This phlegmatic temperament lessens the credit of the men with the females, who uniformly prefer the European, or the still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... Individuals who are phlegmatic, matter-of-fact, and not very intense in their feelings might be inclined to ridicule this anxiety and suffering on the part of the parents, for so slight a cause; they would fail to understand it. But any mother with children of her ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... literature, possessed a knowledge of our modern poetry as intimate as my own, and a love of it equally great. This feeling brought us together and made us two—the nervous olive-skinned Hispano-American of the tropics and the phlegmatic blue-eyed Saxon of the cold north—one in spirit and more than brothers. Many were the daylight hours we spent together and "tired the sun with talking"; many, past counting, the precious evenings in that restful house of ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... under the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... psychologists and philosophers have been too broad and too classical to be of practical value. Sanguine and choleric temperament, the bilious, the nervous and the phlegmatic, the quick and the slow, all these are broad divisions, and no man really exemplifies them. What I propose to do is less ambitious, but perhaps more practical. I shall take a few of the qualities with which the previous pages have concerned ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... I should not have lived with you. I thought she had let you come here alone through phlegmatic British coldness. If she lost you, it was her affair. This is different. You have ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... nomenclatures do not add much to our knowledge. You know what to expect—if the comparison will be pardoned —of a horse with certain points; but you wouldn't dare go on a journey with a man merely upon the strength of knowing that his temperament was the proper mixture of the sanguine and the phlegmatic. Science is not able to teach us concerning men as it teaches us of horses, though I am very far from saying that there are not traits of nobleness and of meanness that run through families and can be calculated to appear in individuals with absolute certainty; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... virtues which we should naturally expect from the same sanguine disposition. He shewed us that grey hairs could add nothing but hypocrisy to him; for he avowed public prostitution, laughed at all honour, public spirit, and patriotism; and gave convincing proofs that the most phlegmatic old miser upon earth could not be sooner tempted with gold to perpetrate the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the disabling regime that now governs, an epoch, which would witness the shaking off, by the heavy, phlegmatic red man of the present, of his dull lethargy, with the casting behind him of former inaction and unproductiveness; and his being moved to assert a healthy, genuine, wholesome activity, to be directed to lofty or soulful purpose, or expressed in high and honourable ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Phlegmatic rather than emotional, and wholly secretive, he had accustomed himself to regard romantic ideality, and susceptibility to sentimentality as a species of intellectual anaemia; holding himself always thoroughly in hand, when subjected to the softening influences that now and then invaded professional ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... quiet and tame. The Belgians had lost their original antipathy to Bonaparte, without having yet had time to acquire any warmth of interest for the Bourbons. Natively phlegmatic, they demand great causes or strong incitement to rouse them from that sort of passiveness that is the offspring of philosophy and timidity- philosophy, that teaches them to prize 'the blessings of safety ; and timidity, that points ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... render them subject to painful disorders in the eyes: they are also afflicted with many diseases, which tend to render them short lived. They are a quiet, orderly, and good-humoured people; but of a cold, phlegmatic, and indolent disposition. They never wash themselves with water, but lick their hands, and then rub their faces with them; in the same manner as a cat washes herself with her paws. In most of their habits they are ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... perceive, that, like most other reports, they were to be traced principally to the imagination and fears of the people. He ascertained, however, enough from Bartley Sullivan to justify a belief that there was something certainly uncommon about the woman; and being of a cold, phlegmatic disposition, with some humor, he desired them to go home, if they were wise—he shook his head mysteriously as he spoke—"and do the woman no injury, if they didn't wish—" and with this abrupt hint he sent ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... unconcerned, calm, dispassionate, negligent, stolid, uninterested, careless, frigid, phlegmatic, stony, unmindful, cold, heedless, purposeless, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... in music, that it is suited to please all the varieties of the human mind. The illiterate and the learned, the thoughtless and the giddy, the phlegmatic and the sanguine, all confess themselves to be its votaries. It is a source of the purest mental enjoyment, and may be obtained by all. It is suited to all classes, and never ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... of slide-down-hill aspect, and that we were likely to make a night of it. My acquaintance with Dirck, and indeed my connection with the old race, had not left me ignorant of a certain peculiarity in the Dutch character. Sober, sedate, nay phlegmatic as they usually appeared to be, their roystering was on a pretty high key, when it once fairly commenced. We thought one lad of the old race, down in Westchester, fully a match for two of the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... flavors,—flavors many and subtile, imitating often in their delicacy those subtile blendings which Nature produces in high-flavored fruits. The recipes of our cookery-books are most of them of English origin, coming down from the times of our phlegmatic ancestors, when the solid, burly, beefy growth of the foggy island required the heat of fiery condiments, and could digest heavy sweets. Witness the national recipe for plum-pudding, which may be rendered: Take a pound of every indigestible substance ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... thing, it would be like to be purified and sanctified rather than polluted by the divinity." As an additional argument against the cause being divine, he adduces the fact that this disease is hereditary, like other diseases, and that it attacks persons of a peculiar temperament, namely, the phlegmatic, but not the bilious; and "yet if it were really more divine than the others," he justly adds, "it ought to befall ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... perfectly cool. The Englishman was phlegmatic. Slush hesitated sometimes, but, to the surprise of the boys, seemed rather collected. Bloodgood was hot ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... the accuracy of my recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common—he didn't remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either way made no difference)—had happened to a Mrs. What's-her-name, as once lodged there—but he didn't call it to mind, particular. Nettled by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened, and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, HAD I? Ah! And did I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the difference (I thought, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... resting her head on a cushion of cedar twigs that gave out a pleasant fragrance. Pani sat quietly on the other side. There was no light but the blaze. Neither was the Indian woman used to the small industries some of the French took up when they had passed girlhood. In a slow, phlegmatic fashion she used to go over her past life, raising up from their graves, as it were, Madame de Longueil, Madame Bellestre, and then Monsieur, though he never came from the shadowy grave, but a garden that bore strange fruit, and where ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... had stooped down and kissed his wife, as he had also done before during the recital of the story. It was done in a way that was so real and genuine that it completely broke them down. They declared that morning that they would not quickly judge anyone again. They had thought him phlegmatic and unlovable, and now here had come out from the heart of this Indian, of such a rugged exterior, a story and an exhibition of love and devotion more genuine and beautiful than any that had ever been revealed to them in song ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... to try his hand at him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his finger into the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... passion of the Southern races and the self-poise, serenity, and sturdiness of Northern nations. Pat is there, with a gleam of humor in his eye ... Topsy, all smiles and teeth ... Abraham, trading tops with little Isaac, next in line ... Hans and Gretchen, phlegmatic and dependable ... Francois, never still for an instant ... Christina, rosy, calm, and conscientious, and Duncan, canny and prudent as any ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at him, his inscrutable eyes betraying no surprise. "What are they?" he asked, his tone almost phlegmatic. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Brereton had to go through the story. But his new listener did not receive it in the calm and phlegmatic fashion in which it had been received by the practised ear of the man of law. Bent was at first utterly incredulous; then indignant: he interrupted; he asked questions which he evidently believed to be difficult to answer; ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... in the boathouse. I knew that something must have happened or been discovered to disperse that truculent party of sportsmen so soon and on such good terms with themselves. They had not got us; they might have got something better worth having; and your phlegmatic attitude suggested what. As luck would have it, the cases that I personally had collared were the empty ones; the two prizes had fallen to you. Well, to allay my horrid suspicion, I went and had ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Herr Count," responded the colonel. "I have had the peculiar misfortune which sometimes overtakes a married man; my wife deceived me, and ran away with her lover, whom I do not even know. As mine is not one of those phlegmatic natures which can meekly tolerate such an indignity, I am searching for the fugitives—for what purpose I fancy you can guess. For four years my quest has been fruitless; I have been unable to find a trace of the guilty ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... qualities that compose what we commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a bad one. There are some men formed with feelings so blunt, with tempers so cold and phlegmatic, that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives. Upon such persons the most striking objects make but a faint and obscure impression. There are others so continually in the agitation of gross and merely sensual pleasures, or so occupied in the low drudgery of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pupils, whether for the inculcation of the love of study or for the correction of faults. The earnest and passionate nature was treated in the same way as the cold and phlegmatic; the boy of genius or talent, as the dullard; the one who loved, as he who disliked, or had a tendency to dislike, study; the weakly, as the strong. They were all driven together like a flock of sheep, with scarcely any regard to individual capabilities, bent of genius, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... great lady of her, and had married her without consulting her wishes. Prince Charles-Louis-Frederic was then twenty years of age, and though exceedingly good, brave, and generous, and possessing many admirable traits, was heavy and phlegmatic, ever maintaining an icy gravity, and entirely destitute of the qualities which would attract a young princess accustomed to the brilliant elegance of the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Church of the principle and laws of ascetic self-renunciation, which, though they had run to great extremes in the Nitrian desert and in the valley of the Nile, assumed noble form when the idea took possession of the more phlegmatic temperament and practical energies of the West. Without discussing the vexed question of the authorship of the 'Life of S. Anthony,' which is referred by many traditional testimonies to Athanasius, we think it obvious, from the 'Confessions' of Augustine, that the religious ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely opened a book. He was sent out with the First Division and carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through almost four years of fighting from ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... am not," replied De Launay, rising from his chair and beginning to pace the room—"But I do not profess to have your phlegmatic disposition. I feel what I thought you would feel also,—that the King is exposing himself to unnecessary danger. And I know what you do not yet know, but what this letter will no doubt inform you,"—and he drew an envelope bearing the Royal seal from his pocket ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as well as to body. It is not merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red Indian with the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with the passionate Italian. True, you say, but what about the influence of their various climates, or again of their different ideals of behaviour? Quite so. It is immensely difficult to separate the effects of the various factors. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... generals, Chancellor Bismarck read aloud the Proclamation of the Empire, and the new German emperor gave thanks to God. It was a fitting sequence to the greatest military success since Napoleon crushed the German armies at Jena and Austerlitz. The tables at last were turned, and the heavy, phlegmatic, intelligent Teutons triumphed over the warlike and passionate Celts. So much for the genius of the greatest general and the greatest diplomatist that Europe ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... he said to his more phlegmatic friend, "than that sergeant, should he get here before we leave. ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... subsistence on the precarious chances of the chase. He is consequently nomadic in his habits, and barbarous withal. His whole life is spent in the bare process of procuring a living. He consumes a large amount of oleaginous food, and breathes a damp heavy atmosphere, and is, consequently, of a dull phlegmatic temperament. Notwithstanding his uncertain supplies of food, he is recklessly improvident, and indifferent to all the lessons of experience. Intellectual pursuits are all precluded. There is no motive, no opportunity, and indeed no disposition for mental culture. But in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his second of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... time I met her, was a buxom, phlegmatic spinster of sixty, equipped with an experience so tragic and unusual that though her tongue ran on for decades its output would still be of imperishable interest ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... The operator—a phlegmatic sort—gave me directions to the M&R, and off I went, still trying to figure out how to sail along as gracefully ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake
... the train, upon its arrival at Philadelphia, there was an aspect of absolute exhaustion, varied in its expression according to the individual. Phlegmatic men lay upon their backs, across the seats, with their legs dangling in the aisles. One might send them spinning round or toss their feet out of the passage, and their worn faces showed no more ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk, or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as he did with two minutes of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... atmosphere of the northern States produces a restlessness which must either expend itself in bodily or mental exertion or force of expression; from this probably arise the frequent use of superlatives, and the exaggeration of language, which the more phlegmatic English attribute ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... speaks. In this respect, his reputation is like that of all other heroes of romantic history. It is a people's history, written in their hearts, rather than in their books; which their books could not write—which would lose all its golden glow, if subjected to the cold details of the phlegmatic chronicles. The tradition, however swelling, still testifies to that large merit which must have been its basis, by reason of which the name of the hero was selected from all others for such peculiar honors; and though these ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... the copulative, is of considerable importance."—Blair's Rhet., p. 113. "Cicero, for instance, speaking of the cases where killing another is lawful in self defence, uses the following words."—Ib., p. 156. "But there is no nation, hardly any person so phlegmatic, as not to accompany their words with some actions and gesticulations, on all occasions, when they are much in earnest."—Ib., p. 335. "William's is said to be governed by coat, because it follows William's"—Smith's New Gram., p. 12. "There are many occasions in life, in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... exemplifies its own theory, that 'Paris is France,' by shewing how all its important railways spring from the metropolis in six directions. Belgium exhibits its compact net-work of railways, by which nearly all its principal towns are accommodated. The phlegmatic Dutchman has as yet placed the locomotive only in that portion of Holland which lies between the Rhine and the Zuiderzee. Rhineland, from Bale to Wiesbaden, is under railway dominion. North Germany, within a circle of which Magdeburg may be taken as a centre, is railed pretty thickly; and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... earth, the fall upon the moon, or stagnation upon the neutral line! And here a fourth hypothesis, full of all the terrors of the infinite, cropped up inopportunely. To face it without flinching took a resolute savant like Barbicane, a phlegmatic being like Nicholl, or an ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... are such a phlegmatic man, when I said that,' answered Schreiermeyer with the frankness of a conjurer who admits that ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... others. There are greater and less degrees of intensity in the change. The degree of intensity, or depth of experience, may depend on several things. It may depend, to, a certain extent, on the temperament of the individual. One person is of a phlegmatic temperament; his mind is sluggish; his feelings are not deep; he rarely becomes excited. Of a cool, calculating disposition, he does everything deliberately and cautiously. He feels the ground before him ere he takes a step. ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... in his most phlegmatic tones. "Aye, just so! And where d'ye intend to cut in, now, like? Is it a sort of Gordian knot affair that you're thinking of? Going to solve this ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... found himself in an argument with Lord Glerey, a phlegmatic Englishman, whose marital misfortunes had made both London and ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... his normal mood, and Eric walked into the lounge with his teeth set and the muscles of his cheeks hard. The burgeoning happiness of Agnes was harder to bear than ever, but he achieved a tolerable effect as the undemonstrative, phlegmatic Englishman and mingled suitable congratulations with ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world, except for those phlegmatic natures, who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... a great singer unquestionably," responded her more phlegmatic friend, "but the registers of her voice are not so ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... am a sinner," exclaimed Asa, usually one of the most phlegmatic of the youths, "the girl is blown ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that, desperate as your case seems to be, I participate in your sanguine hopes? I do not deem them entirely romantic, but share in that which the phlegmatic would call the frenzy of your mind; and half-persuade myself that you will ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... visiting the City from the Civil Lines it is well to follow the road, which passing the Kudsia Gardens leads straight to the Kashmir Gate, one of two places in India (the Lucknow Residency is the other) which must stir with grateful pride the heart of the most phlegmatic of Englishmen. The road from the Gate to the Fort and the Jama Masjid is rich in memories of the Mutiny. It has on its left S. James' Church, with memorial tablets within and outside the shot-riddled globe which once surmounted its dome. Further on are the obelisk to the telegraph officers ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... head, the fluttering or chafing of her brown fingers, and not unfrequently by an impatient stamp, or other movement of her foot that exposed fairy toe and instep. Contemplation of the one rested and refreshed the observer; of the other, amused and excited him. Mr. Dorrance's phlegmatic nature found supreme content in dwelling upon the incarnation of patrician tranquillity at his right hand, and he regarded the actions of his frisky would-be tormentor very much as a placid, well-gorged salmon would survey, from his bed of ease upon the bottom of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of the two, was a very tall, stout, squarely built young man, with a broad, good-humored face, fair skin, blue eyes and light hair. In temperament he was rather phlegmatic, quiet and lazy. In character he was honest, prudent and good-tempered. In circumstances he was a safe banker, with a notable wife and two healthy children. The one thing that was able to excite his quiet nerves was the chase, of which he was as fond as he could possibly be of any amusement. The ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after, another, a little before the fire; the old women, and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call the old women too, remarked, especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over, that those two comets passed directly ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in Chapelizod that Sturk was poking after Lord Castlemallard's agency that Nutter felt the scene going on before his eyes between him and Dangerfield like a public affront. His ire was that of a phlegmatic man, dangerous when stirred, and there was no mistaking, in his rigid, swarthy countenance, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Root. D.—These roots are considered rather as articles of food than of medicine: they are supposed to afford little or no nourishment, and when eaten liberally they produce flatulencies, occasion thirst, headachs, and turbulent dreams: in cold phlegmatic habits, where viscid mucus abounds, they doubtless have their use; as by their stimulating quality they tend to excite appetite, attenuate thick juices, and promote their expulsion: by some they are strongly recommended in suppressions of urine and in dropsies. The chief medicinal ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... Prefaced by a phlegmatic hem; sad, very sad, truly! cried Mowbray; who sat himself down on one side of the bed, as I sat on the other: his eyes half closed, and his lips pouting out to his turned-up nose, his chin curdled [to use one of thy descriptions]; leaving one at ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... softened, almost to a gentle whisper. 'Ah, Lilama, once, only once, you shall, of your own free will, clasp those arms around me—if not in love, then in terror. A moment more, and over this abyss together we shall go!' With terror in his eyes, Pym glanced at Peters; and even the phlegmatic Peters was startled. 'Yes, for one moment in each other's arms; and then for me, the everlasting darkness of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... phlegmatic brain of her people, was stupefied for a little time, then, recovering some vivacity, she inquired hesitatingly as though she was never at her ease with ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... drop these serious comments, and return to the more humorous side of our theory—the plumpness of the prince, overlooked as a mere accident, by critics and actors. It is a physiological propriety that he should be of a phlegmatic temperament—a temperament often united to an acute intellect, but also, to a sluggish and heavy person. A weak, wavering inactivity, fickleness of purpose, a keen sensibility, or sensitiveness, are also noticeable; while the subtlety of his theories is sharply ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... great deal for the carrier (whose name was Mr. Barkis) to say—he being, as I observed in a former chapter, of a phlegmatic temperament, and not at all conversational—I offered him a cake as a mark of attention, which he ate at one gulp, exactly like an elephant, and which made no more impression on his big face than it would ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... and ineffective manner. Sir Donald Currie had introduced a deputation to Lord Derby, Colonial Minister in the Gladstone Cabinet, which warned him seriously as to German aims on the coast of Damaraland; in reply to which that phlegmatic Minister stated that Germany was not a colonising Power, and that the annexation of those districts would be resented by Great Britain as an "unfriendly act[439]." In November 1883 the German ambassador inquired whether British protection ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... depends not only upon one's capacity to perform, but upon the character of the performance. The spirit must be willing to perform. The overeater is heavy, phlegmatic, indifferent, lacking in energy, tact and initiative. She is constantly subjecting her system to needless overwork; she is depressed, nervous, imaginative and she is not ambitious. She is a victim of self-poisoning, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... the horrors that had befallen an English scouting party which had fallen into the hands of a band of Indians and Frenchmen, and hideously tortured. He wrote stern protests to Duchambon, and it was at this time that he urged Pepperrill most earnestly to attack. But the more phlegmatic officer could not see it in that way. Warren then argued with increasing heat that by this time the French reinforcements must be near, and could easily steal up under cover of the fog which was thick there every night. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... has never paid one shilling of rent for any, and has sometimes positively received money for vacating his abode. So substantially valuable is a thorough acquaintance with the capabilities of the law. I saw honest Tom Wealdon about a fortnight ago—grown stouter and somewhat more phlegmatic by time, but still the same in good nature and inquisitiveness. From him I learned that Jos. Larkin is likely to figure once more in the courts about some very ugly defalcations in the cash of the Penningstal ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... arise from many causes; and are either distinguished by complexion, as choleric and phlegmatic, or by the differences of age or sex, of climates, or quality of the persons, or their present condition. They are likewise to be gathered from the several virtues, vices, or passions, and many other common-places, which a poet must be supposed to have learned from natural philosophy, ethics, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... dry in a high degree; of approv'd Vertue against all flatulency proceeding from cold and phlegmatic Constitutions, and generally all Crudities whatsoever; and therefore for being of universal use to correct and temper the cooler Herbs, and such as abound in moisture; It is a never to be omitted Ingredient of our Sallets; provided it be not too minutely beaten (as oft we find it) to ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... may be eaten, but it is far more efficacious in its beneficial results when taken warm. The use of Iceland moss jelly is strongly recommended in cases of consumption, and in the treatment of severe colds, catarrhs, and all phlegmatic diseases ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... company; but dogs and cats are proverbially discordant. I presume that two species of animals do not consider one another companionable, or clubable, unless their behaviour and their persons are reciprocally agreeable. A phlegmatic animal would be exceedingly disquieted by the close companionship of an excitable one. The movements of one beast may have a character that is unpleasing to the eyes of another; his cries may sound ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... known in the room, where he generally smokes his pipe of an evening, is plain and blunt, but affable and communicative in his manners—bold in his assertions, and has proved himself courageous in defending them—asthmatic, and by some termed phlegmatic; but an intelligent and agreeable companion, unless thwarted in his argument—a stanch friend to the late Queen and the constitution of his country, with a desire to have the Constitution, the whole Constitution, and nothing but ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... defence into another as plausible and futile, before the very eyes of the Court, and doing her best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the warming-pan lie—our imaginative innocence being most accessible in the region of religion. The French are more open to the appeal ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the Rhine Valley drink wine instead of beer. They are more lively in their disposition than the Prussians, Saxons and Bavarians, who are of a heavy and phlegmatic nature. The Bavarians are noted for their prowess as beer drinkers, and it is not at all unusual for prosperous burghers of Munich to dispose of thirty large glasses of beer in a day; hence the cures which exist all over Germany and ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... Commons that the Prince of Wales be empowered to exercise the Royal Authority; whereupon the Prince at the palace, having heard the Address, read a reply, sufficiently startling to the country, though well foreknown to those present: he laid stress upon the new conditions of the world—that phlegmatic eye, which had seen so much, lifting a moment in punctuation to dwell coldly upon his hearers, then coldly reading again; the difficulties, he said, which he was called upon to face on behalf of His Majesty were ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... ideas of physiology, one of the four "humours" or fluids which composed the body. Where it abounded it made men dull and heavy, or as we still say "phlegmatic." ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... leaving the house, I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I have not heard two staves of the throstle's loud ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... feel the shock of the earthquake which was to overthrow the old stability of Europe. It is known how Germany has ever since been a scene of continual wars, dynastic changes, and territorial confusion. What evils have not the wars of the present century brought upon her! Yet, owing to the phlegmatic disposition, one might call it the stolidity of the majority of Germans, the disturbances have been so far external, and the lower masses of society have scarcely been agitated, except by the first rude explosion of Protestantism, and the sudden patriotic enthusiasm of young plebeians, in 1814. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... own lights, to do his best, and each resorted to measures radically different. Winthrop, active, eager, nervous in temperament, pushed forward boldly, rapidly, bent on "getting there," as he expressed it, and hitting hard before the reds could slip back to their holes. Chrome, slow, phlegmatic, cautious, advanced by carefully-studied marches, with scouts far ahead and flankers far dispersed. Arguing that Winthrop, with one hundred and fifty miles or more to go, and a bigger crowd to handle, and with Indians on his ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... she had been asleep. She had a phlegmatic temperament, and her condition did not seriously inconvenience her. She took a lot of trouble about her health and accepted the advice of anyone who chose to offer it. She went for a 'constitutional' every morning that it was fine and remained out a definite time. When it was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... sunlight of childhood. It was a land of the lotos. The people were narcotized. Was it the sea air? I think I read somewhere in an old philosopher, called Berkeley, that the damp salt air of the sea has a curious phlegmatic effect on the blood, and will coagulate it and produce gout and sundry disorders. However that be, there was a weary weight on everything around Kilronan. The cattle slept in the fields, the fishermen slept in their coracles. It was a land of sleep ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... made him popular. For he passed part of every year in Texas with Dick Millard, and all that could be known about horses and hunting and woodcraft, Harry Hallam knew. He had also taken on very easily the Texan manner, frank, yet rather proud and phlegmatic: "Evidently a young man who knows what he wants, and will be apt to ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... merry still, laughing, pleasant, meditating on plays, women, music, &c. Phlegmatic, slothful, dull, heavy, &c. Choleric, furious, impatient, subject to hear and see strange apparitions, &c. Black, solitary, sad; they think they are bewitched, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... unparalleled sufferings, Captain Edwards must be set down as a man, whose only feeling was to stick to the letter of his instructions, and rigidly to adhere to what he considered the strict line of his duty; that he was a man of a cold phlegmatic disposition, whom no distress could move, and whose feelings were not easily disturbed by the sufferings of his fellow-creatures. He appears to have been one of those mortals, who ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... more thoroughly than any one else. A feeling that this is the case is penetrating into England, but the fear of the German hate is as yet hidden. There is a grain of truth in Lord Curzon's statement that the phlegmatic temperament of his countrymen is incapable of hating as the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... bank had ceased, and John, who still kept his head, being a rather phlegmatic specimen of the Anglo-Saxon race, knew that, for the moment at any rate, all danger from this source was ended. Jess lay perfectly still in his arms, her head upon his breast. A horrible idea struck him that she might ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... two or three of those little niceties of description which give life and reality to the picture. He says that the prince was a man of great counsel and authority, wise and of good memory, but in some things slow, whether it was through the prevalence of the phlegmatic temperament in his constitution, or from intentional deliberation, being moved to some end which men did ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... is morn—I rise To smell the roses sweet; Emphatic are my hips and thighs, Phlegmatic are my feet. Ten thousand roses have I got Within a garden small, Give me but strength to smell the lot, Oh, let me sniff ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the bushes, and the long-suffering corn looks as though afflicted with the yellow jaundice. I sup this same evening with a family of Germans, who have been settled here forty years, and scarcely know a word of English yet. A fat, phlegmatic-looking baby is peacefully reposing in a cradle, which is simply half a monster pumpkin scooped out and dried; it is the most intensely rustic cradle in the world. Surely, this youngster's head ought to be level on agricultural affairs, when he grows up, if anybody's ought. From Napoleon ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... which flowed from the side of Christ hanging on the cross, was not the phlegmatic humor, as some have supposed. For a liquid of this kind cannot be used for Baptism, as neither can the blood of an animal, or wine, or any liquid extracted from plants. It was pure water gushing forth miraculously like the blood from a dead body, to prove the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... forward and looked up in his master's face with patient expectation. If Gyp had had a tail he would doubtless have wagged it, but being destitute of that vehicle for his emotions, he was like many other worthy personages, destined to appear more phlegmatic than nature ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Laps is indescribably clumsy, when they are walking on level ground, and as unsteady as that of a person under the influence of liquor; but they appear the reverse of awkward when engaged in the avocations incident to their primitive life. They are exceedingly phlegmatic in temperament, greedy, avaricious, suspicious, very indolent and filthy, and by no means celebrated for strict adherence to truth. The Nordlanders one and all spoke of them, in answer to my questions, with mingled distrust and contempt, and my own limited experiences most ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... seen an ignorant nursery-maid who could scarcely read or write, by dint of an excellent, serviceable, sanguine, phlegmatic temperament, which made her at once cheerful and unmoveable; of a robust constitution and steady, unimpassionable nerves, which kept her firm under shocks and unharassed under annoyances—manage with comparative ease a large family of spoilt children, while their governess lived amongst them a ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... really troubled," said Lord Evandale, in his quaint, phlegmatic British fashion, "at disturbing the last sleep of the poor unknown body which did expect to rest in peace until the end of the world. The dweller below would willingly ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... to work calmly after breakfast, they found some tents pitched, and at least a score of dirty diggers, bearded like the pard, at work on the ground. Staines sent Falcon back to tell Bulteel, and suggest that he should at once order them off, or, better still, make terms with them. The phlegmatic ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... trees. Tail feathers pointed and stiffened to serve as a prop. Two toes before and two behind for clinging. Usually seen clinging erect on tree-trunks; rarely, if ever, head downward, like the nuthatches, titmice, etc. Woodpeckers feed as they creep around the trunks and branches. Habits rather phlegmatic. The flicker has better developed vocal powers than other birds of this class, whose rolling tattoo, beaten with their bills against the tree-trunks, must answer for their love-song. Nest in hollowed-out ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... affinities between individuals. People who up to this time had not a thought in common discovered all at once that they thought alike; and this resemblance drew them together. It was what people called "the Sacred Union." Men of all parties and temperaments, the choleric, the phlegmatic, monarchists, anarchists, clericals, Calvinists, suddenly forgot their everyday selves, their passions, their fads and their antipathies,—shed their skins. And there before you were now creatures, grouped in an unforeseen manner, like ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... in the case of girls, puberty usually occurs earlier in brunettes than in blondes. In general, it makes its appearance earlier in those of a nervous or bilio-nervous temperament than in those whose temperament is phlegmatic or lymphatic. In the United States fourteen and a half years is the usual age of puberty in girls. In tropical lands, however, it is not uncommon for a girl to be a mother at twelve. Country girls (and boys) usually mature several months or a year later than those living ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The tones are those of the convent Nakous, says the wild Arab;—there must be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them, says an English one in an Oxford gown;—they resemble rather the striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... sudden and violent passions into which he was apt to fall if thwarted or overlooked were purely Spanish; there seemed to be nothing of the patient, phlegmatic Netherlander about this side of him. Indeed it was this temper of his perhaps more than any other desire or tendency that made him so dangerous, for, whereas the impulses of his heart were often good enough, they ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... refreshment, Dulberry proposed to Bertram that they should adjourn to the Town Hall. On entering the court-room, they were both surprized to observe the phlegmatic Dutchman addressing Sir Morgan in the character of petitioner. They caught enough of his closing words to understand that the gite of his petition was to obtain the baronet's sanction for the regular and Christian interment of some foreigner who ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... curious tangle and never fully unravelled. Yet, considering the emperor's personal characteristics, his last action does not seem inexplicable. As his visitor showed the intensity of his will, Frederic became restive. Phlegmatic, obstinate, yet conscious of his own weakness, personal conflicts with a nature equally obstinate and much more vigorous were exceedingly unpleasant. The collision made him writhe uneasily and prefer to slip out of his embarrassment as ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... mountains. They are very dangerous for boats deeply laden, and without decks. We had escaped as if by miracle. To the reproaches that were heaped on our pilot for having kept too near the wind, he replied with the phlegmatic coolness peculiar to the Indians, observing "that the whites would find sun enough on those banks to dry their papers." We lost only one book—the first volume of the Genera Plantarum of Schreber—which had fallen overboard. At nightfall we landed on a barren island in the middle of the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Isaacs," he said aloud, coming up to us, "you know you won the game. Nobody stopped the ball after you hit it, and the saices say it ran right through the goal. So cheer up; you have got something for your pains and your tumble." It was quite true; the phlegmatic saices had watched the ball instead of the falling man. Miss Westonhaugh, who was really a sensible and self-possessed young woman, and had begun to be sure that the accident would have no serious results, expressed ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... battles of the Chickahominy, and to the end, was the able and resolute Longstreet—an officer of low and powerful stature, with a heavy, brown beard reaching to his breast, a manner marked by unalterable composure, and a countenance whose expression of phlegmatic tranquillity never varied in the hottest hours of battle. Longstreet was as famous for his bull-dog obstinacy, as Hill for his dash and enthusiasm. General Lee styled him his "old war-horse," and depended upon him, as will be seen, in some of the ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... with a hereditary instinct for their own language and literature, which instinct, besides assiduous cultivation for thousands of years, is fostered from infancy by their surroundings, and is so exactly suited to their patient, phlegmatic temperament that it comes to them as naturally as the air they breathe, and even if unable to read but a few characters in a phrase, they will arrive at the meaning as surely as a well-bred ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... he spoke before the king; and Louis the Seventh, with his nobles, received their crosses from his hand. The abbot of Clairvaux then marched to the less easy conquest of the emperor Conrad: [311] a phlegmatic people, ignorant of his language, was transported by the pathetic vehemence of his tone and gestures; and his progress, from Constance to Cologne, was the triumph of eloquence and zeal. Bernard applauds his own success in the depopulation of Europe; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Paviljoensgracht—where he now sits securely in stone, pencilling a thought as enduring—that he encountered fresh difficulty. There, at his own street door, under the trees lining the canal-bank, his landlord, Van der Spijck, the painter—usually a phlegmatic figure haloed in pipe-clouds—congratulated him excitedly on his safe return, but refused him entry to the house. "Here thou canst ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... hurrying on like a guilty creature, a hood drawn over her face, and her heart in a flutter at every stray footfall. But fortune stood her friend. She met no one, and soon found herself at the eastern postern gate. A couple of phlegmatic Swiss guardsmen leaned upon their muskets upon either side, and the lamp above shone upon the carriage which awaited her. The door was open, and a tall cavalier swathed in a black cloak handed her into it. He then took the seat opposite ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... looked upon as differing very little from the Canadian militia. The method of managing militia and well-disciplined regular troops appears to be quite as different as they differ in nature. A cool, phlegmatic, undaunted bravery is the fruit of an excellent discipline, rendering the soldiers capable, when repulsed, to return several times to the assault, and rally of their own accord. But the strength and merit of the militia resembles a hot, ardent, ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... supper for them when they get back. Can you wait till then, or shall I cook you something now?" Upon my thanking her and saying I would wait, she relapsed into silence, but still keeping her eyes on me. I was growing nervous under this phlegmatic inspection, and idly investing it with some occult and sinister significance, when she ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... amount of description, can depict the wrath of an author in a paroxysm of mortified vanity, nor the energy which he discovers when stung by the poisoned darts of sarcasm; but, on the other hand, the man that is roused to fighting-fury by a personal attack usually subsides very promptly. The more phlegmatic race, who take these things quietly, lay their account with the oblivion which speedily overtakes the spiteful article. These are the truly courageous men of letters; and if the weaklings seem at first to be the strong men, they cannot hold ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... gather (by hints and inferences rather than by any statement), his own experience was limited to some words or looks such as I have myself endured. His abandonment of Miss Penclosa is in itself a sign that he was never really in her toils. Oh, if he only knew his escape! He has to thank his phlegmatic Saxon temperament for it. I am black and Celtic, and this hag's clutch is deep in my nerves. Shall I ever get it out? Shall I ever be the same man that I was just ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we're stolid and phlegmatic!" muttered Mr. Dane, as he read the inscription. (Evidently ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Henri maintained the phlegmatic attitude of a strong man who feels himself vanquished; his countenance, cold, silent, entirely English, revealed the consciousness of his dignity in a momentary resignation. Moreover, he had already ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... of view it will be understood that people possessing a calm and phlegmatic temperament, will not attain to high degrees of fever, except in cases of very serious complications, while nervous people may quickly reach very considerable degrees of temperature. Children and younger people are more inclined to high fever, since ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the most phlegmatic mind, but to the mystically constituted brain of Nelson, under all the varied thoughts that came into his brain during the days and nights of watching and searching for those people he termed "the pests of the human race," it must have been one long heartache. No wonder that he lets ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... to one's temperament. A nervous, magnetic person, who is not afraid of solitude, of solitary thought, of taking the truth to his heart and wrestling with it—that person is, of course, always nearer the truth than the person of phlegmatic temperament, who has to struggle ever so hard to be conscious of anything not actually within the sphere of his physical apprehension. These things in our generation will have a great effect. In centuries to come, they will become ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on hot bricks; he was fairly beside himself. I took mine in a calmer manner, that is, although I was brimful and even bubbling over with it, I did not rave, but kept as cool as possible, and I remember at the time thinking it was due to our different nationalities, the excitable and phlegmatic temperaments predominating in the two individuals and giving character. Probably a stranger looking on would have thought us either a couple of fools or a ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... from without, and not so much suggestible as autosuggestible. The other type, which is significant from our present point of view, is thus described by Miss Stein: "In general the individuals, often blonde and pale, are distinctly phlegmatic. If emotional, decidedly of the weakest, sentimental order. They may be either large, healthy, rather heavy, and lacking in vigor or they may be what we call anaemic and phlegmatic. Their power of concentrated attention is very small. They describe themselves ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... which they pursue their national aims may eventually enable them to vanquish their more brilliant competitors in the struggle for hegemony in the Peninsula. Unlike most southern races, the Bulgarians are reserved, taciturn, phlegmatic, unresponsive, and extremely suspicious of foreigners. The peasants are industrious, peaceable and orderly; the vendetta, as it exists in Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia, and the use of the knife in quarrels, so common in southern Europe, are alike unknown. The tranquillity of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Slow and phlegmatic Jim Brown, who had been city editor on the Bulletin almost since it was the Bulletin under half a dozen changes of ownership and nearly a score of managing editors, sauntered over into Jolter's room with a copy of the paper in his hand, and a long ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... but could not love. He ruled her—she was his property. She found it easier to accept his rule than to rebel. Had his treatment of her descended to brutality, she would have flown to her lover or else died. One critic says: "Laura must have been of a phlegmatic type, not of a fine or sensitive nature, and all of her wants were satisfied, her life protected and complete. The adoration of Petrarch was not a necessity to her—it came in as a pleasing diversion, a beautiful compliment, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... qualities the unity of the subject. The characters of their novels are principally drawn from the middle class, as governors, literary men, etc. The episodes are, generally speaking, ordinary actions of common life—all the quiet incidents of the phlegmatic life of the Chinese, coupled with the regular and mechanical movements which distinguish that people. Among the numberless Chinese romances there are several which are considered classic. Such are the "Four ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... by the extraordinary display of deep feeling and quaint rugged eloquence which had just been wrung from their hitherto phlegmatic and taciturn skipper, stretched to their oars in dead silence, mechanically keeping the boat stern on to the sea, and so regulating her speed as to avoid the mischance of being pooped or ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... of the lamp I examined him. He was about thirty years of age, cool, phlegmatic, with resolute physiognomy—the English officer in all his native impassibility—no more disturbed than if he had been on board the Standard, operating with extraordinary sang-froid, I might even say, with the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... many kinds of love as there are races. A great tall German, learned, virtuous, phlegmatic, said one day: "Souls are sisters, fallen from heaven, who all at once recognize and run to meet each other." A little dry Frenchman, hot-blooded, witty, lively, replied to him: "You are right; you can always find shoes ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... here, solitary, exotic, no observer would have laughed. Fear, mortal dogging fear, impersonate, supreme, was in every look, every action. Somewhere back of that curved line where met the earth and sky, lurked death. Nothing else would have been adequate to arouse this phlegmatic human as he was now aroused. The sweat oozed from his thick neck in streams and dripped drop by drop from the month-old stubble which covered his chin, but apparently he never noticed it. Now and then he attempted to moisten his lips; but ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... "sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of the finest passages in the "Epistle of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... worst calumnies probable. Infessura, though he expressed horror for the crimes of Sixtus, was yet a dry chronicler of daily events, many of which passed beneath his own eyes, Burchurd was a frigid diarist of Court ceremonies, who reported the rapes, murders, and profligacies of Alexander with phlegmatic gravity. The evidence of these men, neither of whom indulges in satire strictly so called, is more valuable than that of Tacitus or Suetonius to the vices of the Roman emperors. The dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors, again, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... "would constitute an epoch in the mind of every reader."[76] A friend to whom he submitted two-thirds of his manuscript advised him to throw it into the fire and so safeguard his reputation. The result of this criticism on a character less determined or less phlegmatic than Godwin's would have been a violent reaction from hope to despair. But Godwin, who seems to have been independent of external stimulus, was not easily startled from his projects, and plodded steadily forward until his story was complete. He would ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... operation by a famous surgeon. It is evident from the bearing of patients, nurses, and students that they are dealing with a less highly strung population than ours. Indeed, the surgeons who know both countries tell me that here in Germany they have more endurance of this phlegmatic kind. They suffer more like animals. Their patience reaches down to the very ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... and perhaps rousing her from her bed to ask her an amazing question, than by going to Fyodor Pavlovitch. But that is just how it is, sometimes, especially in cases like the present one, with the decisions of the most precise and phlegmatic people. Pyotr Ilyitch was by no means phlegmatic at that moment. He remembered all his life how a haunting uneasiness gradually gained possession of him, growing more and more painful and driving him on, against his will. Yet he kept cursing himself, of course, all the way for going to this ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... two should go across the river to Belpre, there consult the squire, and set in motion every available agency to insure the recapture of the fugitive. The much-worried philosopher begged Burr to excuse him for a couple of hours, and hurriedly started on his vexatious quest, accompanied by the phlegmatic gardener. Complying good-naturedly with a proposal of Dominick and little Harman, and convoyed by those devoted children, Burr explored orchards, fields and stockyard, and won the extravagant praises of the black people by visiting their quarters and greeting every one, ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable |
