"Quaintness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... series of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their "Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Holy-rood, his levees, at Theobald's, were occupied with listening to the detail of more polished, but not less sanguinary, contests. I rather suppose, that James never was himself disposed to pay particular attention to the laws of the duello; but they were defined with a quaintness and pedantry, which, bating his dislike to the subject, must have deeply interested him. The point of honour was a science, which a grown gentleman might study under suitable professors, as well as dancing, or any other modish accomplishment. Nay, it would appear, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... published poems at ten. Her first effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression and richness of imagery, combined with a curious quaintness, the outgrowth of the deep vein of mysticism that pervades her nature, soon attracted the attention of the literati of this country, one of the most distinguished of whom, the late George D. Prentice, did not hesitate ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... scarcely a dwarf's portion. But Truth, though perhaps slowly, must finally prevail. Mr. Coleridge remarks, that for his own guidance he was greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic and allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim he had been ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... inscriptions, often deciphered with difficulty after scraping away the moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one that has the charm of quaintness, or which touches our heart or sense of humour in such a way as to tempt us to copy it into ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... and the triumphal car discovered its want of a lid. But having pre-excited attention, we had full leisure to sharpen our eye. To these imprudent authors and actors we may apply a Spanish proverb, which has the peculiar quaintness of that people, Aviendo pregonado vino, venden vinagre: "Having cried up their wine, they sell ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... dialectic. The linguistic difficulties are especially great in The Rats where the members of the Berlin populace speak an extraordinarily degraded jargon. In the translation I have sought, so far as possible, to differentiate the savour and quaintness of the Silesian dialect from the coarseness of that of Berlin. But all such attempts must, from their very nature, achieve only a partial success. The succeeding volumes of this edition, presenting the plays written in normal literary German, will offer ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... specially interesting as the haunt of half the painters of the early Georgian era. There are anecdotes of Hogarth and his friends to be picked up here in abundance, and the locality generally deserves exploration, from the quaintness and cleverness ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to recompose the Bible, the broad vulgar colloquial diction, which has been used by our theological writers, is less tolerable than the quaintness of Castalion and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... little volume with its roughness and quaintness, sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet. His muse, it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one. She is "clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... to-day. It was the boy and the meaning of his words which escaped me still, baffled me, and formed the whole subject of my attention, even when I was inside the Tern Creek church; so that I retain nothing of that, save a general quaintness, a general loneliness, a little deserted, forgotten token of human doings long since done, standing on its little acre of wilderness amid that solitude which suggests the departed presence of man, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... John had lost half its charm and quaintness since the fire, we are surprised to find so much of interest when we are out at the "top of the morning" next day, and are reluctant to leave; but here the Octave disintegrates, scatters to finish the season elsewhere; and each member, on arrival at home, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... remain inscrutable. Yet another is furnished by the fact that Miss ELLA KING HALL has composed for the main story six "illustrations in music," duly reproduced. You may with luck be able to smile a little at the quaintness of these. But on the title-page they are said to be "arranged from the MS. notes of Botolf Glenfield." And Glenfield, being only a character in the novel written by Flanders, couldn't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... from distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no. There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them—as the old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel—whole books have been written. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... out exactly how it had been; and then Faith put the inquiry, simple to quaintness, "Did I do better to-day?"—"If you are so anxious for me—" he said, stroking back her hair. "They did not deserve to have one of my wife's words, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... think my friend was versed in the pretty theory that good luck is the subconscious wisdom of them who in previous incarnations have been consciously wise. He was a member of the stock exchange, and I smiled as at a certain quaintness in his remark. I asked in what ways besides luck the "great character" was manifested. Oh, well, Pethel had made a huge "scoop" on the stock exchange when he was only twenty-three, and very soon had doubled that and doubled it again; then retired. He wasn't more than ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... daintily worked the lode which had been deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac, sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance was in his blood. Bras-Coupe, the great, proud, rebellious slave in The Grandissimes, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from them by dying. The postures and graces ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... place Johnson gave me such descriptions, that to this day the name of Dartmouth has a romantic sound in my ears, though I know now that all the marvels were Johnson's own invention, and barely founded upon the real quaintness of the place, of which he must have heard from his mother. It became the highest object of my ambition to see the captain's native city. That there must be people—shopkeepers, for instance, and a man to keep the post office—who lived there all ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... Pulwick Priory stands on the site of an extinct religious house; its oldest walls, in fact, were built from the spoils of once sacred masonry. It is a house of solid if not regular proportions, full of unexpected quaintness; showing a medley of distinct styles, in and out; it has a wide portico in the best approved neo-classic taste, leading to romantic oaken stairs; here wide cheerful rooms and airy corridors, there sombre vaulted ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... its strange draperies powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the Fifteenth Century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous, or at least cold. And yet the more you come to understand what imaginative ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... worked for some time as a bricklayer or mason; 'and let not them blush,' says Fuller, speaking of this circumstance in his 'English Worthies,' with his usual amusing, but often expressive quaintness, 'let not them blush that have, but those that have not, a lawful calling. He helped in the building of the new structure of Lincoln's Inn, when, having a trowel in his hand, he had a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord. Perhaps her thoughts ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Quincey (though he goes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerard resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines "on the further side of the border between verse ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature only; she alone is the real thing, all the quaintness of childhood, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite unconscious drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the natural religion of its plays and the delicious oddity of its prayers—all these waited for dear ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... curls, for her hazel eyes held a peculiar liquid beam, and her face, heart-shaped in outline, had none of the heaviness of jaw which marred the symmetry of his. A little brown mole beside the dimple in her cheek gave the finishing touch of coquetry to the old-world quaintness of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... freshest flowers in majolica jars; water-colour sketches by Hunt, Prout, Cattermole, and Edward Duncan; sage-green silk curtains; black and gold furniture, and all the latest prettinesses of the new Jacobean school. The mixture of real medievalism and modern quaintness was delightful. One hardly knew where the rococo began or the mediaeval left off. The good old square fireplace, with its projecting canopy, and columns in white and coloured marbles, was as old ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... religious knowledge, signify ocular exhibition. The first teachers of mankind borrowed this method of instruction; and it comprised an endless store of pregnant hieroglyphics. These lessons of the olden time were the riddles of the Sphynx, tempting the curious by their quaintness, but involving the personal risk of the adventurous interpreter. "The Gods themselves," it was said, "disclose their intentions to the wise, but to fools their teaching is unintelligible;" and the King of the Delphic Oracle ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... herrings, English ale for a change on Manx jough; then dancing led by the mistress, to the tune of a fiddle, played faster and wilder as the night advances, reel and jig, jig and reel. This pretty rural festival is still observed, though it has lost much of its quaintness. I think I can just remember to have heard the shouts of the Mheillia from the breasts of ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... opportunity of enforcing the lesson with which this incident closes, 'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' It is because of the light that it throws upon that great thought that he tells this fascinating story of Zacchaeus. I need not repeat it. We all remember it, and the quaintness and grotesqueness of part of it fix it in people's memories. We know how the rich tax gatherer, pocketing his dignity, and unable to see over the heads of the crowd, scrambled up into the branches of the sycamore tree that overhung the road; and there was found by the eye of love, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Missy had often regretted that her own home had been built before the vogue of the bungalow. And now, when she beheld Aunt Isabel's enchanting house, the solid, substantial furnishings left behind in Cherryvale lost all their savour for her, even the old-fashioned "quaintness" of ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Mocking-Bird, then the palm belongs, among our New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking-Bird sing at liberty; and while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our Mavis, while his stately attitudes and high-born ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... deficiencies. Where the hiatus consisted of a word or two only, and the missing portion could be furnished by conjecture, Mr. Singer took the liberty of adding what seemed to be wanting, in italics; his interpolations have been left as they stood. The old orthography and language, besides the charm of quaintness, appeared to the editor to possess a certain philological value, and he has rigidly adhered to it. In respect to the punctuation, the case was different; there were no reasons of any kind for its retention; it was very imperfect and capricious; and it has therefore ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... legends, in a few instances, the exact phrases of the narrators have been retained for the sake of their quaintness. ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... their youth upward to an abstruse style, which, in all legal papers, from the petty court of the Immediate Knight up to the Imperial Diet at Ratisbon, was still maintained in all its quaintness, could not easily elevate themselves to a certain freedom, the less so as the subjects of which they had to treat were most intimately connected with the external form, and consequently also with the style. But the younger Von Moser had already ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... eloquent of much burghers' wealth. There could be no such square in a city which was not or had not been very rich. And among all the houses in the Egidien Platz, there was no house to exceed in beauty of ornament, in quaintness of architecture, or in general wealth and comfort, that which was inhabited ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... Sec. 36. This bolder quaintness of the missals is very slightly modified in religious paintings of the period. Fig. 86, by Cima da Conegliano, a Venetian, No. 173 in the Louvre, compared with Fig. 3 of Plate 10 (Flemish), will show the kind of received tradition about rocks ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... feel the mind of Xenophon shimmering under various lights. The Cyropaedia is shot with Orientalism. Homeric Epicism—antique Hellenism and modern Hellenism are both there. Spartan simplicity and Eastern quaintness both say their say. In this passage the biblical element seems ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... interest in him? That question assailed her. She studied him, and was uncertain. For his manner had not changed. He was still quiet, thoughtful, polite, still deferential and natural, with a quaintness of speech and a simplicity that had gripped her, that held ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... reign of the good and wise and lovely. It was the discomfiture of the base, the faithless, the wicked, the traitors. This is what is reflected in Spenser's poem; at once, its stateliness, for there was no want of grandeur and magnificence in the public scene ever before Spenser's imagination; and its quaintness, because the whole outward apparatus of representation was borrowed from what was past, or from what did not exist, and implied surrounding circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by substituting ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... vividness these simple lines came before us, on hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter's genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration, but the natural, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... think nothing at all of having shot that there black fellow; why, Sir, they're very thick and plentiful up the country." I did not exactly see the consolation to be derived from this argument of Ruston's, but I could not forbear smiling at its quaintness, and feeling grateful for the kindness ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... went to New Mexico, Mrs. Coolidge enjoyed transports of enthusiasm over the quaintness and picturesqueness of its alien modes of living. So she hunted all over Santa Fe for a house of the requisite age, dilapidation, and eventful history, to transform into her own home. And when at last she found this one, ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... stranger visiting Chesterton would get? He would, I think, be impressed by his genial kindliness; he would be amazed by his extraordinary powers of memory and the depths of his reading; he would be gratified by the interest that Chesterton displays in him; he would be charmed by the quaintness of his home. That Chesterton has humour is abundant by his conversation; that he has pathos is not so apparent. I am not perfectly sure that he can appreciate the things that make ordinary men sad. It has been said that he is not concerned with the facts of everyday life; if he is not, it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... sat and talked to me of her journey I had time to enjoy again the quaintness of her dress,—the quaintness of forty years before. There was the same old-fashioned, soft gray silk with up-and-down stripes spotted with sprigs of flowers, the lace cap with its frill of narrow pink ribbons and two wide pink strings that fell over the shoulders, and the handkerchief of India ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the Lay Reader. "Bibles? Why, really, Miss Flame, I couldn't countenance any sort of mock service! Even just for—for quaintness,—even ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... becoming. Vienna, with her beautiful Hotel Bristol, is such an advance in modern comfort from the best of her accommodations for travellers of a few years ago that she affords an excellent example, although for every steam-heater, modern lift, and American comfort you gain, you lose a quaintness and picturesqueness, the like of which makes Europe so worth while. The whole of civilised Europe is now engaged in a flurried debate as to the propriety of remodelling its travelled portions for the benefit of ease-loving ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Sixpennyworth of Divine Spirit:" one of these works bears the following elaborate title: "Some fine Biscuits baked in the Oven of Charity, carefully conserved for the Chickens of the Church, the Sparrows of the Spirit, and the sweet Swallows of Salvation." Sometimes their quaintness has some humour. Sir Humphrey Lind, a zealous puritan, published a work which a Jesuit answered by another, entitled "A Pair of Spectacles for Sir Humphrey Lind." The doughty knight retorted, by "A Case ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... land, and the English Channel, between himself and London, and there was much passing to and fro; and though the French Court had stories enough of its own, new ones were always welcome, English gossip being thought to have a special heavy quaintness, droll indeed. The Court of Louis found much entertainment in the Court of Anne, and the frivolities or romances of beauties who ate beef and drank beer and wore, 'twas said, the coquettish commode founded on lovely Fontange's lace handkerchief, as ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a scene—yonder you have an alley that serpentises into gloom and obscurity—and from that cliff you doubtless would see over the tree-tops into the outer and airy world. With all its natural beauties is intermingled an agreeable quaintness, that shows the owner has occasionally been working in the spirit of fancy, almost caprice; the tool-house in the garden is not without its ornaments—the barn seems habitable, and the byre has somewhat the appearance of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... were "all given by the Spirit of God," and that Christian Metz had a great gift of hymn-writing, very often, at home or elsewhere, writing down an entire hymn at one sitting. They are all deeply devotional in spirit, and have not infrequently the merit of great simplicity and a pleasing quaintness of expression, of which I think the German language is more capable than our ruder ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... quaintness and singularity of its form," said I; "it appears to be less adapted for real use than our ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... keys, the clerk walked away to his home, an ivy-covered cottage not a stone's-throw off; the clergyman lingered in the churchyard, reading the memorials on the tombstones. He was smiling at the quaintness of some of them, when the sound of hasty footsteps caused him to turn. A little girl was climbing over the churchyard-railings (as being nearer to her than the entrance-gate), and came dashing ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness—who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment;—"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... relatives. After the name of the son is written, "Dyer in cloth and silk." The notice closes with an announcement of the funeral at the cemetery, and a service at the church the day after. The advertisement I have given is not uncommon either for quaintness or simplicity. It is common to engrave upon the monument the business as well as the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of lilies and was turning, with relief, to artichokes. There was a periodical of this time entitled The Green Volume. This appeared somewhere about 1890 and it brought with it a band of young men and women who were exceedingly clever, saw the quaintness of life before its reality and stood on tiptoe in order to observe things that were really growing quite close to the ground. This quarterly produced some very admirable work; its contributors were all, for a year ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the entrance. Nor did the interior impress them less favourably. The rooms were large, and low, the ceilings, walls, floors, and staircase all of oak. The diamond-lattice windows, and narrow, tortuous passages, and innumerable nooks and crannies and cupboards, created an atmosphere of combined quaintness and comfort that irresistibly appealed to the Murphys. Viewed under the searching rays of the sun, and cheered by the voices of the visitors, the interior of the house, for artistic taste and cheerfulness, would indeed be hard to beat; but, as Mrs. Murphy's eyes wandered up the stairs ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets of Milton shall we find sentences or passages more perfect in their union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic movement of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are perplexed to understand how so exquisite an ear as ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... respecting their name might be fully satisfied, and his interest increased, if he should happen to be in Bristol on some sunny afternoon in the later part of May, or the beginning of June, by a sight of this bright "regiment of women"—the gay colour of their gowns subdued by the quaintness of their fashion, and the clean whiteness of their aprons, collars, &c.—proceeding, in double file, towards the downs, for air and recreation. An account of their foundation may be found in Barret's ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... on the lobster by dyeing his dark coat scarlet. The man was evidently a denizen of the north, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and quaintness of his language, as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes: broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic castes, coteries, sets, and sects, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... cloth, they saw nothing that jarred, as so much in London jarred. There were bright brass jugs on the window sill, a bowl of pot-pourri on the black table in the centre, an oak settee by the open fireplace, a couple of Persian rugs on the polished floor. The room had its quaintness, too, such as she had alluded to in her memorable essay read before the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture," and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas. Equally ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... set in 1614, by the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One of Overbury's sketches—the Fair and Happy Milkmaid—is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. "Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defiance ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... leaving my bed-room, when I accidentally caught a view of myself in the glass; and so mortified, so shocked was I, that I sank into a chair, and almost abandoned my resolution to go on; the very gesture I had assumed for vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... the solitary plash of a diving frog. Nay, those walls seclude me from much more than city streets. Outside them hums the changed Japan of telegraphs and newspapers and steamships; within dwell the all- reposing peace of nature and the dreams of the sixteenth century. There is a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet all about one; perhaps the gentle haunting of dead ladies who looked like the ladies of the old picture-books, and who lived here when all this ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical." He was the very antipodes of a retailer of other men's thoughts in other men's words: {170} every chapter of Boswell brings its evidence of Johnsonian eloquence, of Johnsonian quaintness, raciness, and abundance, of the surprising flights of his fancy, of the inexhaustible ingenuity of his arguments and illustrations. No talk the world has ever heard is less like the talk of a commonplace man. Yet the supreme quality of it is not the ingenuity or the oddness or the wit: it is the ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... of quaintness in both of these attitudes. We of the present are in the habit of acknowledging the autonomy of science, and the unimpeachable validity of the results of experimental research in so far as they are sanctioned by the consensus ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... yet more brightly than before. A few steps further would hide them and the edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for ever. There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not well be exceeded. But Somerset, as has been said, was an instrument of no narrow gamut: he had a key for other ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have—always with a vein of the finest autobiography—a kind of select and indirect self-revelation—often with a touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies there, that generally he suggests ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illustrations, and, perhaps, above all, the singularities of his feelings, clothed in an uncommon quaintness of style, have contributed to render it, even to modern readers, a valuable repository of amusement and information."—Warton's Milton, 2d edit. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to-day, if he have an antiquarian taste, will find himself embarrassed by the number of localities and buildings that appeal to his interest. Many of these buildings were new and undoubtedly commonplace enough at the date of Washington's visit; time and association have given them a quaintness and a significance which now make their architecture a question of ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... instant stood, hesitatingly, framing herself as a picture in the door. Mrs. Hopkinson was right,—she had "no style," unless an original and half-foreign quaintness could be called so. There was a desperate attempt visible to combine an American shawl with the habits of a mantilla, and it was always slipping from one shoulder, that was so supple and vivacious as to betray ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... rendering the characters, scenes and situations with the faithfulness and reverence due to the masterpiece of a race; using as much as possible, especially in the dialogue, the words of the original.... (The language) should be simple, though not untinged with quaintness, and even in places a certain degree of archaism.' —Pages xvi, ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... upstairs to see Edwin Edgett, the gentle-hearted literary editor of the Boston Transcript), we walked down the stairs, peeping into doorways in great curiosity. The whole building breathed a dusky and serene quaintness that pricks the imagination. It is a bit like the shop in Edinburgh (on the corner of the Leith Walk and Antigua Street, if we remember) that R.L.S. described in "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"—"it was dark and smelt of Bibles." We ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... somewhat amused by the quaintness of some of the advertisements of this sheet for the people, that style of literature being new to me; and found myself smiling over the perfections set forth as necessary, by the paragons of the earth, in both wife and servant, when I came to a dead stand. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... proof, or merits of the cause, as well as falsehood. What general truth is there, the merits of which all the world, or the one hundredth part has examined? It is smartly said somewhere, That the priest only continues what the nurse began. But the life of the remark consists in the quaintness of the antithesis between the nurse and the priest; and owes its support much more to sound than to sense. For is it possible that children should not hear something of the common and popular opinions of their country, ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... fun from fires (I sincerely trust the insurance premiums were not overdue); culled quaintness from street rows; extracted merriment from catastrophes the most ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of Arms, as in so many formal documents, something of the early form of Expression, with some traces of its piquant quaintness, are still retained. Very quaint indeed, and very extravagant also, is the style that was generally adopted by the Heralds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and yet characteristic of both the men and their times. As an example of one of these ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... the first to name Washington Irving as the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that springing step, that modest and gentle ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... people, unless ill, took their meals at the farmhouse dining room. A little quaintness of dress, some picturesque costumes—such as the blue tunics with black belts of leather, that the men wore; the full beards, that were not common then as now; the broad hats and graceful, flowing hair of the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... no sooner were they in the hall than Emilia called for her bedroom candle in a thin, querulous voice that made Tracy shout with laughter and love of her quaintness. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I should have liked a more grave and ancient mode of conveyance; but how silly to desire that! The Lady of Shalott's boat was no doubt of the latest and neatest trim, fully up to her drowsy date; and as for quaintness, no doubt a couple of hundred years hence, when our river-craft may be cigar-shaped torpedoes of aluminium for all I know, a picture of myself in my homely motor-boat, with antiquated hat and odd grey suit, will appear quaint and old-timed enough. And, anyhow, the ripple gurgled under ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was especially interested in Dr. Guthrie, who seems to be also a particular favorite of the public. He is a tall, thin man, with a kind of quaintness in his mode of expressing himself, which sometimes gives an air of drollery to his speaking. He is a minister of the Free Church, and has more particularly distinguished himself by his exertions in behalf ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... once more the freshness of youthful enjoyment. I felt also an interest in the scene from the consideration that these fleeting customs were posting fast into oblivion, and that this was perhaps the only family in England in which the whole of them was still punctiliously observed. There was a quaintness, too, mingled with all this revelry that gave it a peculiar zest: it was suited to the time and place; and as the old manor-house almost reeled with mirth and wassail, it seemed echoing back the joviality ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... two men who were standing in front of a dwelling-house appeared to be as inconsistent, and out of proportion to the silent houses, as were the actors on a stage to the painted canvas thoroughfares before which they strutted. Mr. Clinch usually had no fancies, had no eye for quaintness; besides, this was not a quaint nor romantic district, only an entrepot for silks and velvets, and Mr. Clinch was here, not as a tourist, but as a purchaser. The guidebooks had ignored Sammtstadt, and he was too good an American to waste time in looking up uncatalogued curiosities. Besides, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the pie. There is many another dingy corner, many a young antiquity, many a terrain vague with that stamp of quaintness that the city lover seeks and dwells on; and the indefinite prolongation of its streets, up hill and down dale, makes San Francisco a place apart. The same street in its career visits and unites so many different classes of society, here echoing with drays, there lying decorously silent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it was that, with an arbitrary quaintness, the babe was named without so much as a thought of consulting the mother. They assumed a proprietary interest in her, a sort of corporate ownership that had as its basis a genuine affection for and pride in Cruise's widow. It did not ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... before answering: "Do you know," she said at length, "he forgets often to remember that the children are not his very own. The little Margaret there creeps into his lap nights, calls him daddy, and melts the heart of him. And the boy with his quaintness, follows him about the house on Saturdays, and Reynolds says often enough: 'He'll be a great man, this chap, Peggy. He says some of the things I thought when I was his age.' He's taken to calling me Peggy since the children came to make a ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... of this sad little Society was passionately to ignore what they contemptuously called local talent. It is true that there was not much to ignore, and, after all, it has now to be recorded to their credit that they did unreservedly give Theophilus Londonderry his chance. By what quaintness of accident he could not imagine, he suddenly found himself invited to lecture before them. The invitation read something like a command, and there seemed to be an implication that if all were satisfactory, he might thus earn the right of acknowledging the patronage of the Literary ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... degrees and with due deliberation, when I shall have had time to assemble the necessary words. But, the more I look at you the more uneasy I feel as to what my fiancee of to-morrow may be like. Almost pretty, I grant you, you are,—in virtue of quaintness, delicate hands, miniature feet, but ugly after all, and absurdly small. You look like ouistitis, like little china ornaments, like I don't know what. I begin to understand that I have arrived at this house at an ill-chosen ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Chelsea that has arisen on the ashes of the old might well arouse the admiration even of the most exasperated foreigner. There are recently created regions in that great tract of the earth's surface known as South Kensington which in their quaintness of architectural form and braveness of red brick can defy the gloom of a civic March or November. Old London is disappearing day by day, but bits of it remain, bits dear to those familiar with them, bits worth the enterprise ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... lean, up-country Cracker, (an half-civilized native,) who commences telling his story with commendable simplicity, the Judge in the meanwhile endeavoring to suppress a smile, which the quaintness of his remarks excite. Making a tenement of his cart, as is usual with these people when they visit the city, which they do now and then for the purpose of replenishing their stock of whiskey, he had, about eleven o'clock on the previous night, been set ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... they had already imported cows, and a bull whose lowings terrified the Esquimaux. They had found self-sown corn too, probably maize. The streams were full of salmon. But they had called the land Vinland, by reason of its grapes. Quaint enough, and bearing in its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the first finding of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the Fortunate, almost as soon as he first landed, missed a little wizened old German servant of his father's, Tyrker ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... rail that an old shellback leaned on in the middle watch, would bring me up all standing. But come, let's see some more of the island. It's all sand and coral and palm trees; but there's a kind of a quaintness ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... was the greatest comfort to him, for whenever he was off his sleep, which sometimes happened to him, he had only to take one of the novels, and before he read two pages it was sure to set him asleep. Tom, with the usual shrewdness common to his countrymen in that class of life, joined a quaintness and drollery in his notions and mode of expressing himself that was very amusing; he was familiar, but at the same time perfectly respectful, although he was sometimes tempted to deal sharp cuts, particularly at Sir Adam Ferguson, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... sturdily nursed its own interests as a fishing port; yet a study of its Borough Accounts proves that it could be generous at times, and these accounts are such delightful reading that a few extracts must be quoted. They begin with the year 1573; the quaintness of diction and the "indifferent spelling" add piquancy and remoteness ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... only Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics of a few generations back, who admired him simply and solely for what they called his 'quaintness'; while Mr. Gosse has flown to the opposite extreme, and will not allow Browne any sense of humour at all. The confusion no doubt arises merely from a difference in the point of view. Mr. Gosse, regarding Browne's most important and general effects, rightly fails ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... monotonous phraseology. They ask for what is desired plainly and earnestly, and never could be shortened by a syllable. The following series of ejaculations are deep in spirituality, and curiously to our present purpose in the philological quaintness of being built ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... testifies to the "daring fiery spirit" which animates his translation, and says that it is not unlike what Homer himself might have written in his youth—surely not a grudging praise. But though this is true, I will venture to assert that Chapman also sins, not merely by his love of quaintness, but by constantly indulging in sheer doggerel. If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional verbiage smothers and ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... told everybody again how lame I was. So five wardresses carried me there, but they dropped me twice on the way. It was a very interesting cell, the punishment cell was. If it had been in the Tower, everybody would go to look at it because of its quaintness. There were two pools of water near to the bed. I was three days in the cell, and those pools of water were always there; I could see them because from where I lay on the bed the light glinted on them. Just one gleam from the tiny cobwebby window high up. I hadn't anything to read, of course, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... it. Mrs. Chester moved fondly from one flower-bed to another, and while the sisters eagerly filled her hands with their choicest bloom Yvonne privately got a disturbed glance to Corinne that drew the four indoors again. There the outside quaintness tempted Mrs. Chester at once to a front window, with Mlle. Yvonne at ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... appearance and manner, a half-shrinking and smiling diffidence, an unworn and childlike ardor and unconsciousness, a freshness of feeling and frankness of address, invested his personality with what we call quaintness. He was always active, even to apparent restlessness, not from nervous excitement, but from fulness of life and sympathy. You might think of a humming-bird darting from flower to flower, of a honey-bee happy in a garden. ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Captain Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship's own quaintness, somewhat diluted. The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet's ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... sonnet on which I invite minute criticism. I endeavoured in it at a more Miltonic plainness and severity than I have any- where else. I cannot say it has turned out severe, still less plain, but it seems almost free from quaintness and in aiming at one excellence I ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... spicy aroma of tropical fruits, and the perpetual snow of-lofty peaks is reflected on fields of golden maize and on meadows that gleam and glitter in the bright sunlight as if paved with emeralds. It is contrast, not similitude, that attracts the eye, novelty more than beauty, and quaintness rather than such gorgeous sights as one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... State. Then Mr. Blaine must have met the glance of his late associates in President Arthur's Cabinet —Folger, of impressive manner; Lincoln, to whom the proceedings of the day rekindled the saddest of recollections; Brewster, noticeable by the quaintness of his dress; Kirkwood, of plain, homely ways and dress, and the Creole-like Hunt. By the side of these Mr. Blaine saw his own successor in the Cabinet, Frelinghuysen and with him Postmaster-General Howe. A little to the left, resplendent in ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... some time. I settled upon my usual efficacious remedy in desultory hours—old Burton's Anatomie, and dropped with it into the window-seat. I have seldom found him to fail me on such emergencies—his quaintness, his humour, the lavish prodigality of learning and extraordinary thinking that loads his pages, never to me lose their freshness. Yet on the present occasion I found them fix me with more difficulty than I ever before, or I believe since, experienced. My mind wandered constantly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... talked politics with his host; how they went out to the barn afterwards to look at the stock; what Greeley said to him and what he said to Greeley,—it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... gray old man lugged out of his coat-tail pocket a whole newspaper, and having pinched from it a most economical fragment, singed his fingers at the bars in the act of lighting it. He had laughed at that little quaintness a hundred times as a lad, and it was somehow the first thing that had come home to him as a real reminder to be in want ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... in the face of a gold locket, on the back of which there was a curl of the same fair hair. It was so fresh and glossy that it might have been cut off the day before. But the quaintness of the setting and the costume of the portrait showed that it had been taken many years previous, and that in the order of nature ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... to modern usage, are printed with all the peculiarities of eighteenth century orthography. It was felt that they would lose their quaintness and charm if Holbach's somewhat fantastic English were trifled with or his spelling, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... be a pity to replace the vivacity and quaintness and felicity of Susy's innocent free spelling with the dull and petrified uniformities of the spelling-book. Nearly all the grimness it taken out of the "expergating" of my books by the subtle mollification ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... noble old castle where King Rene used to spend his springs and summers when he was tired of living in state at Aix. There is the church of Saint Martha, and the beautiful Hotel de Ville, and—almost best of all for its quaintness, though far from beautiful—the great Tarasque lurking in a dark and ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... comments upon a simple text reveal endless subtleties of thought. Indeed, he continued to make a fairly logical sequence of incidents out of the famous nonsense paragraph invented to confound mnemonics by its absolute irrelevancy. Miss Greenaway's charm lies in the fact that she first recognised quaintness in what had been considered merely "old fashion," and continued to infuse it with a glamour that made it appear picturesque. Had she dressed her figures in contemporary costume most probably her work would have taken its place with the average, and never obtained ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Nan, simply; and then she added, with quaintness that was pathetic, "You see, we are so unused to the feeling, and it is over-hard at first: by and by we shall be more used to not having our ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... round, and a gentleman, finding it rather difficult to open, incautiously applied a dessert-knife to the lid. Poor Brummell was on thorns; at last he could not contain himself any longer, and, addressing the host, said, with his characteristic quaintness, "Will you be good enough to tell your friend that my ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Goldsmith. Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... two hundred miles north of Madrid, and is reached by railway. Here the first impression upon the stranger is that of quaintness. It is a damp, cold, dead-and-alive place, with but three monuments worthy of our attention. These are its unrivalled cathedral, its Carthusian monastery, and its convent of Huelgas; and yet there is a tinge of the romantic Castilian period about its musty old streets ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... precision of the adults from whom they had learned it. They had never heard the argot of American childhood, but from mammy and from the tongue of their adopted land they had acquired a soft slurring of speech which gave a certain quaintness to their diction. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Ucayali, a branch of the Amazons flowing from the south, and therefore, from an opposite direction to that of the Napo. An account of this journey was sent by D'Aguirre, in a letter to the King of Spain, from which Humboldt has given an extract in his narrative. As it is a good specimen of the quaintness of style and looseness of statement exhibited by these early narrators of adventures in South America, I will give ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors, that the idea of imitation is almost done away. There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress. The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require their point and pungency to be neutralized ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... appurtenances spoke of an old regime that was here continued rather than suggested to the memory. The plate was rich to the extent that its age and quaintness alone saved it from being showy; there were interesting names signed in the corners of the pictures on the walls; the viands were of the kind that bring a shine into the eyes of gourmets. The service was swift, silent, lavish, as in the days when the waiters were assets like the plate. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... desired to see, and Reuben forthwith ordered it. So that it insensibly came to pass that the daily life of the little household was really an intellectual one, and Elder Kinney's original and vigorous mind expanded fast in the congenial atmosphere. Yet he lost none of his old quaintness and simplicity of phrase, none of his fervor. The people listened to his sermons with wondering interest, and were not slow to ascribe some of the credit of the ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... are from a European standpoint, but on more intimate knowledge this quaintness resolves itself into a slavish adaptability to the smallest circumstances in their daily struggle for existence. To a man who has been some years in the country, and who has tried to understand local conditions, ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... Rebellion in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes published the Leviathan, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter, with his Saints' Everlasting Rest sent a book of religious consolation into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his Religio Medici; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his Compleat Angler how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller, born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town, Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his Holy ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... that kind, which happened to a lady of his acquaintance. There is a great deal of wit in them, rather too much; for, according to the taste of those times, they are full of what the Italians call 'concetti spiritosissimi'; the Spaniards 'agudeze'; and we, affectation and quaintness. I hope you have endeavored to suit your 'Traineau' to the character of the fair-one whom it is to contain. If she is of an irascible, impetuous disposition (as fine women can sometimes be), you will doubtless ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... anachronism," let us now leave Caractacus in the carpet—while our reason has recourse to the philosophy of criticism. Mr Horne asserts, that in "Mr Pope's" highly-finished paraphrase of the "Wife of Bath's Prologue," and the "Merchant's Tale," "the licentious humour of the original is divested of its quaintness and obscurity, and becomes yet more licentious in proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is brought into the light." Quaintness and obscurity!! Why, everything in those tales is as plain as a pike-staff, and clearer than mud. "The hazy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... story laying the plot first in America and subsequently, in the other stories, in other countries. The author's intimate knowledge and deep insight into the life and surroundings of the young heroines in the various countries add distinct educational value to the pronounced charm and quaintness of the stories. A peculiarly timely series of books for young readers who have been following the progress of ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... He says something about the Court of Crown Cases Reserved... Ah, what place on this earth bears a name so mystically majestic? Even in the commonest forensic phrases there is often this solemnity of cadence, always a quaintness, that stirs the imagination... The grizzled junior dares interject something 'with submission,' and is finally advised to see 'my learned brother in chambers.' 'As your Lordship pleases.'... We pass to the business of the day. I settle ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... nothing of the sort," retorted the General. "I trust I am not so lacking in manners. I merely remarked its beauty and quaintness and massiveness and general artistry. My host expressed pleasure at my appreciation of its qualities and volunteered the information that it was a little thing he had picked up in a curio shop on Regent Street, London, last summer. He had acquired it in perfect good faith. What its history had ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... the buds open on the bush" is most original, the national dance in the second act is full of fire and the rope dancers' march is truly Slavonic in its quaintness. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of European white slavery. Here is one reference, I see, in my notes on that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but it is a good instance of the power of the King of the Valley of Diamonds[153] ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a curiosity and eagerness that seemed almost childlike Elizabeth turned over rings, chains, and brooches, scarcely listening to Alwyn's comments on the lustre of the gems or the quaintness of the fashion, the duchess disappeared for a moment, and returned with ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... preserved its outer shell of quaintness and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... from ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of that unhappy kind which nobody has desired to possess for their own sake, and nobody ever will. Something there will be of original genius, or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out-of-the-way information, or of quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some class of men, whether a literary or a polemical,—something, in short, which people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to read,—such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from annihilation, that they may find ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... midst of familiarity. What had she in common with all this mean wretchedness, with this semi-barbarous breed of beings? The more she looked, the more her heart sank. There was no flaunting vice, no rowdiness, no drunkenness, only the squalor of an oriental city without its quaintness and color. She studied the posters and the shop-windows, and caught old snatches of gossip from the groups in the butchers' shops—all seemed as of yore. And yet here and there the hand of Time had traced new inscriptions. For Baruch Emanuel ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... fire-place, with its concomitant ornament, a profusely-carved mantel-piece of the usual time-stained oak, was at least five feet high, and more than two feet broad; its ingenious workmanship occupied his attention, and kept him for some time engaged in curious admiration of its exquisite quaintness. The other furniture consisted of chairs, a chest-of-drawers, and a table, all the work of a former age. An easy chair was placed in the middle of the room, in which the stout gentleman composed himself luxuriously for a short ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various |
