"Prig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us a pleasing sense of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... woolly lambkin! The girl would flee, shrieking, and issue a warning against you as a high-brow, a prig, and a hopeless bore. They don't read books, except a few chocolate-cream novels. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that he must make his choice between the evil doing and you—that he cannot be chums with both. Chums should have strict honour between themselves, and always be ready to stand up for one another. A good chum prevents one becoming a prig, and there is nothing short of actual vice which is so hateful in a boy as priggishness. There is as much difference between a prig and a right- minded boy as between chalk and cheese. A right-minded boy goes on his way ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... intended it to be merely a frank expression of opinion. Just a moment, please!" he urged, breaking in on violent language. He brought his thumb and forefinger together to make a circle and poised his hand over his head. "I don't wear one of these. I have no right to wear one. Halo, I mean! I'm no prig or preacher—at least, I don't mean to be. But when I talk business I intend to talk it straight and use few words—and those words may sound rather blunt, sometimes. Just a moment, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... again brings us in touch with Tancred Ennever, the stupid hero of "The Transient Guest." In the meantime he has become an almost intolerable prig. It is probable that Saltus meant more by this fable than he has let appear. The roar of the waves on the coast of Lesbos is distinctly audible for a time and the denoument seems to belong to quite another story.... Ennever has turned author. We are informed that he has completed studies on ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like it "for a cent"; but ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... of life. Even in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... them, and finding fault with them. My uncle generally has his dinner parties on Saturday, or goes out; and aunt gives me ten shillings and sends me to the play; that's better fun than a dinner party." Here the lad blushed again. "I used," said he, "when I was younger, to stand on the stairs and prig things out of the dishes when they came out from dinner, but I'm past that now. Maria (that's my cousin) used to take the sweet things and give 'em to the governess. Fancy! she used to put lumps of sugar into her pocket and eat them in the schoolroom! Uncle Hobson don't live in such good society ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... became restive; at this, the elves set up a shout, and skipped about with the swiftness of lightning. Hearing the noise, the great master asked his only attendant, Gourlay, "What is the meaning of the uproar?" "It is only Prim, Prig, and Pricker making sport," replied ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... he had married a wife like you, a girl with a level head and a stiff upper lip, a girl with not sufficient sentiment to make her a fool, nor enough brains to be a prig, but just clever enough to supply her husband's deficiencies, he would have been my heir, and this place and all my money would have been ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter 'Little Prig; Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... CHARLES, a young prig who was killed in a duel of small arms with Raphael de Valentin at Aix, Savoy, in 1831. Charles had boasted of having received the title of "Bachelor of shooting" from Lepage at Paris, and that of doctor from Lozes the "King ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... my great will-power that had enabled me to quit drinking. They were steadily drinking themselves to death. I could see that plainly. There was nothing else to it. I was a fine sample of a full-blown prig. I went so far as to explain the case to one or two, and I got hooted at for my pains; so I lapsed into my condition of immense superiority and said: "Oh, well, if they won't take advice from me, who knows, let them go along. Poor chaps, ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... walks abroad and sinks the author and hard student in "the gentleman who sometimes writes for his amusement." He writes always with a crow-quill, speaks slowly and sententiously, and shuns the crew of dissonant college revellers, who call him "a prig," and seek to annoy him. Long mornings of study, and nights feverish from ill-health, are spent in those chambers; he is often listless and in low spirits; yet his natural temper is not desponding, and he delights in employment. He has always something to learn or to communicate—some sally of ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... He was not a prig, by any means, who held aloof from sport and play; he could laugh with the merriest, run a race with the swiftest, and try a wrestling ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... And it isn't for want of "suggestion." I begin to suspect Hospitality's fudge, Meaning—mutually ruined digestion! He is such a bore, and his wife is so fat, And as fond of her bed as a dormouse. My girls say—in confidence—she is a cat; I'm sure he's a prig and a poor-mouse. I fancied he'd "influence," which he might use For DICK, our third son, who's a duffer. It doesn't come off, and I really refuse In DICK's interests longer to suffer. PAYN's right, and a Chamberlain would ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... Stephen had picked a grass leaf, and was blowing catcalls upon it. He blew very well, and this morning all his soul went into the wail. For he was ill. He was tortured with the feeling that he could not get away and do—do something, instead of being civil to this anaemic prig. Four hours in the rain was better than this: he had not wanted to fidget in the rain. But now the air was like wine, and the stubble was smelling of wet, and over his head white clouds trundled more slowly and more seldom through broadening ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... fortunes, I can promise you a fluttering time. Mr. WILBERFORCE'S name is unknown to me, and I judge him more experienced in the mysteries of the Stock Exchange than in the art of fiction; but I like his constructive ability and I like his courage. He does not hesitate to make his champion a prig, which is exactly what a youth so idolised by his family would be likely to become. But, though a prig by training, Jack was not by nature a bore, and his relations (especially his father and sister) are delightful people. Altogether I find this a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... herself sterile, written out already. As for writing again on the same lines, she wondered what Raphael would think if he knew of the profits she had reaped by bespattering his people. But there! Raphael was a prig like the rest. It was no use worrying about his opinions. Affluence had come to her—that was the one important and exhilarating fact. Besides, had not the hypocrites really enjoyed her book? A new wave of emotion swept over her—again she felt strong ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the springs of the boy's religion. It is easy to call all this a hot-house process; it is easy to dub the child a precocious prig. But at bottom his religion was healthy and sound. It was not morbid; it was joyful. It was not based on dreamy imagination; it was based on the historic person of Christ. It was not the result ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... shoplifting. thievishness, rapacity, kleptomania, Alsatia^, den of Cacus, den of thieves. blackmail, extortion, shakedown, Black Hand [U.S.]. [person who commits theft] thief &c 792. V. steal, thieve, rob, mug, purloin, pilfer, filch, prig, bag, nim^, crib, cabbage, palm; abstract; appropriate, plagiarize. convey away, carry off, abduct, kidnap, crimp; make off with, walk off with, run off with; run away with; spirit away, seize &c (lay violent hands on) 789. plunder, pillage, rifle, sack, loot, ransack, spoil, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... see my Solicitor, Sir. (To himself, savagely.) That confounded young prig will find he's paid dear enough for his precious Whistlers—if I don't have a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel; And the former called the latter "Little Prig." Bun replied, "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere; And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... manifestly a prig of the first water, and there was no use arguing with him. I thought I had best meet him on his own ground, so I said, "Your clients, sir, are happy in having so resolute a guardian of their confidence. I ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... replied Ingleborough laughing. "No; I don't like him. I never do like a fellow who is an unnatural sort of a prig. He can't help being fat and pink and smooth, but he can help his smiling, sneaky manner. I do like a fellow to be manly. Hang him! Put him in petticoats, with long hair and a bonnet, he'd look ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... "that there are men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend—I don't know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you." Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... And I—never dreaming; only puzzled at the way he sheered off after the first. Between us, we made his last month of life a torment, though he never let me guess it. I don't know how to forgive myself. And, to be honest, it's no easy job forgiving you. If that makes you angry, if you think me a prig, I can't help it. If you'd heard him—all those ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... to make up one's mind," she said, "but you seem to me to have changed. Your voice sounds so different. But as a boy—well, you were a bit of a prig, weren't you? I imagined you writing me good advice and excellent short sermons. And it wasn't that that I ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... best reputation in this world as a steady man. Is he altogether the sort of man that mammas of the best kind are seeking for their daughters? I like a roue myself;—and a prig who sits all night in the House, and talks about nothing but church-rates and suffrage, is to me intolerable. I prefer men who are improper, and all that sort of thing. If I were a man myself I should go in for ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in society and adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicals—if there is any way to say it without seeming a prig—is that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... for the Abolition of Ancestors, Miss Ranken. We have to make up all lost ground, and we can't help it. I'm sorry almost that I take it all so seriously. I feel so very much like a middle-aged prig. Perhaps, Miss Dearsley, we may grow more cheerful when your uncle and I (and you) are fairly at work and clear of brooding. At present I seem to exude lectures ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... fought his way to his present position of distinction, to his niece he was soft-hearted as a mother. "There, there!" he exclaimed hastily. "We'll give the boy a chance. No mother, eh? And a confounded prig for a father! No wonder the boy goes all wrong!" Then with a sudden vehemence he cried, striking one hand into the other, "No, by—! that is, we will certainly give the lad the benefit of the doubt. Cheer up, lassie! You've ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... the relief held out to me. To sit in the company of that condescending prig, to bore him and to be bored by him, was a doleful grievance I did not wish to inflict upon myself, and I eagerly answered that the day had been a long and hard one, and that I would be ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... leads up to the sad admission upon our part that Payson, Jr., was a prig. And in the very middle of his son's priggishness Payson, Sr., up and died, and Tutt and Mr. Tutt were called ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... de Wissant hurried up to him, he turned and stiffly saluted the Mayor of Falaise. Admiral de Saint Vilquier had no liking for M. de Wissant—a cold prig of a fellow, and yet married to such a beautiful, such a charming young woman, the daughter, too, of one of the Admiral's oldest friends, of that Admiral de Kergouet with whom he had first gone to sea a matter of fifty years ago! The lovely Claire de ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... self-defence like a fool. All my stock goes down, and as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not bother ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... willing you should think she knows them; but she does not say she does[691].' BOSWELL. 'Mr. Harris, who was present, agreed with her.' JOHNSON. 'Harris was laughing at her, Sir. Harris is a sound sullen scholar; he does not like interlopers. Harris, however, is a prig, and a bad prig[692]. I looked into his book[693], and thought he did not understand his own system.' BOSWELL. 'He says plain things in a formal and abstract way, to be sure: but his method is good: for to have ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... that?" replied Sanine. "Literature is a very great, and a very interesting thing. Real literature, such as I mean, is not polemical after the manner of some prig who, having nothing to do, endeavours to convince everybody that he is extremely intelligent. Literature reconstructs life, and penetrates even to the very life- blood of humanity, from generation to generation. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... left more husbands and lovers behind her than a sailor has wives! Marion Delegass and that prig in petticoats! Well, Elsie, you do ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his brain, By various methods try to entertain; Brings ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Dowlas, when he was raised from the chandler's shop in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor "to larn him to talk English;" and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick, with a salary of [pounds]300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of ponderous pomposity. He talked of a "locomotive morning," of one's "sponsorial and patronymic appellations," and so on; was especially fond of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as "Lend me your ears. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... signed, and signed, till at last I was with all due civility informed that my signature was no longer worth a farthing; and when I came to inquire into the cause of this phenomenon, I could nowise understand what my Lord Delacour's lawyer said to me: he was a prig, and I had not patience either to listen to him or to look at him. I sent for an old uncle of mine, who used to manage all my money matters before I was married: I put the uncle and the lawyer into a room, together with their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... of a prig, but in the wrath of a fishwoman, I execrated Scott Gholson; his jealousies, his disclosures, his religion, his mispronunciations; and Ned Ferry—that cockerel! Here was I in the barrel, and able only to squeal in irate terror at whoever ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... than that," returned the whittler, brushing the litter from his lap. "Now I've no doubt that prig of a doctor, who they say is shining up to Alice, will be disappointed when he finds just how much she's worth. Let me see. What is his name? Lives up there," and with his jackknife Mr. Liston pointed toward ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... as she watched her walk primly down the corridor and out of the side entrance. "That infant," she said to Elinor who had been leaving Judith out, "is trembling on the brink of becoming a little prig. We've got to see to it, Norn, that she doesn't ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... contrary, he was a moral prig," Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. "He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... laird gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the water-pail, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr. Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs, Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr. Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and, amid wooings and preparations ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... is not a fair question to ask any man, for an affirmative makes a prig of him and a negative a mere politician. I will therefore generalize freely and tell you that a man who believes himself to be a statesman considers the nation first, as a matter of course. Howard, for instance, nearly killed himself at the end ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... I have. That was two months ago. I don't think I am the morally self-satisfied prig I was two months ago.... I'd be easier on anything now, even a cat. But don't think I mean more than I do mean, Duane," she added hastily. "I've missed you a little. I want you to be nice to me.... After all, you're the oldest friend I have ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the great resource of conversation, are more socially binding than any drinks. There will, indeed, be a temporary social hardship for many abstainers until the custom is generally broken up; one runs the risk of being thought by the heedless a prig and a Puritan. But that is a small price to pay for one's health ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... great moral principle. He finds sermons in his horses' tails; he could give an excellent reason for the quantity of lace on his coat, which was due, it seems, to a sentiment of filial reverence; and he could not fix his hour for dinner without an eye to the reformation of society. In short, he was a prig of the first water; self-conscious to the last degree; and so crammed with little moral aphorisms that they drop out of his mouth whenever he opens his lips. And then his religion is in admirable keeping. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... see a man who affects to doubt everything he hears, I never hesitate about writing him down an ass. A great doubter is a solemn and self-conceited prig. How amusing is it to see the blockhead shake his empty pate, compress his lips into a sneer, and turn up his absurd unmeaning eyes in dubious disbelief, when he hears aught which he thinks it would imply sagacity to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... to read even in the "skim and skip and dip" fashion which should, no doubt, be only practised as a work of necessity (i.e. duty to others) and of mercy (to oneself) on extraordinary occasions, but which nobody but a prig and a pedant will absolutely disallow. Almost the only good thing I can find to say about it is that Prevost, who lived indeed for some time in England, is now and then, if not always, miraculously correct in his ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... own point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... is a prig," Theodora said restively. "She may be worse than you are, Hope; but I doubt it. Never mind," she added sagely to herself, as she left the room; "it is two weeks till then, and there's plenty of chance for things to ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... as these a strange neglect of that glory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prig enjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the supremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towards some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new and more ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... prize in triumph into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry will say ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... think that curing a cancer in one's mind is rather an effeminate thing to do, Louis—rather a priggish thing. I suppose if you get cured of drinking you'll say you never did it for fear of being called a prig?" ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... said Jock with a blush. "I was a little prig. Lucy, how strange it all is, like a picture one has seen somewhere, or a scene in a play or a dream! Sometimes I can remember little bits of it, just as he used to read it out to old Ford. Bits of it are all ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig"; Bun replied, "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... disciplined as to believe in their souls that death must come, then there would be no lost days. Is there one of us who can say that he never lost a day amid this too brief, too joyous, too entrancing term of existence? Not one. The aged Roman—who, by-the-way, was somewhat of a prig—used to go about moaning, "I have lost a day," if he thought he had not performed some good action or learned something in the twenty-four hours. Most of us have no such qualms; we waste the time freely; and we never know that it is wasted ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... stating how much he had suffered in the cause of the ministry. Swift immediately carried his letter to Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, who railed much at Sacheverell, calling him a busy intermeddling fellow; a prig and an incendiary, who had set the kingdom in a flame which could not be extinguished, and therefore deserved censure instead of reward. Although Swift had not a much better opinion of the Doctor than Lord Bolingbroke, he replied, "True, my Lord; but let me tell you a story. In a sea fight in ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... "You're a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night." He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" he cried; ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... the Conservative party, both of them until 1857 belonging to one proprietor—were edited respectively by the two ladies aforesaid. The "Standard" was very wroth. It would not have been so sore perhaps at being dubbed "Betsy Prig;" but, being in fact almost a reprint of the "Herald," the suggestion of "Mrs. Harris"—a creature of no existence, the mere reflex of Mrs. Gamp's own inane and besodden brain—was too calmly provoking, as it was meant to be, to be borne in silence. These two journals ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... quiet, you prig! I won't be dictated to by you. Look here, Dick!" His voice changed abruptly. "I'm not ordering. I'm asking. That boy is a mill-stone round your neck. Let him go! He'll be happy enough. I'll see to that. Give him up like a dear chap! Then ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... this company. How now, my masters, is there to be no discipline when my foot is off the quarter-deck? If another man speaks above his breath, by the beard of father Neptune, I will stop his grog. Where was I? Let me take the latitude once more. Aye, here away bearing up to tell how I liked this prig of a town." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... the cock again, which both began and ended the book. He stood and crowed so proudly and never slept. He was a regular prig, but when Sister was diligent he put a one-ore piece among the leaves. But the hens laid eggs, and it was evident that they were the same as the flowers; for when you were kind to them and treated them as if they belonged to the family, they were industrious in laying, but if you built a model house ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... mean—is with her; I am certain of it. The girl was always very much attached to her, and I know the sly old devil has been sent to negotiate with me, but I declined. I knew better than to involve myself in a controversy with an old she prig who deals in nothing but maxims, and morals, and points of duty. I consequently sent her off in double quick time, as they say. Get me some burgundy and water. I really am not well. There is something wrong, Gibson, whatever it is; but I think it's nothing but ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Graham—prig; What was thy delighted musing? Now accepting, now refusing, Till on the Admiralty pitch'd, Still would that thought his speech prolong; To gain the place for which he long had itch'd, He call'd on Bobby still through all the song; But ever as his sweetest theme he chose, A sovereign's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... purpose of starting the institute, and the manner in which I pestered distinguished authors for presentation copies of their books, in order to furnish the shelves of the library, I am driven to the painful conclusion that I must have been a terrible person in the days of my youth, and something of a prig to boot. Apropos of the begging for books as free gifts from authors, I had one or two amusing experiences. Among those whom I importuned in this impertinent way were Charles Kingsley, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt; I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... came to you, did he? and sent you down at a moment's notice? ha! ha! He's a solemn old prig, is Pritchett; but a good servant; a very good servant. When I am gone, he'll have enough to live on; but he'll want some one to say a word to him now and again. Don't forget what I say about him. It's not so easy ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... like you a little. I perfectly loathed you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome elderly prig ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... "Ah! a prig I dare say—like some of his uncles before him," said Mr. Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... trunk or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at the work of weekly redemption with a will. And, what is more, he is listened to, and for the time being—though on week days he is styled a bore by the old and a prig by the young—he becomes temporarily invested with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any other day. It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have been ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... "The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned. As he seared me he hissed: "You are wearing away. The good angels tell me you leave them today. You want to come down from the nails in the door. The victor must hang there three hundred years more. If any prig-saint would outvote all mankind He must use an immortally resolute mind. Think what the saints of Benares endure, Through infinite birthpangs their courage is sure. Self-tortured, self-ruled, they build their powers high, Until they are gods, overmaster the sky." Then he pulled out the nails. ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... "If you ask me I don't think she cares a bit for him. And one can scarcely be surprised. He is not a bad fellow, but rather a prig, and Edith Morriston is not exactly the sort of girl to suffer that type of man gladly. But her brother is all for the match; from Painswick's point of view she is just the wife for him, money and a statuesque style ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... "He isn't a prig. And he's had to fight some things that you of all men ought to understand. He's only been here a few months, but he told me that Judge Pike has been against him from the start. It seems that Mr. Ladew is too liberal in his views. And he told me that if it were not for Judge Pike's losing ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... steps in making an argument, so in defining, there is no formula for all cases. In each case your knowledge of your audience must guide you, and your own sagacity. Unnecessary definitions will make them think you a prig; insufficient definition will let them ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... It was not only girls who carried themselves differently before Beatrice: every man who met her seemed to try and show her the best in him, or at least to suppress any thought or act which might displease her. It was not that she was a prig, or an angel, but she herself was so fine and sincere, and treated all with such an impersonal and yet gracious manner that it became contagious, and everybody who met her imitated the model she unconsciously furnished. ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... been any intimacy between these two men. Reardon regarded his wife's brother as rather snobbish and disagreeably selfish; John Yule looked upon the novelist as a prig, and now of late as a shuffling, untrustworthy fellow. It appeared to John that his brother-in-law was assuming a manner wholly unjustifiable, and he had a difficulty in behaving to him with courtesy. Reardon, on the other hand, felt injured by the turn his visitor's ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... form of an epic poem; most fortunately, it must be conceded, for Milton had not the knowledge of men necessary for a drama. As a study of character Paradise Lost would be a grievous failure. Adam, the central character, is something of a prig; while Satan looms up a magnificent figure, entirely different from the devil of the miracle plays and completely overshadowing the hero both in interest and in manliness. The other characters, the Almighty, the Son, Raphael, Michael, the angels ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the night before. Miss Day and Miss Marsh had repeated this good story. It had impressed them at the time, but they did not tell it to others in an impressive way, and the girls, who had not seen Prissie, but had only heard the tale, spoke of her to one another as an "insufferable little prig." ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig;" Bun replied, "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. I'll not ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor
... "A detestable prig!" you say, reader?—That is just what Mr. and Mrs. Sclater thought him that night, but they never quarrelled again before him. In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... than angered Hugh; they had completely upset his mental equilibrium: his every ideal of college swayed and wabbled. He wasn't a prig, but he had come to Sanford with very definite ideas about the place, and those ideas were already groggy from the unmerciful pounding ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part. God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... reporting it to the head-master. If, therefore, they took any action at all, it must be reported, Jerrard would be expelled, a boon companion and the great cricket match of the year, would be lost. And all this through that interfering prig of a Westcott! Any ordinary fellow would have shut his eyes to the whole affair. After all what is there to make a fuss about in having a rag with a kid? What are kids for? Thus the conclave sourly regarding Peter who watched them in turn, and sat sternly, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the liberty of informing you that one of your young gents, which his name is Mister Loman, is a prig. He's been a regular down at my shop this twelve month, and never paid a farthing for his liquor. More than that, he's been a-drawing money from me up to thirty-five pounds, which I've got his promissory note due last Micklemas. He said he was a-going to get a Nightingale or something then that ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother—that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... which was at that time an inner one, and enabled the King and Queen to communicate freely. This post, which was very onerous, because it was to be kept four and twenty hours, was often claimed by Saint Prig, an actor belonging to the Theatre Francais. He took it upon himself sometimes to contrive brief interviews between the King and Queen in this corridor. He left them at a distance, and gave them warning if he heard the slightest noise. M. Collot, commandant ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... prig! They should bottle him in spirits of wine as a specimen. It's the only thing he'll ever be fit for," remarked Mr. Page, who rarely said so ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... abruptly, "you aren't going to be such a goose as to back out of joining the skating club just because—well, because Mary Brewster's such a prig? She isn't the whole membership, not by a good deal, and the rest of us count on your coming. Why, you'll be a tremendous acquisition. And the first meet is ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... save me and save Russell, too. You have from now till after the Easter holidays; and think what you'll save me from! Oh, dear! I wish I'd never seen Lewis Flagg. He don't care a bit, so that he sees the way out of his own scrape. As for that solemn prig, Seabrooke, who you'd think was one of the grown masters with his uppish airs, well, never mind, I suppose he has let us off easy on the whole, if I only raise my share of the money; and he is honor bright about it and don't ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... had been diligently unfaithful to the poor "uneducated" little Creole girl who really thought she loved him. From all accounts, and I have read many, Alexandre Beauharnais was an ill-conditioned cruel prig. This excellent son with "fine and noble qualities" had not been long at Martinique before he associated himself with a lady of questionable virtue, who was much older than he. This person's dislike to Josephine ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... "What a prig he was!" is scrawled across the page, as Charles Dilke's judgment on himself, when later the letter fell into ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... talk about what he reads in a natural way, but do not allow him to become a prig by saying what he supposes you would like to have him rather than what ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... happens, you are a man before you are a prig," she said, "and that is something to be thankful for in these degenerate days. Why, there is the child ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... to help being a snob, Nan, but don't be a prig." Joan's words struck hurtingly. Then ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... love to the wives of his neighbours as that he should know French, or that he should have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heard, a farrago, a galimatias. Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade. Then while her needles, which had paused an instant, began to fly again, she rejoined: "Do you know what you are, my dear? You're a dreadful little prig. Where do you ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, either to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... neglect Maudie; don't alarm yourself! She's the best specimen of the genus prig that I've ever come across in the course of my life. She ought to have a Form all to herself, instead of being plumped into the Fifth. I see dangerous possibilities in Maudie. Do you realize what she did this morning? Learnt the whole of ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... heaven! I'd marry her to-morrow. Here I am, seeing her every day in the week out or in, and what do you think she gets me to talk about?—history! Isn't it enough to make a fellow mad? and there am I lecturing like a prig, and by heaven! while I'm at it I feel a pleasure in it; and when I leave the house I should feel an immense gratification in shooting somebody. What do they say ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... life which make the difference," he said, hesitating, because to say even so much made him feel a prig. "Stella just drifted from unhappiness ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... for Sally May and Catherine look perfectly wretched—as if Sally May would; but some of them believe it. How Genevieve can act! She just hoodwinked Miss Watson completely; looked like a good little prig who'd done everything she ought to do—and she was thoroughly enjoying herself. I guess she'll go on the stage when she leaves school—it would be interesting to have people applauding. I believe she was glad I was there to see her do it—and I believe—she was glad the girls were round to sympathize ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... himself again, "do you wish Dick dead and Hal, too, the finest fellow that ever lived, for the sake of a young girl whose mind is full of a prig like Neil McPherson?" ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... certain point one cannot pretend denseness, and he was in an agony of dread lest his father would see what Therese was up to. She had begun kissing him good-night, and now more and more warmth crept into the embrace until he found himself trying to avoid it. He was no prig, and Therese was attractive, yet the distaste he felt for the situation neutralised her power to lure him. Moreover, she showed him a side which convinced him of what he had hitherto suspected—that Therese had all the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... catch you turning prig, Frieda Lange," advised Hannah. "And now don't ask me what a prig is, for I don't know in German, and there's no way here to find out. What else are you going ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... cigaret case for Marion when the thought came to him. He had not bought a Christmas present for a girl, except flowers, since the first year he was at college. He had sent Delight one that year, a half-dozen little leather-bound books of poetry. What a precious young prig he must have been! He knew now that girls only pretended to care for books. They wanted jewelry, and they got past the family with it by pretending it was not real, or that they had bought it out of their allowances. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... at issue. I consider a knowledge of the passing events of the day, and a recollection of the facts which have occurred during the last twenty years, to be more valuable than all the ancient records in existence. Who talks of Caesar or Xenophon now-a-days, except some Cambridge or Oxford prig? and of what value is that knowledge in society? The escape of a modern pickpocket will afford more matter of conversation than the famous retreat of ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... more likely, if you had Matilda and her prig of a book,' said Arthur, between anger and diversion. 'Tell her to mind her own business—she is not your mistress now, and she shall not teach you affectation. Why, you silly child, should I have had you if you had not been "proper behaved"? You have ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... learned to like him, and for a considerable time, until shortly before his departure from Lucerne, he was my daily companion, from whose intercourse I derived much pleasure, as he was a highly gifted musician and by no means a prig. But Drasecke ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of work, for which he ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... herself, apostrophizing "Lennie" in this uncomplimentary manner. "Fool! I wonder if he thinks I care! He may play hired lacquey to all the women in London if he likes! He looks a prig compared ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... in itself is not bad. Nevertheless,—thinking as the world around us does about hunting,—a clergyman in my position would be wrong to hunt often. But a man who can feel horror at such a thing as this is a prig in religion. If, as is more likely, a man affects horror, he is a hypocrite. I believe that most clergymen will agree with me in that; but there is no clergyman in the diocese of whose agreement I feel more certain ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... "Consummate little prig!" murmured Captain Ducie to himself as he refolded the letter and put it away. "I can fancy the smirk on his face as he penned that precious effusion, and how, when he had finished it, he would trot off to his clothes-prop of a wife and ask ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... and, according to Dickens' own expression, "sent them all stark staring raving mad across the water;" we must frequent the boarding establishment for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs. Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Jenny Man's, I saw an alerte young Fellow that cocked his Hat upon a Friend of his who entered just at the same time with my self, and accosted him after the following Manner. Well, Jack, the old Prig is dead at last. Sharp's the Word. Now or never, Boy. Up to the Walls of Paris directly. With several other deep Reflections ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... habit of having the teakettle in our little sitting-room; and we toasted the bread ourselves, which reminds me of a little circumstance not unworthy of being set down among these minutiae. Happening both of us to be engaged a few minutes one morning, when we had a young prig of a Scotch lawyer to breakfast with us, my dear sister, with her usual simplicity, put the toasting-fork with a slice of bread into the hands of this Edinburgh genius. Our little book-case stood on one side of the fire. To prevent loss of time, he ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... clamorous party strife, And all the hot activities of life; But most the Politician He mocks—for 'meanness.' How the prig would gasp If shown the slime-trail of that wriggling asp In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... father was.' So I told him his father was ten thousand times nicer than ever he would be if be lived a hundred years, and I could not bear him if he talked in that wicked, disrespectful way, and Fly kissed me for it, mamma, and said her daddy was worth a hundred of such a prig as he was.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a man," Julia interrupted, "and I would not undertake to say a man would not do anything—on occasions—or a woman either, for the matter of that. There is a beast in most men, and an archangel in lots, and a snob, and a prig, and a dormant hero, and an embryo poet. There are great possibilities in men; you have to watch and see which is coming out top and back that, and then half the time you are wrong. Of course, at father's age, possibilities ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Will, clenching his fist. "A fellow like Dent!-why, he's a real bad 'un, Hester. Why, he swears dreadful, and he drinks deep, and he's cruel. Ef you had seen how he treated the cabin boy when we was mates together in the 'Betsy Prig' you wouldn't like the feel of knowing that a girl what you loved more than all the world should even set eyes on him. Why, he's a worse man than Bet's father, ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... this occupation is, that too many people take a fancy to it, and the competition is in consequence excessive. Every ignoramus of a fellow who finds that he hasn't brains in sufficient quantity to make his way as a walking advertiser, or an eye-sore prig, or a salt-and-batter man, thinks, of course, that he'll answer very well as a dabbler of mud. But there never was entertained a more erroneous idea than that it requires no brains to mud-dabble. Especially, there is nothing to be made in this way without method. I did only a retail business myself, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dear, plump little prig who adores the woman, and wears with as much gravity as her religious opinions—only eight, Jack!—a venerable horsehair atrocity which she calls her Bustle. I have just burned it, and the child is asleep ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... could do in the rectory. Once or twice he had dined at the great house; but Lady Clavering had declared him to be a bore, and Sir Hugh had called him "that most offensive of all animals, a clerical prig." It had therefore been decided that he was not to be asked to the great house any more. It may be as well to state here, as elsewhere, that Mr. Clavering very rarely went to his nephew's table. On certain occasions he did do so, so that there might ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... would not have lacked so many words that do duty as native-born or naturalized citizens in large sections of the United States, and among these words is the one that stands at the head of the present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some other word. So ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... [violently] Don't dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and my conscience is clear, at all events [she sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Captain Quinn. 'Don't take it like that. From your point of view you were quite right to call me a blackguard. And, mind you, there are plenty of people in the world who aren't blackguards. There's my brother, for instance. He's a bit of a prig—in fact, he's as priggish as he well can be—but he's never done anything but run straight. I don't suppose he could go crooked if ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... no prig, no saintly child, this little King Louis Seventeenth to be, he was just a sensitive, affectionate boy, whose winning manner and charm of person attracted all to him, and made him an especial pet of the older people from whose conversation he gathered much information which they never ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Tyrrel. "Well, well, man," replied he, "we will see what can be done. Order and subordination are very good things; but people should know how much to require. As you tell the story, I cannot see that you are greatly to blame. Marlow is a coxcombical prig, that is the truth on't; and if a man will expose himself, why, he must even take what follows. I do hate a Frenchified fop with all my soul: and I cannot say that I am much pleased with my neighbour Underwood for taking the part of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin |
