"Coarseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worsted more valuable than the other worsted at 32s?-Yes, we can always get a better price; and indeed the article is much more valuable when made of fine white Shetland wool than of fine white English wool, because there is a hardness and coarseness in the English wool that is not in ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... very elaborate rose-bud. There was an appearance of ultra-refinement about her, a look of that refinement which is in itself a weakness, a poverty of blood, so to speak, the opposite and more pleasing but equally unhealthy extreme of coarseness. She looked very pretty as, having left Ruth, she stood by Charles, passing her little pink hand over the lowest carvings, dim and worn with the heat of many generations of fires, and listened with rapt attention to his ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe. Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ginger-cake—and you shall have a new cap," &c. Surely, thought I, our custom of praising and abusing our public men in the newspapers, is far more rational than this. After the novelty of the scene was over, I became wearied and disgusted with their coarseness, violence, and want of decency, and we left them without waiting to see the result of ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... there were no singers to execute, even if the composer had the ability to conceive. Thus Percell's melody, though often original and expressive, is nevertheless more often rude and ungraceful. In the words of a recent writer on this subject, "We are often surprised to find elegance and coarseness, symmetry and clumsiness, mixed in a way that would be unaccountable, did we not consider that, in all the arts, the taste is a faculty which is slowly formed, even in the most highly gifted minds." We suspect that the pageant saved King ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... at last came and sank down in a very low position at Wych Hazel's feet on the carpet. She was a pretty girl; might have been extremely pretty, if her very pronounced style of manners had not drawn lines of boldness, almost of coarseness, where the lip should have been soft and the eyebrow modest. The whole expression was dissatisfied and jaded to-day, over and above those lines, which even ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... of man as but a sojourner m the prison of the body—a blending of that with such a relish for merely bodily graces as availed to set the fashion in matters of dress, deportment, accent, and the like, nay! with something also which reminded Marius of the vein of coarseness he had found in the "Golden Book." All this made the total impression he conveyed a very uncommon one. Marius did not wonder, as he watched him speaking, that people freely attributed to him many of the marvellous adventures he had recounted ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... deserved the praise of modern students. The Satyricon, a severe satire on the Jesuits, is modelled on Petronius and catches his lightness of touch, though it shows little or nothing of the tone of its model, or of the unhesitating severity and coarseness of the humanistic satire of Barclay's age. The Argenis is a long romance, with a monitory purpose on the dangers of political intrigue, probably suggested to him by his experiences of the league in France, and by the catholic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... bluntness. He mentioned, as a striking instance of this, a brief chorus in C major of male and female nymphs in the third act. By the introduction of a more moderate tempo and very soft piano I had tried to free this from the original coarseness with which Devrient had heard it rendered in Berlin—presumably with traditional fidelity. My most innocent device, and one which I frequently adopted, for disguising the irritating stiffness or the orchestral movement in the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... cowards in the daylight. But who can tell which holds the more peril for the soldier? He faces the terror that cometh by night, the destruction that walketh by day, and the pestilence that wasteth at noonday. But night is often kindly—it brings the balm of sleep to our tired bodies and covers coarseness and filth with a softening veil. No Man's Land at night is more beautiful than by day, for we need not know of the horror we do not see, and it shuts us off from sight of our enemies, and lets us feel that the wall is thick and strong ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... nicer tone among the Royal Service girls, and more reticence in their discussions of the subject than at Miss Blackburne's, where the girls were not at all high-minded, and talked of their chances with the utmost frankness, not to say coarseness; but good looks were held to be the best, if not the only means to the end in both sets. Money and accomplishments might help, but personal appearance was the great certainty; and Beth was naturally impressed with this idea like the rest. Marriage, however, was far from ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... which may characterize the taste or manners of the people or the age from which it has been derived. She has transfused into her German or Scandinavian legends the imaginative and daring tone of the originals, without the mystical exaggerations of the one, or the painful fierceness and coarseness of the other—she has preserved the clearness and elegance of the French, without their coldness or affectation—and the tenderness and simplicity of the early Italians, without their diffuseness or languor. Though occasionally expatiating, somewhat fondly and at large, among ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... though he lacked the poet's sense, his wit did something to repair the defect, and even if it has a musty flavour for our pampered palates, it saves his writings from becoming unbearably wearisome; and moreover his fun was without that element of coarseness which mars the comic scenes of later dramatists who appealed to more popular audiences. But it is quite impossible for us to realise how brilliant his wit seemed to the Elizabethans before it was eclipsed by the genius of Shakespeare. Even as late ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... pleasure-loving population, the holiday portion of the programme being preceded, of course, by a religious service in the chapel. The aspect of the place is then that of a fair, without the humour and fun, but, at the same time, without the noise and coarseness of similar holidays in England. Large rooms are set apart for panoramic and other exhibitions, to which the public is admitted gratis. In the course of each evening, large displays of fireworks take place, all arranged according to a published ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... hesitation. I accept beforehand any terms you like to mention. If your present plans point that way, I am ready to squeeze Mr. Noel Vanstone, in your interests, till the gold oozes out of him at every pore. Pardon the coarseness of this metaphor. My anxiety to be of service to you rushes into words; lays my meaning, in the rough, at your feet; and leaves your taste to polish it with the choicest ornaments of the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "Sippara sha Shamash," while the other gave lustre to Anunit in assuming the designation of "Sippara sha Anunitum." Rightly interpreted, these family arrangements of the gods had but one reason for their existence—the necessity of explaining without coarseness those parental connections which the theological classification found it needful to establish between the deities constituting the two triads. In Chaldaea as in Egypt there was no inclination to represent the divine families as propagating their species otherwise than ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... imitations of manners and persons, combining the features of comedy and farce, for comedy represents the characters of a class, farce those of individuals. Their essence was that of the modern pantomime, and their coarseness, and even indecency, gratified the love of broad humor which characterized the Roman people. After a time, when they became established as popular favorites, the dialogue occupied a more prominent position, and was written in verse, like that of tragedy and comedy. During the dictatorship of Caesar, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... must be genteel in his college judgments, that 'The Polite Letter Writer' was the work of an M.A. in the 'Augustan Age.' You may find in Shakespeare household words and phrases from every condition and walk in life—as much coarseness as you please to look for—anything and everything except gentility and vulgarity. Occasional vulgarity is, therefore, a question on which I refuse to take the opinion of any man not well known ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... are all hid away; an extreme sensibility reigns upon the surface; and ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers. Some will be even crying out upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of this paragraph. And so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to cut a man's flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and tender ones {110} keep at home. You have no trouble in 'keeping down' the spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... things evil than to brand the stamp of evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and results are substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and vulgarity of the materials employed we measure the gentlemanliness and beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of its treatment of imposture, but for the rest of the world it will still teach the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... not—how will you help it?" He was now thoroughly angry, and all his native coarseness came to ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... feature. The features, in the people of every race, are offensive when they are coarse and carnal. For example, among a class of the Irish peasantry long ignorance and lowdown life have given to the children an heredity of ingrained coarseness. It is visible in a certain stamp of the features. Education and elevation will gradually reduce the animalism of the face. With good breeding, in generations the lips grow thinner; the face takes on character and even ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... same considerateness from school children. I had not, it seemed, sufficiently allowed for the influence upon manners of the atmosphere of refinement which surrounds the child of to-day from the cradle. These young people had never seen coarseness, rudeness, or brusqueness on the part of any one. Their confidence had never been abused, their sympathy wounded, or their suspicion excited. Having never imagined such a thing as a person socially superior ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... to Mademoiselle de Guerchi how imminent was her danger. At first she had thought the commander's visit might be a snare laid to test her, but the coarseness of his expressions, the cynicism of his overtures in the presence of a third person, had convinced her she was wrong. No man could have imagined that the revolting method of seduction employed could meet with success, and if the commander had desired to convict her of perfidy he would have ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was there, Commandant of Artillery, a brave officer, but a bad man; Varin, a proud, arrogant libertine, Commissary of Montreal, who outdid Bigot in rapine and Cadet in coarseness; De Breard, Comptroller of the Marine, a worthy associate of Penisault, whose pinched features and cunning leer were in keeping with his important office of chief manager of the Friponne. Perrault, D'Estebe, Morin, and Vergor, all creatures of the Intendant, swelled the roll of infamy, as partners ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... varied, so earnest and glowing, his anecdotes so racy, his perception of character so shrewd, and the whole tone so spontaneous and natural, that the want of repose was rather recalled afterwards than felt at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and congruity,—that perfect ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... French towns. The heroine is a kind of Flemish Carmen, a wicked siren named Rita, who seduces the poet Merlyn from his bride, and after dragging him to the depths of infamy and despair, dies in the end by his hand. The music, though not without a touch of coarseness, overflows with life and energy, and one scene in particular, that of a Flemish Kermesse, is masterly in its judicious and convincing use of local colour. Jan Blockx's later works, 'Thyl Uylenspiegel' (1900), 'De Bruid van der Zee' (1901) ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... had determined to marry her. Louisa had always been repelled by his coarseness and rough ways, and when he proposed for her hand she shrank from the thought. If her father had ever encouraged her confidence she might then have thrown herself on his breast and told him all that she felt, but to Mr. Gradgrind marriage was ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own name quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor does the coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschylean parallel. Even the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet would have found a true gossip in her of the Agamemnon, who is so indiscreet in her confidences concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right or not in warning historians ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place, without and within,—a true home for every one of his children. It matters not if she is poor, if she has to toil for her daily bread, or even if she is surrounded by coarseness and uncongeniality: nothing can deprive her of her natural instinct to help, of her birthright as a helper. These very hindrances may, with faith and patience, develop in ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... there was something striking in that appearance. Face, figure and dress represented the wreck of more than one kind of distinction. The face must once have been exceptionally handsome, before an underlying commonness and coarseness had been brought out or emphasized by developments of character and circumstance. The mouth was now loose and heavy. The hazel eyes had lost their youth, and were disfigured by the premature wrinkles of either ill-health or dissipation. None the less, a ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... devotion to a depressing theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare, audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for thought. And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the enigmatic mind of a new friend, to ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... time forward, however, Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's influence was perceptibly upon the wane. Even Colonel Colquhoun wearied of her—to Evadne's great regret. For Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's vulgarity and coarseness of mind were always balanced by her undoubted propriety of conduct, and her faults were altogether preferable to the exceeding polish and refinement which covered the absolutely corrupt life of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... existence—we will not say life—of a Kalmuk paterfamilias. At their laborious days, however, the women never repine; they are accustomed to the burden, and bear it cheerfully; but they age very early, and after a few years of wedlock, not only lose their good looks, but acquire a coarseness of feature and a robustness of figure which make it exceedingly difficult to distinguish them from men. Nor is the difficulty lessened by the fact that the costume of both sexes ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... The coarseness of Skelton's satires and his open disregard of the clerical vows of chastity may justify some doubt of the value of the poet's influence on Henry's character; but he so far observed the conventional duties of his post as to dedicate to his royal pupil, in 1501, a moral treatise ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... extraordinary commonplaces, as in the comparison of popular favor to a weathercock, and of woman's love to a flower worn, then thrown aside; and a constant lapsing from the energy and spirit of the dialogue into flatness, familiarity and triviality. There is an occasional not unwholesome coarseness which recalls Mr. Story's Elizabethan masters, as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... to his girl at the firemen's ball the night before, and then translate it into some of this first-class poetry. That'll be a great play," said Tolly, as I came down-stairs just as he had turned page twenty-five of Peter's manuscript. Tolly's coarseness doesn't affect me as it does Edith because there is always so ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... woman's rough usage. He wanted to take her away, to give her a friendly caution, to advise her not to become a bore, not to expose herself. But she held up her beautiful head as to show how little she cared at present for any exposure, and that (it was half coarseness—Madame Carre was so far right—and half fortitude) she had no intention of coming away so long as; there was anything to be picked up. She sat and still she sat, challenging her hostess with every sort of question—some reasonable, some ingenious, some strangely futile and some ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... often been reproached by writers for the coarseness of their taste; but our present grievance does not seem to be the want of a good ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... papers. There was a contrast between Christian congregations and infidel meetings. One had the appearance of purity and elevation; while the other had the stamp of pollution and degradation. Irreligion seemed the nurse of coarseness and barbarism. Some of the secularists actually argued against civilization, as Rousseau had done before them. One of them reprinted Burke's ironical work in favor of the savage state, and sent it to me for review, and was greatly offended because I refused ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... was a man of perhaps sixty-four, if indeed guardians have ages, and like a doctor rather than a squire; his face square and puffy, his eyes always half-closed, and his curly mouth using bluntly a voice of that refined coarseness peculiar to people ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... sad as he looked at this great, strapping woman, whose red face was the very representative of coarseness and meanness. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... among mountains; it was not an open joyous bay, with a cheerful populous village, like Luss; but a pastoral and retired spot, with a few single dwellings. The people of the inn stared at us when we spoke, without giving us an answer immediately, which we were at first disposed to attribute to coarseness of manners, but found afterwards that they did not understand us at once, Erse being the language spoken in the family. Nothing but salt meat and eggs for dinner—no potatoes; the house smelt strongly of herrings, which were hung to dry ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... The word hildlng or hinderling—a low wretch; it is applied to Catharine for the coarseness of her behaviour. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... vivacity of his performance of a whole range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish, refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor, carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that the broadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity; and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, was never anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member of the French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a more delightfully amusing ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... monks, in its coarseness and simplicity, would not commend itself to our modern dudes; but, then, life is a terrible reality to these brothers, who, hearing the voice of God, have hastened to follow his call, fully realizing, that without the one thing ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... one characteristic, he could not also show a diametrically opposite quality—that, for instance, because tenderness, delicacy of feeling, and a high sense of reverence and of honour were undoubtedly integral parts of his personality, the stories told by his contemporaries of his occasional coarseness ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the ONLY KNOWN, harmless, pleasant and absolutely *SURE* and infallible cure. It positively and effectively removes ALL, clean and completely IN A FEW DAYS ONLY, leaving the skin clear and unblemished always, and clearing it of all muddiness and coarseness. It is a true remedy to cure and NOT a paint or powder to cover up and hide blemishes. Mailed in a plain, sealed wrapper for 30c., or 2 for 50c. by George N. Stoddard, Druggist, 1226 Niagara St., ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... recite in that horrible, rasping tone sometimes heard, than it is to sing with harsh tone; and if the same principles are applied to the speaking-voice as are herein given for the management of the singing-voice, in so far as they may be applicable, this harshness and coarseness may be avoided. It is the pushed, forced tone in speech or song that ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... dramatists after the Restoration—and may be said in some measure to be compounded of Captain Fluellen and Bobadil;—but the ludicrous combination of the SOLDADO with the Divinity student of Mareschal-College, is entirely original; and the mixture of talent, selfishness, courage, coarseness, and conceit, was never so happily exemplified. Numerous as his speeches are, there is not one that is not characteristic—and, to our ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... builds her nest and carefully provides for the comfort of her young long ere she lays her fragile egg. Even look at that vulgar-looking beetle, whose coarse form would banish the idea of any rational feeling existing in its brain—the Billingsgate fish-woman of its tribe in coarseness and rudeness of exterior (Scarabaeus carnifex)—see with what quickness she is running backward, raised almost upon her head, while with her bind legs she trundles a large ball; herself no bigger than a nutmeg, the ball is four times the size. There she goes along the ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... degrees in the frankness with which this convention has been accepted, according perhaps to the coarseness of the canvas ground, perhaps to the personality of the worker. The animal forms at the top of Illustration 6 are uncompromisingly square; the floral devices on the same page, though they fall, as it were inevitably, into square lines, are less rigidly formal. The inevitableness ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... Associations. Through it pass the sympathy and the help of the earnest workers in the older churches to the earnest workers in our mission churches and schools. The people for whom we labor cannot be saved either for this world or the next, unless the women who make the homes are lifted out of coarseness and vice, and taught true womanhood and womanly duties and arts. The Woman's Bureau is a most potent factor in the work of bringing the Gospel to the rescue of ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889 • Various
... something contemptible, unworthy of a noble mind; and it must be admitted that according to the contemporary "Fabliaux," later German comedies and Italian and French novels, the sexual manifestations of the period, were of incredible coarseness. As against these, spiritual love was not merely an artistic and theoretic concept, but the profound emotion of the cultured minds, and remained a powerful and creative force even in later centuries. Spiritual love and sexuality were irreconcilable contradistinctions; the man who thought otherwise ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... compact, and exclusive world in existence, perhaps, is a ship at sea—especially an emigrant ship—for here we find an epitome of the great world itself. Here may be seen, in small compass, the operations of love and hate, of wisdom and stupidity, of selfishness and self-sacrifice, of pride, passion, coarseness, urbanity, and all the other virtues and vices which tend to make the world at large—a mysterious ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... confidence-destroying quality that lurked subtly in his aspect, he was not repulsive to look upon. His features were delicate enough, his restless mouth was even pretty, and his carriage graceful. He had little of the coarseness of industrialism—probably because he was not industrial. His age was about twenty, and he might have sold Signals in the street, or run illegal errands for street-bookmakers. At any rate, it was certain that he was not above earning a chance copper ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a challenge in her glance, but the man, not knowing what was expected of him, made no answer. At first he had been almost repelled by the girl, but he was becoming mildly interested in her. She could, he thought, be daring to the verge of coarseness, and he did not admire her pessimism, which was probably a pose; but there was a vein of elfish mischief in her that appealed to him. Sitting among the heather, small, lithe, and felinely graceful, watching him with a provocative smile in her rather narrow ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... that these indecencies could not have emanated from a pure, chaste woman; that Marguerite must have experienced the sins she depicted; but such reasoning is not sound. The expressions used by her were current in her time; there was greater freedom of manners, and coarseness and drastic language—examples of which are found so frequently in the writings of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... sure that nothing escaped his intelligence. To Hilda, shocked by the coarseness and the obtuseness which evidently characterized his attitude, now as on other occasions, this self-confidence was ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... service, and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon—youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor must have become, in his measure, actually ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... dishes. She made a resolution to ask him again and provide both these luxuries. To-day she would take him into the parlour and make Ellen show off her accomplishments, which would help put a varnish of gentility on the general coarseness of the entertainment. She wished she had asked Mr. Pratt—she had thought of doing so, but finally decided ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry will furnish an example of the coarseness of invective used by both parties during the era of the Reformation; in such rhymes as "Plain Truth and Blind Ignorance"—"A Ballad of Luther and the Pope," &c. The old interlude of "Newe Custome," printed in Dodsley's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the table on which he leant. His whole being was in a surge of physical loathing—the revulsion of feeling was bewildering and complete. So this was what Frenchmen thought of women, what they could say of them, when the mask was off, and they were at their ease. The witty brutality, the naked coarseness of the thing scourged the boy's shrinking sense. Freedom, passion—yes! but this! In his wild recoil he stood again under the Arc de Triomphe watching her figure disappear. Ah! pardon! That he should be listening at all seemed to a conscience, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... multitudes who have never read the One Hoss-Shay or The Courtin'. And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts large portions of their writings below the line where real literature begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... pretty much as does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him, and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain himself. I remember what he said about him because it ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... whole affair kept hammering at her thoughts. To think that she had tied herself up with such a creature. To think that she had been so blind to the coarseness, the commonness that must have been there all along. What would Aunt Susie think about it? What would they all think? And in her own room! The brazen, callous nerve of the creature! Like a big, fat, lumbering ox. She trembled all over ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... take off the irony) where he could not show his indignation, hath shewn his contempt, as much as possible; having here drawn as vile a picture as could be represented in the colours of Epic poesy."[3] On these grounds Pope justified the coarseness of his allusions to Mrs. Thomas (Corinna) and Eliza Haywood. But a statement of high moral purpose from the author of "The Dunciad" was almost inevitably the stalking-horse of an unworthy action. Mr. Pope's reasons, real and professed, for giving Mrs. Haywood ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... The coarseness of the voices startled him, whether he comprehended the words or not. He shrank away from more interruption and more insult, into the quieter road that led to ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... me, brother, with the greater attention," pursued the priest. "I objected to the coarseness of your tone in talking of our young pupil and your daughter; I object still more strongly to your insinuation that my desire to see them married (provided always that they are sincerely attached to each other) springs from ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... grasp on the merry company, the toasters and speakers lose more and more their control over speech and actions. What was at first mischievous abandon and merry jest, gradually degenerates into loquaciousness, coarseness and querulous brawls. Here and there one of the maudlin crowd drops off ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... top, but Julia saw these things as little as any one else—as little as she saw the disorderly welter of theatrical effects in the Poveys' neglected rooms, the paint on the women's faces, the ugly violence and coarseness of their talk. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Second, he has pointed out in the character of Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be glad that he has appeared, I ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the talk for and against Board School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Porthos scanned him from head to foot and smiled when he discovered that in spite of the blow he had administered to Parry's brother, he was not nearly so strong as himself. Athos and Aramis suppressed as well as they could the disgust they felt in the presence of such coarseness ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... if coarse, was kind; and that time it would be hard to say whether her kindness or her coarseness did me the most good; for the latter roused me, between indignation and horror, to a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... nor of ill nature. In a land where there were no newspapers, telegraphs, telephones, railroads, or neighbours, it seemed like the expression of a confidence which had in it neither malice nor impertinent coarseness. And yet Bauer was puzzled to know what Clifford's real feeling was towards Miss Gray even after Clifford's own open statement made to him that day while they were sitting on the old cottonwood by ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... sceptical and the non-sceptical: it is touched superficially with the coloring of superstition, with its tenderness, its humility, its thankfulness, its awe; but, on the other hand, it is not therefore tainted with the coarseness, with the silliness, with the credulity of superstition. Such a faith reposes upon the universal signs diffused through nature, and blends with the mysterious of natural grandeurs wherever found—with the mysterious of the starry heavens, with the mysterious of music, and with that infinite form ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... shown in this novel is the degree to which the high society of this time was, under its exterior gorgeousness, barbarous and vulgar. A German girl, maid-of-honor to the wife of Alexis, defines it in the following way: "Brandy, blood, coarseness. It is hard to say which is most prominent,—perhaps it is coarseness." The boyards[13] she describes as: "Impudent savages, baptized bears, who only make themselves more ridiculous when they ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... alone. Mame goes and sits apart. She detests Brisbille, who is the personification of envy, malice and coarseness. And everybody hates this marionette, too, for his drunkenness and his forward notions. All the same, when there is something you want him to do, you choose Sunday morning to call, and you linger there, knowing that you will meet others. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... outside the order of a particular cause, except through some other impeding cause; which other cause must itself be reduced to the first universal cause; as indigestion may occur outside the order of the nutritive power by some such impediment as the coarseness of the food, which again is to be ascribed to some other cause, and so on till we come to the first universal cause. Therefore as God is the first universal cause, not of one genus only, but of all being in general, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... is a miracle; and to see no silver at all but turned into water, which they can bring again into itself out of the water. And here I was made thoroughly to understand the business of the fineness and coarseness of metals, and have put down my lessons with my other observations therein. At table among other discourse they told us of two cheats, the best I ever heard. One, of a labourer discovered to convey away the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to substitute masculine qualities which scarcely befit them, for the feminine qualities which constitute their grace, their strength, and their dignity; thence results a certain something unpleasant and rude which does no credit to the New World. I by no means admire coarseness, and I do not admit that it is the necessary companion of energy; the tone of the journals and of the debates in Congress is often calculated to excite a just reprobation. There is in the United States a levelling spirit, a jealousy of acquired superiority, and, above ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... led away to the final scene of his drama. Before the adjustment of the hempen order he was enlivened by the brutal taunts and lampoons of his master; who, forgetful of his own narrow escape from the grave, jested, with an unparalleled coarseness, on the fate awaiting the condemned ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... face and form which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by instinct, although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique, set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never left her, came, ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the dress or obligations of their sex. Many were clothed as the men were, in flannel shirt and boots; rode their mules in unfeminine fashion, but with much ease and courage; and in their conversation successfully rivalled the coarseness of their lords. I think, on the whole, that those French lady writers who desire to enjoy the privileges of man, with the irresponsibility of the other sex, would have been delighted with the disciples ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... but, since the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England produce feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, and though admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness of the original stock. The men are manlike, but the women are not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the male. To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few, and their behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with thick fur; which, notwithstanding its coarseness, is much prized for various purposes. They afford much sport to those inclined for such exercises; but the cruel practice of bear-baiting is discontinued. In an old edition of Hudibras, there is a curious note of a mode of running at the devoted bears with wheelbarrows, on which they ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... plainly that they are exceptional. Society, he says, is as moral as ever it was, and given more to frivolity than to vice[12]—a statement judiciously overlooked by some of the critics who want to make graphic history out of his novels. Fielding's mind had gathered coarseness, but it had not been poisoned. He sees how many ugly things are covered by the superficial gloss of fashion, but he does not condescend to travesty the facts in order to gratify a morbid taste for the horrible. When ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... which is shown in the death scenes of some of the Periclean statue heroes; here it is only a rude, barbarous Gaul, suffering death as a brute might; it is very realistic, and when we are near the marble itself we see the coarseness of the skin, the hardened soles of the feet, the coarse hand, and we are sure the artist must have made a true representation of this wild, savage man, who yet had the nobility of nature which would not live to be enslaved ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in Jane Eyre. It is true that most of them are the effects of that portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing. The fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield are described ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... in the original copies of the following tract are a few hexameter verses on the Rape of Helen, which have been omitted as of an inferior kind to the other part of the work, and for still more obvious reasons. The "Affectionate Shepherd" itself will be found remarkably free from the coarseness which disfigures so much of the Elizabethan literature,—an additional inducement, if any were necessary, for rescuing it from the liability to destruction which is of course incident to any book of such excessive rarity. Our thanks are due to the Rev. H. Christmas, ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... square, escorted, guarded, went other women, reputable women. Great rawboned women, daughters of Irish portenos, with the coarseness of the Irish peasant in their faces, the brogue of the Irish peasant on their Spanish, but punctiliously Castilian as to manners; gross Teutonic women; fluffy sentimental Englishwomen, bearing exile bravely, but thinking long ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... their joint work, the translation of the Linnaean system of vegetation into English from the Latin. His illustrious coadjutors exacted of him fidelity to the sense of their author, and they corrected Jackson's inelegant English, weeding it of its pompous coarseness. Darwin had already conceived the design of turning the Linnaean system into a poem, which, after he had composed it, was long handed about in manuscript; and, I believe, frequently revised and altered with the most sedulous care. The ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... he knew how wisely to direct it. He never ate a careless or thoughtless meal, be its elements simple as they might. He knew and was loved by the foremost cooks all over Europe. Never did he allow coarseness or intemperance to mar the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... longer permit one to be a real fool, and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and buffoons of the eighteenth ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... "Gentleman," &c. in the following pages, which were in existence many years before the first publication of Scoggins Jests. It will hardly be contested at the present day, that "books of the people,"[4] like these now reprinted, with all their occasional coarseness and frequent dulness, are of extreme and peculiar value, as illustrations of early manners ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators,—the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent remarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness and coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into the stores and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... his contemporaries by pleading the example of the earlier English dramatists; and Mr. Leigh Hunt seems to think that there is force in the plea. We altogether differ from this opinion. The crime charged is not mere coarseness of expression. The terms which are delicate in one age become gross in the next. The diction of the English version of the Pentateuch is sometimes such as Addison would not have ventured to imitate; and Addison, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her head; she could not see it. She would admit none of the notorious errors, of the world; its backbiting, selfishness, coarseness, intrusiveness, infectiousness. She was young. She might, Willoughby thought, have let herself be led; she was not docile. She must be up in arms as a champion of the world; and one saw she was hugging her dream of a romantic world, nothing else. She spoilt the secret bower-song he delighted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of flesh is only wrapped up in a white skin, even though it is not nearly thick enough to conceal the grossness and coarseness of the veiled material, the poor "feeble folk" within will fancy that he really belongs to the natural variety of aristocratic humanity. He has the good taste to refuse condescension sufficient to allow him to eat at table with a Frederick Douglass, a Samuel ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... he replied, "that you mean coarseness. People often do when they use that word, I notice. Anyhow, the papers are not very ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... longing. To her her bronzes had typified something that she valued in herself. Her immense vanity had not been blended with those passions which shake many women, which had devastated Lady Sellingworth. A coarseness in her mind made her love to be physically desired by men, but no coarseness of body made her desire them. And she had supposed that she represented the ultra modern type of woman, the woman who without ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... controversy is to retort upon his adversary his own words: he is very angry, and hoping to conquer Collier with his own weapons, allows himself in the use of every term of contumely and contempt, but he has the sword without the arm of Scanderbeg; he has his antagonist's coarseness but not his strength. Collier replied, for contest was his delight. "He was not to be frighted from ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... us this life as it is acted out by all kinds of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness, purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the most critical point, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil. It is striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... served the purpose of "keepin' the draf out'n 'er neck-hole" when she was at work in the dairy. For my share of disguising, I now rubbed together some ruddle and dry soil, and the mixture gave a necessary touch of coarseness to her hands. Altogether she was changed out of recognition, even if, which was not the case, any of her ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... two Elaines which play so great a part in the story. And it is curious that, coarse as both the manners and the speech of the Middle Ages are supposed to have been, the majority of these romances are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might shock Ascham's prudery, but the expression is, with the rarest exceptions, scrupulously adapted to polite society. There are one or two coarse passages in the Merlin and the older Saint Graal, and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... took a long walk down Broadway, gnawing his lip and holding his head in the air. He used blasphemous language at intervals in a low voice. Some of it was addressed to his fate and some of it to the vulgar mercantile coarseness ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for the play it was of a very poor kind, and gave me no pleasure at all; for there was but one subject in it from beginning to end, and that was the passion which the author would call love. There were lines too in it of the greatest coarseness, and at these he laughed the loudest. He had a sharp bold face, of an extraordinary insolence; and he appeared to take the highest delight in the theme of his play—(which he had written for the King's Theatre ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... tobacco-smoke John stared at the face which had illumined nearly every hour of his school-life. Its peculiar vividness always amazed John, the vitality of it, and yet the perfect delicacy. Scaife's handsome features were full of vitality also, but coarseness underlay their bold lines and peered out of the keen, flashing eyes. When the Caterpillar left Harrow he ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... fro as to constitute a social phase, and give colour to a literature of unquestionable genius? And where, over orgies so miscellaneously Berecynthian, an atmosphere so elegantly Horatian? And where can coarseness so vanish into polished expression as in that diamond-like language—all terseness and sparkle—which, as friendly to Wit in its airiest prose, as hostile to Passion in its torrent of cloud-wrack of poetry, seems invented by the Grace ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amusing to collect out of our dramatists from Elizabeth to Charles I. proofs of the manners of the times. One striking symptom of general coarseness of manners, which may co-exist with great refinement of morals, as, alas! vice versa, is to be seen in the very frequent allusions to the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have recruited a noble brain. But without any evil intention, sometimes with the very kindest intention, there are those who worry and torment you. It is through want of perception, —want of tact,—coarseness of nature,—utter lack of power to understand you. Were you ever sitting in a considerable company, a good deal saddened by something you did not choose to tell to any one, and probably looking dull and dispirited enough,—and did a fussy host or hostess draw the attention of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... down, and with him takes The coarseness of my poor attire; The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame Of gypsy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... which the dust of ages has settled for ever. We know thus much of him and no more. But the visitor who has probably been more impressed with the contents of the Elgin Saloon than with the massive coarseness of the Egyptian antiquities, will be glad to hear a few general words—an authoritative summing up of the matter from a pen more clearly authorised to touch the subject than ours can be. A brief summary, a terse description, analytical and picturesque, of a field of speculation or ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... at Philadelphia, after the British evacuation. It was a troubled time. Arnold was concerned with confiscations of property for treason and with disputes about ownership. Impulsive, ambitious, and with a certain element of coarseness in his nature, he made enemies. He was involved in bitter strife with both Congress and the State government of Pennsylvania. After a period of tension and privation in war, one of slackness and luxury is almost certain to follow. Philadelphia, ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... George II was morally torpid. With the exception of a few public men like Pitt, the majority of the Whig party (S479) seemed animated by no higher motive than self-interest. It was an age whose want of faith, coarseness, and brutality were well protrayed by Hogarth's ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... intelligence, and all his mistakes and blunders have something arch about them. The true mode of representing him is to give him suppleness, agility, the playfulness of a kitten with a certain coarseness of exterior, which renders his actions more absurd. His part is that of a faithful valet; greedy; always in love; always in trouble, either on his own or his master's account; afflicted and consoled as easily as a child, and whose grief is as ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... sum like that I can get all the village together, though by now they're asleep. Are the peasants here worth such kindness, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, or the girls either? To spend a sum like that on such coarseness and rudeness! What's the good of giving a peasant a cigar to smoke, the stinking ruffian! And the girls are all lousy. Besides, I'll get my daughters up for nothing, let alone a sum like that. They've only just gone to bed, I'll give them a kick and set them singing for you. You gave the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... those veiled and stealthy reminders of obligation habitually indulged in by delicate people seeking repayment of the debt, but shunning the coarseness of direct demand. Mildred saw her opportunity. Said ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... person, as straight as his rifle, and a beard, that waved like a prophet's, on his breast, would have commanded observation anywhere. Joined to this was an air of dignity and gravity that, in spite of the coarseness of his apparel, insured respect. However much the rude and vulgar might feel disposed to insult, they were too much awed by his presence to attempt it. They might speak disrespectfully, indeed, of him in his absence, but before him they were cowed and mute. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... their whiteness, and he instantly said to himself, "This is no common laborer; I know that he is not, from the whiteness of his hands. Besides, he is disguised; it is evident from the length of his beard, and the unnecessary coarseness of his apparel. Then his figure, the symmetry and size of which no disguise can conceal; this, and everything else, assures me that he is disguised, and that he is, besides, no other individual than the man I want, William Reilly, who has been ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... assault of the tropic sun, but it was a thin face, well shaped, in spite of prominent cheek bones, and set with the features of long breeding; and it was mobile, fiery, impetuous, and very intelligent: ancestral coarseness had been polished fine ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the Roman school are absent; so also is their vigor. But where the grace of form and color is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... more step to make us civilly free, and this we ask you to embody in your new constitution. Many men are not opposed to the fact of female suffrage, but to its mode at present; that could be corrected, and women need not be exposed to the coarseness and strife of the polls as they are now conducted. There is no man among you who does not believe his wife or his daughter intelligently capable of taking a voice in the government. If my lessees are capable of being citizens of Louisiana, it is because for thirty years ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... confusion of both. They had both sharps and flats: we have neither, but a mere set of semitones, which serve for both. In their enharmonic scale the fineness of their ear perceived distinctions which are lost on the coarseness of ours. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... end of the fifth century, manufacture of vases at Athens decayed. Supply chiefly from South Italy. Growing use of additional white (rare in Attic red figure vases), sometimes addition of detail in yellowish brown, and a general coarseness of ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... Hanover succession was disputed, Tickell gave what assistance his pen would supply. His "Letter to Avignon" stands high among party poems; it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority without insolence. It had the success which it ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, as "hands," not ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... entitled, "Scottish Pastorals, Poems, Songs, &c., mostly written in the Dialect of the South, by James Hogg. Edinburgh: printed by John Taylor, Grassmarket, 1801. Price One Shilling." The various pieces evince poetic power, unhappily combined with a certain coarseness of sentiment. One of the longer ballads, "Willie and Keatie," supposed to be a narrative of one of his early amours, obtained a temporary popularity, and was copied into the periodicals. It is described by Allan Cunningham as a "plain, rough-spun pastoral, with some ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... McCloud and I went to Sacramento and sold our chunks of gold (it was all very coarse) to Page, Bacon & Co. who were themselves surprised at the coarseness of the whole lot. When our savings were weighed up we found we had made half an ounce a day, clear of all expenses, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... face peered cautiously into the window of what had once been Ben Davis's cabin,—at first an eager face, its coarseness lit up with the fire of hope; a moment later a puzzled face; then an anxious, fearful face as the man stepped away from the window and rapped ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... such coarseness! such vulgarity! such indelicacy!" cried Mrs. Ramshorn, while the parson was still occupied with the sherry. "Not content with talking about himself in the pulpit, he must even talk about his wife! What's he or his wife in the house of God? ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Secure in the thought that she would not err, she abandoned herself to a sentiment which seemed to her won by her sorrows. And, moreover, it was so innocent and fresh! What an abyss lay between the coarseness of Arnoux and the ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... have wasted good ink and paper in bewailing Swift's malice and coarseness. But without these very elements which the wise men bemoan, Swift would be for us a cipher. Yet love is life and hate is death, so how can spite benefit? The answer is that, in certain forms of germination, frost is as necessary as sunshine: so some men have qualities ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... most people'd say you were more sensitive than I. Instead, you're much coarser—except about piffling, piddling, paltry non-essentials. You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. I shouldn't be a bit surprised if Margaret had penetrated the fact that your coarseness is in-bred while mine is near surface. Women have a surprising way of getting at the bottom of things. I'm a good deal like a woman ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... frequent accusation of coarseness brought against Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he made his literary entry into the world. Here ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... promontory of land, in the quiet shelter of its protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense of harmonious association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as it were by her one white life for all the crimes and coarseness of her ancestry: the idea of her seemed to steal into the solemn golden evening and give it added poetry and meaning. The young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that the thistle in Lebanon took of the cedar or lilies in Lebanon; and the entire force of the passions which, in the Scottish revolution, foretold and forearmed the French one, is told in this one paragraph; the coarseness of it, observe, being admitted, not for the sake of the laugh, any more than an onion in broth merely for its flavor, but for the meat of it; the inherent constancy of that coarseness being a fact in this order of mind, and an essential part of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in which such a bewildering variety of color is found have a tendency to coarseness, but this objection cannot be urged against the Gladiolus. It has all the delicacy of the Orchid. Its habit of growth fits it admirably for use in the border. Its ease of cultivation makes it a favorite ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... the far wider and higher educational advantages enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist, whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coarseness, have ranked him among classic English authors, referred mischievously to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers, whose "ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart," have not, however, availed to redeem ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... wrong fast. No one suspected cocain—they thought it was whiskey till Eva was forced to tell much to the good old doctor-details revealing her husband's uncouth carelessness of habits, his outbreaks of cruelty to her and the boy, his obvious and shameless lying, his unnatural coarseness of speech. This friend in need spent a bad hour, a hard hour with Waring. Calmness was ineffective, clear reasoning impossible. The accusation of drug-using was vehemently denied, and it was only the doctor's courageous threat to have him arrested and tried on a lunacy ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... presents unpacked. Could she help to pin a veil over that stupid little head; could she wave good-bye to Royal Blondin and his girl wife; could she picture the room where Nina's ignorance that night must face his sophistication, his passion, his coarseness? ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... a mind to forgive a little coarseness, for the sake of one of the honestest, manliest, kindest companions in the world, cannot, as we fancy, find a better than Fielding, or get so much true wit and shrewdness from any other writer of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... wild sea-shore and the green wood-side for the hedge ale-house and the Rules of the Bench, the character of his pictures shifted with the scene. Yet even then his wonderful skill of hand and sense of the picturesque never forsook him. His intimacy with low life only dictated his theme—the coarseness of the man and the folly of his company never touched the execution of his pieces. All is indeed homely—nay, mean—but native taste and elegance redeemed every detail. To a full command over every implement of his ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference; all are clad in male attire; and oaths that men might shudder at, issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be—some are—the mothers of England! But can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... protecting;—for the Cause Smiting with iron heel on England's laws: —Intolerant tolerance! Soul that could not trust Its finer instincts; self-compell'd to run The blood-path once begun, And murder mercy with a sad 'I must!' Great lion-heart by guile and coarseness marr'd; By his own heat a hero ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... presence of women, is Pax, v. 963-967. But still it remains doubtful, and I recommend it to the consideration of the critic.—AUTHOR.], while the men were almost constantly together, the language of conversation contracted a certain coarseness, as is always the case under similar circumstances. In modern Europe, since the origin of chivalry, women have given the tone to social life, and to the respectful homage which we yield to them, we owe the prevalence of a nobler morality in conversation, in the fine arts, and in poetry. Besides, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... to join his famous body-guard, a regiment of men who were each over six feet high. He would kick women in the streets, abuse clergymen for looking on the soldiers, and insult his son's tutor for teaching him Latin. But, abating his coarseness, his brutality, and his cruelty, he was a Christian, after a certain model. He had respect for the institutions of religion, denounced all amusements as sinful, and read a sermon aloud, every afternoon, to his family. His son perceived his inconsistencies, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of Manly Beauty.—The Greek worship of the beautiful masculine form is something which the later world will never understand. In this worship there is too often a coarseness, a sensual dross, over which a veil is wisely cast. but the great fact of this worship remains: to the vast majority of Greeks "beauty" does not imply a delicate maid clad in snowy drapery; it implies a perfectly shaped, bronzed, and developed youth, standing forth in his undraped manhood ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality of our lives," he decided. "American men and ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... fun-maker of the house, and, like Falstaff, could boast that he was not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others. His stories were irresistibly comic; but they almost always contained expressions of profanity or coarseness which renders it impossible for us to transmit them to these pages. He was an inimitable mimic, and had perfect command of a Dutchman's brogue. One of the least objectionable of his humorous stories we will ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... show, and this trait gives to his statements and descriptions, when his own reputation is not concerned, a value beyond that of those of most contemporary travelers. And there is another thing to be said about his writings. They are uncommonly clean for his day. Only here and there is coarseness encountered. In an age when nastiness was written as well as spoken, and when most travelers felt called upon to satisfy a curiosity for prurient observations, Smith preserved a tone quite remarkable ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... closed it, and returning, sat down by the candle and began to talk to Cyrene. Seeing his features so close and large and accentuated by the candle-light, their coarseness and horror ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall |
