"Ineffectual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... large plantation to serve as overseers or head workmen. In 1639 Sir Francis Wyatt was instructed to see to it "that tradesmen and handicraftsmen be compelled to follow their several trades,"[58] but this order was entirely ineffectual and soon but few artisans remained. Makensie says, "Our tradesmen are none of the best, and seldom improve from the incouragement they have. If some few stick to their trades, they demand extravigant ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... of this usage of me, and the impossibility of my escape from his hands, set my head a-working upon all sorts of mischief, and in particular I resolved, after studying all other ways to deliver myself, and finding all ineffectual, I say, I resolved to murder him. With this hellish resolution in my head, I spent whole nights and days contriving how to put it in execution, the devil prompting me very warmly to the fact. I was indeed entirely at a loss for the means, for ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... our happiness and our strength. The tory papers will still find fault with every thing. But these papers are sinking daily, from their dissonance with the sentiments of their subscribers, and very few will shortly remain to keep up a solitary and ineffectual barking. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... paralytikon] from [Greek: airomenon] which agrees with it, and transposed [Greek: pherontes] to the verb it is attached to, thus clumsily excluding the exquisite hint, clear enough to those who can read between the lines, that in the ineffectual attempt to bring in the paralytic only some of the company reached our Lord's Presence. Of course the scribe in question ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the pursuit it was not ineffectual. Six British guns opened fire upon the Wali's artillery—which was in rear of the retreating column—with such effect that the gunners were seized with a panic and, cutting the traces, fled for their lives. A good many were cut down by the British cavalry, and the six ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... a gentle step she retreated through the door, and then Lady Meredith, having tried what a conciliatory whisper with her mother would do, followed her. Alas, the conciliatory whisper was altogether ineffectual. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... dangerous individuals among them without mercy. These summary measures would seem to have borne immediate fruit in the almost complete subjugation of the Highlands. But it was hard to reckon with such a restless element as the clans, and hanging and heading were very ineffectual measures among people with whom "another for Hector" was the simplest suggestion of ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... world, confidence in discerning a "soul of goodness in things evil." Daniel Bartoli ("a learned and ingenius writer," born at Florence, 1608; died at Rome, 1685; the historian of the Order of Jesuits) serves to point a moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of a true tale recounted by Browning, the graphic and brilliant story of the duke and the druggist's daughter. The parleying with Christopher ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... after the midnight bell had tolled. Spectres in white habiliments were reported to have gibed and chattered from the windows; but all these stories could bear no investigation. The knocking, however, was a fact which no one could dispute, and several ineffectual attempts were made by the proprietor to discover the cause. The rooms were sprinkled with holy water; the evil spirits were commanded in due form, by a priest, to depart thence to the Red Sea; but the knockings still continued, in spite of all ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... case where the happiness of my life was at stake; and how inconsistent it was with the charitable precepts of our faith, to allow feelings of resentment to influence his conduct. My remonstrances, as in the preceding meeting, were ineffectual. The more I spoke, the more intemperate he grew. I therefore desisted, but not before he had ordered me to quit the house. I did not leave the neighborhood, but saw him again ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... met by a distressing spectacle. The lamp, burning as peacefully as it might have burned on an old lady's tea-table, revealed the window of the garden-room driven bodily inward, shutters and all, and now forming an inclined bridge over Dougal's ineffectual tubs. In front of it stood McGuffog, swinging his gun by the barrel and yelling curses, which, being mainly couched in the vernacular, were happily meaningless to Saskia. She herself stood at the hall door, plucking at something hidden ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... littered with straw, and the straw straggled into the shop, and heaped itself at the open side door. One large brass saucepan lay lorn near the doorstep, a proof that Foster was human. For everything except that saucepan a place had been found. That saucepan had witnessed sundry ineffectual efforts to lodge it, and had also suffered frequent forgetfulness. A tin candlestick had taken refuge within it, and was trusting for safety to the might of the obstinate vessel. In the sequel, the candlestick was pitched ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... rose up at the same time, and advancing towards him, frantically waving its arms, and repeating the words Edmund had just uttered. He was in a frenzy of despair, and rushing to the door, as the spectre had come up to him, he had made an ineffectual effort to open it, and was busily engaged in kicking its stout timbers to attract the attention ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... to have in his pocket a box of wax-tapers which smokers use. After several ineffectual attempts, he succeeded in igniting one against the dank wall, and by its momentary glare perceived that the candle had been left in the tomb. This would serve him in examining the fastenings of the vault. If he could force the inner door by any means, and reach the grating, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... do or whether you do not is in the hands of God," the General said. "I don't think Nell will mind very much if your sword-arm is ineffectual or not. You've done enough for honour, anyhow. And I'm not going to betray any more of the child's secrets. You'd better come and hear them yourself. I'll tell you what: come on Christmas Day. Come to lunch ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... started the conversation in the direction of clothing and are fearful of the topic being changed. As the pause becomes embarrassing, they look helplessly from one to the other, and all five, suddenly and at once, make an ineffectual effort to say something—or nothing. Out of the general confusion MRS. HUNTER comes to the front, mistress of the situation.] Are you going to stay in New York this winter, ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... interesting, and practical. Such a work is here attempted; but it remains with the public to say whether these plain philosophical principles shall be sustained, matured, perfected, and adopted in schools, or the old roundabout course of useless and ineffectual teaching ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... soul that goes forth and builds up a new world out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses. His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Glasgow, and more was pouring out of her ports. Her crew were at their stations, hauling up buckets of water, and labouring like brave men to quench the rising flames; but all their efforts, as far as I could see, were ineffectual. Nettleship and some of the older midshipmen went off ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... instance, of her Major Yeates, is not the whole attitude one of amused and acquiescent resignation? Take the hunting out of it (with all the humours of the hunt)—take the shooting and fishing—and what is left but a life (to borrow a phrase from Mr. George Moore) "as melancholy as bog-water and as ineffectual." Miss Somerville would probably decline to imagine an Ireland with these unthinkable suppressions, but after all, we cannot live by or for sport alone. What gave dignity and reality to the life ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... something great is to be done on Wednesday, 18th: he sends Rothenburg with reinforcement to Einsiedel, lest a scalade of Prag should be on the cards. Rothenburg is right welcome in the lines of Prag, though with reinforcement still ineffectual; but it is not Prag that is meant, nor is Wednesday the day. Through Wednesday, Friedrich, all eye and ear, could observe nothing: much marching to and fro on the Austrian side of the River; but apparently it comes to nothing? The mounted ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... their quarters there, which is called the Parian. He narrates the gradual increase of the Chinese immigration to the islands, their relations with the Spaniards, the establishment of the Parian, and his efforts for their conversion. These last are ineffectual until the coming of the Dominican friars in 1587; they assume the charge of converting the Chinese, and build their convent next the Parian, which brings the friars into constant and friendly relations with the Chinese. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... by the scruff of the neck; he was dos-'a-dos, with his booted legs kicking in the air, and his fists making warlike but idle demonstrations and his mouth uttering ineffectual bad language. ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... New York, if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we shall have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barrier of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... the House made an ineffectual effort to sustain the veto, but the party whip and the power of the saloons were too strong for them, and the bill was passed over the veto by a vote of 9 to 4. It met a different and better fate, however, in the Council, where it was sustained ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in this case we know just where the author went astray. Helene (the wife) is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation between the mother, the illegitimate ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... that all Ann Veronica's tact had been ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignified reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dance was ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... measures, for the steps I took afterwards for my own deliverance were hereby rendered wholly ineffectual, unless I would abandon him, and leave him to go to America by himself; than which he protested he would much rather venture, although he were certain to go ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... last sunbeam, ere it unclosed them to the evening breeze. Pan, looking eagerly after the Psyche in its flight, did not perceive what was taking place in the cavern; but the magic wand, now for ever lost to its possessor, must have cancelled its own spell, for when his gaze reverted from the ineffectual pursuit, the living lily had disappeared, and Iridion lay a corpse upon the ground, the faded flower of her destiny ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... fortress, with a garrison of 250 men; and Manuel de Sousa had orders to secure its safety by sea, with a squadron of twenty-two vessels. The zamorin soon repented of having allowed this fort to be built in his dominions, and used ineffectual endeavours to induce the rajah of Chale, Caramanlii, and Tanore to break with the Portuguese, even going to war against them, but ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... trifling additional expense, whereas, at the present time, users of such powders are compelled to buy expensive atomizing cans, to which the powder must be transferred from the packing cans, before it can be properly used, or in the absence of such cans the powder is scattered in an ineffectual and wasteful way in or about the resorts of ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Arts,—perhaps still less in the Peace ones, if we knew the great Marlborough,—he could not have been. But there is in him a recognizable flash of magnanimity, of heroic enterprise and purpose; which is highly peculiar in that sordid element. And it can be said of him, as of lightning striking ineffectual on the Bog of Allen or the Stygian Fens, that his strength was never tried."—For the upshot of him we ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... resumed, but ironclads were not built to fight the zenith, and the only hits the Americans scored were a few lucky chances in a generally ineffectual rifle fire. Their column was now badly broken, the Susquehanna had gone, the Theodore Roosevelt had fallen astern out of the line, with her forward guns disabled, in a heap of wreckage, and the Monitor was in some grave trouble. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... seemed to relax; she made one or two ineffectual efforts to retain it and the brute dropped to the ground. She looked at it for a second disconcerted as if she had lost her nerve, and then, in a horrible flash, the beast sprang at her face. She uttered piercing screams. The blood spurted from the ghastly claws. Quick ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... beat down with the ebb tide to Middle Island, and then steered across the basin for the Middle Arm, which was yet totally unexplored; but after many ineffectual attempts to find a passage over the shoals, we came to, in 5 fathoms, near the Shag Rocks, and I went to examine the arm with the boat. From Inspection Head I discovered a narrow channel leading into it, where there was ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... it was scarcely different. Kinnicutt was hibernating. Each household had drawn into its shell. And the huge drifts, lying defiant against the fences in the short, ineffectual winter sunlight, held out little hope of reanimation. Aunt Faith, in her pumpkin hood, and Rob Roy cloak, and carpet moccasins, came over once in two or three days, and even occasionally stayed to tea, and helped make up a rubber of whist for Mr. Gartney's ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. The moment came when the pursuer was hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond the groyne where the runner lay in hiding. After two or three ineffectual castings hither and thither it came to a stop, stood upright, with arms raised high, and then darted straight ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... temptation that might beset his Spartan resolutions, but he heard from time to time that she had been seen at balls and parties, apparently enjoying those very frivolities of her sex she affected to condemn. It was a Sabbath morning in early spring that he was returning from an ineffectual attempt to enlist a capitalist at the county town to redeem the fortunes of Blazing Star. He was pondering over the narrowness of that capitalist, who had evidently but illogically connected Cass's present appearance ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... necessity was to keep to the last the ardent heart of the true adventurer. While she stitched with flying fingers, there passed before her the pale sad line of the victims—of those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She saw her mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil, her drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane, tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness of all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... brain. Under this view we are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. But the consciousness is altogether adventitious, and bears the same ineffectual relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the clockwork. Here, again, we meet with an echo of Hobbes, who opens his work on the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... with the petulant persistence that marks a trunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... went to bed. Foreseeing some inconveniences possible in this nocturnal party, the Queen determined on having a number of people with her; and even ordered her waiting women to accompany her. All precautions were ineffectual to prevent the effects of calumny, which thenceforward sought to diminish the general attachment that she had inspired. A few days afterwards, the most wicked libel that appeared during the earlier years of her reign ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... in his movements that she forgot her manners, and stood watching his ineffectual efforts at cleaning up, with a smile of amusement mingled ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... difference expressed. The issue that roused the most heated debate was whether the colored man should be kept out of the right of suffrage until woman could also be enfranchised. One young, but not ineffectual speaker, declared he considered the women the bitterest enemies of the negro; and asked, with intense emotion, shall they be permitted to prevent the colored man from obtaining his rights? But it was not shown that women, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the sun shot its first rays into her eyes. David lay near by, breathing lightly, his face like a pale carven mask against the blanket's folds. Down below in the camp the fire burned low, its flame looking ineffectual and tawdry in the flushed splendor of the sunrise. Daddy John was astir, moving about among the animals and pausing to rub Julia's nose and hearten ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Fabius had a triumph decreed him at Rome, much more splendid than his first; they looked upon him now as a champion who had learned to cope with his antagonist, and could now easily foil his arts and prove his best skill ineffectual. And, indeed the army of Hannibal was at this time partly worn out with continual action, and partly weakened and become dissolute with over abundance and luxury. Marcus Livius, who was governor of Tarentum when it was betrayed to Hannibal, and had then retired into the citadel, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... purpose much the same ground as the French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to the national commonwealth. The British started late, but the discipline of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection. So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the privileged classes, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... commanded the archbishop to remove thence [i.e., from Vigan] the said provisor and oblige him to reside in the city of Lalo all to the end that he should not proceed in the suit. This measure was ineffectual, on account of the reply and representations made by the archbishop; the provisor therefore proceeded in his suit. The delinquent, finding himself in a tight place, fled from Bigan and came to Manila; and, when he was arrested by the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... conscientious sentiments this paper was undertaken, is evidenced by the following prayer, which he composed and offered up on the occasion: 'Almighty GOD, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be with-held from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation of myself ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... ineffectual, he summoned the midwives a second time, and called them to account for their disobedience. They replied: "This nation is compared unto one animal and another, and, in sooth, the Hebrews are like the animals. As little as the animals do they need the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... practised with more frequency, because it is practised with impunity; but there being no human laws against these crimes, is so far from an inducement to commit them, that this very consideration would be sufficient to deter the wise and good, if all others were ineffectual; for of how heinous a nature must those sins be, which are judged above the reach of human punishment, and are reserved for the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... taken me a little by surprise. Let me see. Pinkle,—Pinkle." Pinkle was a clerk who sat in an inner room, and Mr Tombe's effort to call him seemed to be most ineffectual. But Pinkle understood the sound, and came. "Pinkle, didn't we pay some money into Hock and Block's a few weeks since, to the credit of Mr ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... be broadened and deepened without being made thin and ineffectual. As the civil community is related to the individual's private interests, so the community of the universe is related to the civil community. There is a citizenship in this larger community which requires a wider and more generous interest, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... one more ineffectual attempt to free himself from the vice-like grip of the negro, then relaxing his efforts, and, gathering his broken breath, he said, "You're safe now, but if you're found within ten miles of my plantation by sunrise, by—you're ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... us, Alec," admitted Jack, his heart sinking as he remembered how ineffectual McGuffey had been in the box even while Chester was scoring against the Harmony man; and with Hendrix sending his puzzling shoots over, defeat was positive for Chester unless they had Donohue to depend on. "Tell me how it ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... treatment of renal tuberculosis was ineffectual, surgical treatment has been attended with greater success. This consisted in removing the diseased kidney. Now good results will possibly be attained by the application of Koch's method to cure and resource to surgery will be ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... be expected, efforts at resistance so ill calculated as these demonstrations of the wage-earners and farmers, not to speak of the host of petty sects of so-called reformers during the first phase of the Revolution, were ineffectual. The great labor organizations which had sprung up shortly after the war as soon as the wage-earners felt the necessity of banding themselves to resist the yoke of concentrated capital, after twenty-five years of fighting, had demonstrated their utter inability to maintain, much less to improve, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... conspiracy. If ever mercy was becoming to a man, it would have been pre-eminently so to Maurice on this occasion; but he was inflexible as adamant. The mother, the wife, and the son of Groeneveld, threw themselves at his feet, imploring pardon. Prayers, tears and sobs were alike ineffectual. It is even said that Maurice asked the wretched mother "why she begged mercy for her son, having refused to do as much for her husband?" To which cruel question she is reported to have made the sublime ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... in the history of child-welfare work for the enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of work-house orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for more than ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... been a curious subject of observation to an inexperienced person, to note the manner in which the two fleets man[oe]uvred throughout that night. After several hours of ineffectual efforts to bring their enemies fairly within reach of their guns, after the moon had risen, the French gave the matter up for a time, shortening sail while most of their superior officers caught a ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to subdue her disorder proving ineffectual, Mrs. Robinson relinquished her melancholy and fruitless pursuit, and resolved once more to return to her native land. Proceeding through Paris, she reached England in the beginning of 1787, from which ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... were often under the necessity of tying them; sometimes they tore asunder the cartilage of the nostril, through which the ropes ran, and got loose. On these occasions, all the exertions of our men to recover them would have been ineffectual, without the assistance of some young boys, whom these animals would permit to approach them, and by whose little managements their rage was soon appeased. And when, at length, they were got down to the beach, it was by their aid, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... vainly striving to climb to the pinto's back; but she was so frightened that each time she made a jump for the saddle she came short of it and fell back. And, seeing the teacher coming, her efforts were more ineffectual than ever. But when he was scarcely a rod away, and when escape seemed impossible, a new figure ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... steadily at these complicated difficulties: and truly it is hard to say what choice he had, if any choice were left to kings in what concerns the independence of their crown. Surrounded, therefore, with these difficulties, and that all his late humiliations might not be rendered as ineffectual as they were ignominious, he took the last step, and in the presence of a numerous assembly of his peers and prelates, who turned their eyes from this mortifying sight, formally resigned his crown ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... declaring that he is where his fruits are not manifested; nor blaspheme him, by saying that he is not where his fruits are. Rites and ordinances may be vain, prophets may be false, miracles may be miracles of Satan; but the signs of the Holy Spirit, truth and holiness, can never be ineffectual, can never deceive, can never be evil; where they are, and only where they ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... in 1859 this same part of dupes? A French engineer has demonstrated that dykes erected along the banks of rivers liable to inundation are costly, in constant need of repair, and ineffectual; and that the only real protection against those devastations is the construction of a dam at the source. To the source, then, gentlemen of the diplomatic guild! Ascend straight to the temporal power of ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... while from one of these lucky persons to the other, barely stifled a sigh, bade them good-morning and took his departure. He knew neither where to go nor what to do; he seemed afloat on the sea of ineffectual longing. He strolled slowly back to the inn, where, in the doorway, he met the landlady returning from the butcher's with the lambchops for ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... been submitted to a vote of the whole people. It was not passed. Seward, whom many people now thought likely to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with justice that it was "unconstitutional and ineffectual." Ineffectual it would have been in this sense: the compromise would in all probability have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good feeling, had no further ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... but ineffectual hands That with every futile pass Made the great tree seem as a little bird Before the mystery ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... it was not thought wise to trifle with their irritation. The Bishop felt that it was no longer practicable to detain the troops, and that all the pretext devised by Philip and his government had become ineffectual. In a session of the State Council, held on the 25th October, 1560, he represented in the strongest terms to the Regent the necessity for the final departure of the troops. Viglius, who knew the character of his countrymen, strenuously seconded the proposal. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it, were the invisible but deadly gases from the century-old corruption that rose to meet him and were unconsciously inhaled. Then, as the fumes mounted to his brain, sober reason was ousted from her throne and imagination rioted unchecked, peopling the void with horrors and ineffectual phantoms. From the sashless windows grotesque faces stared down upon him, scowling malignantly, while others, with still more hideous smile, invited him to enter and become one of their dreadful company. Insane laughter re-echoed in ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... it what you will—at the surprise we had given the blundering Boers, and thinking that if the Colonel had been prepared with our men to charge into them at once, the whole line of the enemy for far enough to right and left would have turned and fled, after an ineffectual fire which must have done far more harm to their friends than to their foes, and then scattered before our fellows like ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... fiction, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre are of far less merit than Marmontel's; but most people who have even the slightest knowledge of French literature know why he cannot be excluded here. Personally, he seems to have been an ineffectual sort of creature, and in a large part of his rather voluminous work he is (when he ceases to produce a sort of languid amusement) a distinctly boring one.[399] He appears to have been unlucky, but to have helped his own bad luck ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... strongest light, the criminality and madness of the enterprise in which they had embarked, and the little probability of their ever again struggling with success against the Christian power. All his efforts to restore order proved for some time ineffectual. But the promise of amnesty and redress of their grievances, the well known integrity of the count, and his generosity in sending his lady and son as hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty, induced at length the majority of the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... the village stores roundabout, seldom buying more than two or three times at the same place until after the lapse of a considerable time. He got no commendation, however, for this equitable distribution of his patronage; people were disposed to regard it as an ineffectual attempt to conceal his possession of so much money. That he had great hoards of ill-gotten gold buried somewhere about his tumble-down dwelling was not reasonably to be doubted by any honest soul conversant with the facts ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... France, upon the brother of her favourite Leonora,[52] an unhappy being who was not only deformed in person, but so wholly deficient in intellect that every effort even to teach him to read had proved ineffectual. So abject was he, indeed, that Concini had been careful never to allow him to come into contact with Henri IV lest he should be banished from the Court; and this ill-advised donation consequently excited great disapprobation, and elicited fresh murmurs against the Italian followers ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... had a triumph decreed him at Rome, much more splendid than his first; they looked upon him now as a champion who had learned to cope with his antagonist, and could now easily foil his arts and prove his best skill ineffectual. And, indeed, the army of Hannibal was at this time partly worn away with continual action, and partly weakened and become dissolute with overabundance and luxury. Marcus Livius, who was governor of Tarentum when it was betrayed to Hannibal, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... necromancer, Freston, who carried away my study and my books, has transformed these giants into windmills to deprive me of the honour of the victory; such is his inveterate malice against me; but in the end, all his pernicious wiles and stratagems shall prove ineffectual against the prevailing ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... cook, took occasion one Sunday afternoon to count the number of mysterious packages, of about a pound in weight each, which set forth from his kitchen and were carried along his walk in various stages of ineffectual concealment by the lady's visitors. The result was by no means appalling, seven being the total. But granting that seven was a fair estimate of the whole week's output, and that the stream flowed on Sundays only, and not steadily through the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... other influences had been also exerted in their favor, which, although ineffectual at the time, had tended to alter the Doctor's intention. Immediately after school Mr. Rose had been strongly endeavoring to change the Doctor's mind, and had dwelt forcibly on all the good points in Eric's character, and the promise of his earlier career. And ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... a man of the professions or business whose time for study in these vast fields of the classics is so disproportionate to their extent and who, though supplied with search warrants and summons, still fails to make a capture, how ineffectual and wearying this chase after ideals—subjective. Why not shorten your course? Why not produce Rembrandts and Corots because you apprehend the principles on which they work and anticipate a surprise in discovering, as by chance, that you have produced something which ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... could. And, sure enough, after some ineffectual searching, he came upon another button well hid amid the tapestry on the wall, which, when pressed, caused something to be disengaged which gradually lowered the cage within reach of Mr. ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... procuring an exchange for Mr. Clarke, then prisoner in the King's garrison of Newark." There were many reasons given by the Doctor of the injustice of his imprisonment, and the inequality of the exchange: but all were ineffectual; for done it must be, or he continue a prisoner. And in time done it was, upon the ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... addressed to the bishop of each diocese and to all inferior clergy throughout the kingdom. Arbitrary it might be, but it was excellent in intention; for stubborn-necked personages had to be dealt with, with whom milder measures would have proved ineffectual. As it was, violent opposition was raised against the decree, and the Puritanical preachers wore loud in its condemnation, and as far as was consistent with safety, vehement in their ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... but we were surrounded by woods, which were crowded with Afghans, some 400 of whom made a dashing but ineffectual attempt to carry off their guns, left behind in the first scare of our sudden attack. These men were dressed so exactly like some of our own Native soldiers that they were not recognized until they got within 100 yards of the entrenchment, and they would doubtless have succeeded in accomplishing ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... that his father-in-law and his brother were renegades, we can well understand that a party among his kinsmen may have been bitterly hostile to him, and have opposed his authority with the tribe by open violence, and, when that seemed ineffectual, by secret assassination. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Every one knows the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley, Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Tashkendees declined the honor of becoming the Czar's policemen in this way, evidently foreseeing the end, and, to cut the matter short, chose the Russian general, Tchernayeff, as their Khan. The few Central Asian rulers whose necks had so far escaped the Muscovite heel, made an ineffectual resistance, and in 1866 Hodjeni and Jizakh were duly "annexed," thus ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... day, looking into Venus's looking-glass, given by Merlin to her father, she saw therein sir Artegal, and fell in love with him. Her nurse Glauce (2 syl.) tried by charms "to undo her love," but love that is in gentle heart begun no idle charm can remove. Finding her "charms" ineffectual, she took her to Merlin's cave in Caermarthen, and the magician told her she would be the mother of a line of kings (the Tudors), and after twice 400 years one of her offspring, "a royal virgin," would shake the power of Spain. Glauce now suggested that they ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of the tribes who had participated in that treaty, and threatened with death all the chiefs who were concerned in the subsequent treaties. This excited the attention of General Harrison, then Governor of the Territory of Indiana, who, in 1811, after many ineffectual conferences with Tecumseh and the "Prophet," organized a force of 800 men and marched against the "Prophet's" town, in what is now Cass county, Indiana. The battle of Tippecanoe ensued, in which the Indians were totally defeated and the town burned. The loss of the troops was so great ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... between the parties. Mr. Tanner, deeply excited, procured a pistol and loaded it with the charge of death, sought and found the object of his hatred in the afternoon, in the yard of Messrs. Kezer & Maynard, and in the presence of several persons, after repeated and ineffectual attempts on the part of Capt. Jackson to baffle his fell spirit, shot the unfortunate victim, of which wound Mr. Hazeltine died in a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... says Bishop Burnet, "interceded earnestly for one nunnery in Oxfordshire, where there was great strictness of life, and to which most of the young gentlewomen of the country were sent to be bred; so that the gentry of the country desired the king would spare the house: yet all was ineffectual." ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... in it with a sense of well-being, after steeling itself to resist the insidious Italian cold, exuding from damp pavements and blown on the sharp tramontana; that cold which is never, if measured by the thermometer, severe, but against which clothing seems ineffectual. The blood does not react against it; the blood shrinks away, and stagnates ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the far side of her late flagship, and continued a determined but ineffectual effort to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... with extreme care I edged my way inch by inch along the fuselage toward the main planes and the pilot's seat. Casting back a glance I saw the hangars, a mere white bar across the plain. A few spectators who had pursued us in a desultory, ineffectual manner stood now at long intervals in our wake, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... went on to inform him of that great marvel and enigma of the ocean; of its repeated appearance to the inhabitants of their islands; and of the many but ineffectual expeditions that had been made in search of it. They took him to a promontory of the island of Palma, from whence the shadowy St. Brandan had oftenest been descried, and they pointed out the very tract in the west where ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... with much apparent anxiety and concern for the little notice they took of her intreaties to return: for we imagined, in all she said when calling on them, she was informing them, that the strangers were not enemies, but friends; however, all her endeavours to bring them back were ineffectual, while we remained with her; but we were no sooner gone from the beach, than we saw some of them come out of the wood; and as there were two canoes on the shore belonging to this party, they launched one into ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... members. Following the dedication of the new house, there came complaints against Hubbard as a preacher. He made enemies, and his enemies promoted disturbances. Efforts were made to dissolve the connection. Hubbard having been settled for life, these efforts were ineffectual. Finally his salary was withheld and the house was closed against him. Sunday after Sunday, morning and afternoon, Hubbard would walk from the parsonage to the meetinghouse, try the doors and then return home. As long as the doors were open, I attended ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... feeling of exactly the opposite nature, a feeling of Unity, of extraordinary fellowship, followed by a wonderful sensation of happiness. All this sounds rather grotesque, and the continued use of these rather meaningless epithets is very ineffectual in expressing what they are meant to convey. But it must be remembered that the position is altogether an extraordinary one; and the feelings and sensations resulting from such a position were extraordinary ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... many inventions to mar the work. I now allude to that part of Dr. Gregory's treatise, where he advises a wife never to let her husband know the extent of her sensibility or affection. Voluptuous precaution; and as ineffectual as absurd. Love, from its very nature, must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant, would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone, or the grand panacea; and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... with dead. During this interval the besiegers had never ceased mining and countermining about the walls of St. Jean d'Acre. The siege of Acre lasted for sixty-five days. Bonaparte made eight desperate but ineffectual assaults upon the city, which were repulsed by eleven furious sallies on the part of the besieged garrison. It was absolutely necessary to relinquish the enterprise. The strategic point in the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... ain't any. Yer ez safe HERE ez ye'd be in a Sacramento steamer; ez to your husband, he allowed I was to come yer and fetch yer up to the hotel. That's his look-out!" With this cheering speech, Bill proceeded to make two or three ineffectual scoops into the dark interior, manifestly with the idea of scooping out the lady in question. In another instant he had caught her, lifted her gently but firmly in his arms, and was ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... much like an oath. He gave the door one final kick, and finding his rough summons ineffectual, ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... a great blow to me to leave the firm," said Hartley, after two ineffectual attempts to speak. "I have been in it all my life—all my life. At my age I could scarcely hope to get any other employment worth having. I have always tried to do ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... price increased, and the Flemish industry was faced by the double difficulty of preserving its market from the import of English cloth, through Hanseatic ships, and of obtaining the necessary raw material. The restrictive measures taken against the import of English cloth proved ineffectual, and Spanish wool, which was tried as a substitute for English, was of inferior quality. Ypres was the first to suffer, in spite of the solicitude of the dukes, who reduced commercial taxes in its favour. ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... tend to some harshness and abruptness of condemnation, these worthy people need not be altogether impatient with our impatience. It is surely beneath them, in the scope of their great schemes, to complain of protests so ineffectual about wrongs so individual. I have considered in this chapter the chances of general democratic defence of domestic honour, and have been compelled to the conclusion that they are not at present hopeful; and it is at least clear that we cannot ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to lip by the organ of the ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... other privileges, as should be found necessary for establishing or encouraging such projects. But here was a necessity of procuring letters patents, which they knew the credit that the East India company had at court would certainly render ineffectual. So they were now in treaty for a new act, which should ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... Struggles of the House prove unfortunate and ineffectual, this Province will submit, with pious Resignation to the Will of Providence; but it would be a kind of Suicide, of which we have the utmost Horror, thus to be made the Instruments of ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... shivering fit seized his frame, he was obliged to clench his teeth together, to prevent them from chattering audibly; he glanced wildly round him as if seeking for some means of escape; and, after two or three ineffectual efforts to speak, he managed to gasp out brokenly through his ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... now is to waste as little time as possible in ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart a hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the ideal that I can perceive and cannot reach. To-day, turning over the pages of the old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases staring at me from ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... or local application of woolen cloths wrung out of hot water. They should not be so light as to be ineffectual, nor so heavy as to be burdensome. They should not be wet enough to drip, nor applied so as to expose the body to the surrounding air. A fresh cloth should be ready for application before the first one is removed, and the change quickly effected. Fomentations are effectual in relieving congestion ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... slowly up the hall, the ineffectual bull's-eye, held by Jimmy, very crooked indeed, showing almost as a shadow ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... gradually became convinced of the political and moral necessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. In this current agitation there are at least a few men and women who would extend a greater social and political freedom to all women if only because domestic control has proved so ineffectual. ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... army, thrice armed in the consciousness of their unparalleled achievement?—Five weak and astounded battalions, and a horde of inchoate peasants. But Montcalm did not falter; by ten he had taken up his position, and by eleven, after some ineffectual cannonading, to allow time for the arrival of re-enforcements which came not, he led the charge. The attack was disordered by the uneven ground, the fences and the ravines; and it was broken by the granite front of the English ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... dripped upon a little with ineffectual suns, slid restlessly away from me, and I locked my office door one night, reflecting that it was the night of the first of May, and that to-orrow was ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Borrow confesses that he "made no attempts to flatter and cajole," must have caused the British Minister some diplomatic embarrassment when he read it; but it seems to have been presented, although, as is scarcely surprising, it appears to have been ineffectual in causing to be removed the ban against which it was ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... and then St. Clair, returning to form, ripped his way past tackle on the left and fought over two white lines before he was halted. Gordon and Martin made it first down in three tries and Carmine worked the left end for four more. Thacher stiffened then, however, and after two ineffectual plunges St. Clair punted and Brimfield caught on her goal line and ran back a dozen yards, Lee, right end, missing his tackle badly and Steve Edwards being neatly blocked off. But Thacher found the going even harder than her opponent ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... There was something ineffectual and pessimistic about me that made Russians often feel in me a kindred soul. At the Front, Russians had confided in me again and again, but that was not astonishing, because they confided in every one. Nevertheless, they felt that I was less English ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... his daughter, was summoned by the bell to arrest the verses as they came, and to commit them to the security of writing.... Some days would elapse undistinguished by a verse, while on others he would dictate thirty or forty lines.... Labor would often be ineffectual to obtain what often would be gratuitously offered to him; and his imagination, which at one instant would refuse a flower to his most strenuous cultivation, would at another time shoot up into spontaneous and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... averse to Chymical Medicines, that the Doctor is Chymical, and that because forsooth he makes his own Medicines; but to those that affect Chymical, that the Doctor is but a Galenist, and useth only dull and ineffectual remedies, as best suits to the sick mans Palat. A second is, that if this Physician be called in to a Patient, the Apothecary will pretend present danger, and in his absence call in another, or pretend he is abroad when he is not, or else that the Case requires the counsel of two Physicians; ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availed themselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now become the trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. But this proves that their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroying Wagner's spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; it proves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that all those who are at present in possession of power will not be able to withstand many more attacks. The ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... great in the world. Fancy can do little; doth never anything well, except as directed and wielded by them. Do pretty conceits or humorous talk carry on any business, or perform any work? No; they are ineffectual and fruitless: often they disturb, but they never despatch anything with good success. It is simple reason (as dull and dry as it seemeth) which expediteth all the grand affairs, which accomplisheth all ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... who glares on you like a tiger—he who, in an age of revolution, is most thoroughly revolutionary, and swallows all formulas—he is made a hero, and honourable mention is decreed to him; whilst all who acted with an ill-starred moderation, who strove, with ineffectual but conscientious effort, to stay the wild movement of the revolution, are treated with derision, are dismissed with contempt, or at best with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various |
