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More "Baseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... guidance of adolescent workers, and, there is no escaping from the condemning proofs of our neglect: there has been, and, indeed, is still going on, in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in the way we have shirked our duties to the young. As the writer, from whose Report I have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony: "a strain has been put on the character of young persons which might have corrupted the integrity ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... taken together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian chroniqueur, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is like heaven opening, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had thought to flee had no possibility of pain or fear for her, compared to the certain pain and difficulty of that life from which all reality of love is gone: where her earnest, truthful spirit must live in daily contact with baseness,—may even have, through virtue of her relation to Tito, tacitly to concur in treason. She goes back to what, constituted as she is, can be only a daily, lifelong crucifying, and she goes back to it knowing ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... appropriately interpose than before the encroachments of literary simplisme. The man of whom Delsarte speaks is not confined to such or such a category of the species. He proposes that aesthetics should interpret an all-comprehensive human nature, which is not made up alone of baseness, egotism and duplicity. Though it be subject to perversion, it has its luminous aspects, its radiant sides, and we should not too long turn our ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... so foul a crime, No more shall glow with friendship's hallow'd ardour, Those holy beings whose superior care Guides erring mortals to the paths of virtue, Affrighted at impiety like thine, Resign their charge to baseness and to ruin[316].' 'I feel the soft infection Flush in my cheek, and wander in my veins. Teach me the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre ame"; here was exposed before him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... to have been anything but an admirable character, and I do not see how his baseness in depriving the Egyptians of their liberties and their land by a corner in wheat can be condoned. Jacob robbed his brother of his birthright by trading on his hunger; Joseph robbed a whole people in ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... in that house as an impostor! What she had done seemed no longer a mere joke. What would her host and hostess say if they knew? That they would never know made no difference. She herself could not forget it, and her realization of the baseness of the deception grew stronger under Mrs. Kirby's ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fellow thrashing a boy much less than himself. I am well aware that some prudent individuals would pass by on the other side, possibly addressing an admonition to the big blackguard. But I approve Thomson's statement, that "prudence to baseness verges still"; and I follow a different course. Suddenly approaching the blackguard, by a rapid movement, generally quite unforeseen by him, I take him by the arm, and occasionally (let me confess) by the neck, and shake him till his teeth rattle. This, being done with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... none of the fisher-people would have been bad enough to steal from the dead. They entreated him to think well what he said, and to consider again if there was no doubtful character there who might have had the opportunity and the baseness to commit the crime. At that the dying man fell into profound thought, and when he looked at them again the fever-flush had mounted to his face, and there was a light in his eyes. He told them that if there was any one upon the shore that day who would have done such ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... A man who tells a lie, properly so called, has some hope of reward by it. But to lie for sport is to play at shuttlecock with your soul, and load your conscience for the mere sake of being a fool. "With what temper should I speak of those people? What words can express the meanness and baseness of the mind that can do this?" In making this protest against frivolous story-telling, the humour of which must have been greatly enjoyed by his journalistic colleagues, Defoe anticipated that his readers would ask why, if he so disapproved of the supplying a story by invention, he ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... in our behalf,—and, alas! I have not generosity enough to refuse your noble proffer,—you must go alone, and without communication with Derby. I know him well; his lightness of mind is free from selfish baseness; and for the world, would he not suffer you to leave Man without his company. And if he went with you, your noble and disinterested kindness would be of no avail—you would but share his ruin, as the swimmer who attempts to ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... there seems some trace of getting money by 'projects' and 'bubbles'—whether of doing little bills or by Notable Inventions, I will not say. Prison does not, it is true, last forever, but its doors open on a scene of baseness blacker than that which brought the brave old marquis with sorrow to his grave. The tale is told in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was taken prisoner by his sons in battle, and confined in this same castle; thus justly suffering the greatest disgrace and confusion in the very place where he had perpetrated an act of the most consummate baseness. I think it also worthy to be remembered, that at the time this misfortune befell him, he had concealed in his possession, at Dinevor, the collar of St. Canauc of Brecknock, for which, by divine vengeance, he merited to be taken prisoner ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... for his judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused, to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to make us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule—in a single word, to lie about his characters—this is, for the fiction-writer, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Try to be calm, man. What have I done? Well, this is what I've done, and it's the lucky day for you I've done it. I've saved you from shame; I've freed you from sin; I've shown you the baseness ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow agony of his exile and bitter disappointment. Disillusioned, separated from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it is to climb another's stairs. "Alas," he says, "I have gone about like a mendicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without sail and without ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for—what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... prolonged by a pension of six thousand ducats from the pope and cardinals. His two sons, Andrew and Manuel, were educated in Italy; but the eldest, contemptible to his enemies and burdensome to his friends, was degraded by the baseness of his life and marriage. A title was his sole inheritance; and that inheritance he successively sold to the kings of France and Arragon. [91] During his transient prosperity, Charles the Eighth was ambitious of joining the empire of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Pallas Athene; and I know the thoughts of all men's hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... had been rebuffed at every point, he was not discouraged. Indeed, had his other qualities equalled his perseverance, he had richly merited a full and good reward; but, unfortunately, this was his only redeeming trait, and the baseness of that motive which prompted it poisoned that ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... form. The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking. Lucifer fell because of pride, and man, yielding to Lucifer's temptation, from baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The appearance of Christ, the personification of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them—what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their nobility or baseness, their ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... when unprepared to defend himself!" "By my faith," said Charlot, "I mean to do the same by you. Know that I am the son of Duke Thierry of Ardennes, from whom your father, Sevinus, took three castles; I have sworn to avenge him, and I defy you." "Coward," answered Huon, "I know well the baseness that dwells in your race; worthy son of Thierry, use the advantage that your armor gives you; but know that I fear you not." At these words Charlot had the wickedness to put his lance in rest, and to run upon Huon, who had barely time to wrap his arm in his mantle. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... desire those of men! Let the earth guard them, and let them be moved on a level with its baseness. They now have hearts of slaves; they forget injuries, ancestors, oaths; and everywhere the folly of mobs, the mediocrity of the individual, and the hideousness of races ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... the round and hollow eyes, shining with a sombre fire which he could never entirely suppress, reminded one of a bird of prey unable to face the light, and the lines of his face, the hooked nose, and the thin, constantly quivering, drawn-in lips suggested a mixture of boldness and baseness, of cunning and sincerity. But there is no book which can instruct one to read the human countenance correctly; and some special circumstance must have roused the suspicions of these four persons so much as to cause them to make these ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the virtues and good manners were the custom in Courts anciently, as now the opposite is the custom, this word was taken from the Courts; which word, if it should now be taken from the Courts, especially of Italy, would and could express no other than baseness. It says Holy. The greatness which is here meant is especially well accompanied with the two afore-mentioned virtues; because it is that light which reveals the good and the evil of the person clearly. And how much knowledge and how much virtuous ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but 5 The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed. And ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... guiltier head Shall our intolerable self-disdain Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain; For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... her. But if this was so, it was soon lost in the consideration of how good it was for Pippo to have a man like John to talk to and to influence him in every way. A man like John! That was the thing; not a common man, not one who might teach him the baseness, or the frivolity, or the falsehood of the world, but a good man, who was also a distinguished man, a man of the world in the best sense, knowing life in the best sense, and able to modify the boy's conception of what he was to find in the world, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... doubted whether such considerations ever made a truly good man. Virtue must be loved for its own sake. Vice must be deserted for its inherent baseness, even though it may bring ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... moment of detection, the tide ebbed, and the bottom of her soul lay revealed to her eye. How black, how stained and sad. Strange, strange that she had not seen before the baseness and cruelty of falsehood, the loveliness of truth. Now, amid the wreck, uprose the moral nature which never before had attained the ascendant. "But," she thought, "too late, sin is revealed to me in all its deformity, and, sin-defiled, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... last he felt he held some power in his hands, against which all her defiance would be as naught. Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she had never flinched. Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... know of Yates would seem to deny his surrender of principle, or his condescension to any act of baseness, to obtain office. It was indeed a question whether Clinton, or Hamilton through Yates, should control the state government; but the gubernatorial contest involved more than that. The new government, soon to be placed on trial, needed the help of sympathetic ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... they were yours also as well as mine. If you mean to insist on the severity of your order, you will have to get rid of me altogether. I shall then have come across two men of which I do not know whether to wonder most at the baseness of the one or the cruelty of the other. In that case I can only return to my mother. In that case you will not, I think, care much what may become of me; but as I shall still bear your name, it is, I suppose, proper that you should know ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... three rascals shouted, and what a vain struggle it was to try and preserve my dignity when Laddie clasped his hands and begged pardon, explaining that jokes were necessary to his health, and he never meant me to know the full baseness of this 'pleasantrie!' I revenged myself by giving him some bad English for his translation, and telling him of it just ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... evil—but by furnishing a counter-poise to opposite vices, and finally annihilating those vices and themselves by their preponderance. Oppression could never have gained the upper hand unless cowardice, and baseness, and mutual distrust had prepared the way for it. It will continue to increase until it eradicates cowardice and the slavish mind; and despair re-awakens the courage that was lost. Then the two antagonistic vices will have destroyed each other, and the noblest ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the Restoration he was excepted out of the Act of Indemnity, and spent the remainder of his life in obscurity, dying soon after the Revolution.] And how that he is quite ashamed of himself, and confesses how he had deserved this, for his baseness to his brother. And that he is like to pay part of the money, paid out of the Exchequer during the Committee of Safety, out of his own purse again, which I am glad on. I could find nothing in Mr. Downing's letter, which Hawley brought me concerning my office; but I could ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... is beginning to anger me. I am still too little a hysterical actress and too much a normal woman to take pleasure in such acting. I was never taught by my mother, the secret code of a woman's conduct toward a man, nor did they warn me of man's falsehood and baseness. I observed that quickly enough for myself, and see it every day behind the scenes. You think that to every woman who is in the theater you can boldly talk about your love as though it were some trifle, in the hope that perhaps she will swallow your bait! Actresses are ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... In the nicest point, The honour of my house, you've done me wrong. You may remember (for I now will speak, And urge its baseness) when you first came home From travel, with such hopes as made you look'd on, By all men's eyes, a youth of expectation, Pleas'd with your growing virtue, I receiv'd you; Courted, and sought to raise you to your merits: My house, my table, ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... basest scoundrel, double-dyed, Would pluck an Uncle's whiskers in their pride, What baseness, then, doth such a man disclose Who'd raise a hand to ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... in this case. She was jealous even of that supposed flirtation at Belforet, four or five years ago. She was angry with Clarissa for having once possessed this man's heart; ready to suspect her of any baseness in the past, any ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... population entirely dependent upon foreign-supplies for the daily necessaries of life, a lower rate of wages may be enforced. Cruel as this may appear to your lordship, and unlikely as it may seem, long experience has taught us that there is no possible baseness of which a slave-owner will not be guilty, and no means of accomplishing his purposes, however fraught with ruin to those around him, which he will ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... given as rewards for real services, and as encouragements to other gallant heroes. They were honourably earned in a different sort of campaign than those at Westminster; they were gained by actions full of danger to themselves, of glory and of benefit to this nation—not by corrupt votes of baseness and of destruction to their country. You will find no secret service there; and you will find that, when the warrior was recompensed, the member of parliament was left free. You will likewise find a pension of L1,500 a year to Lord Camden. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... then, wholly outgrown the bitter experiences of her childhood? Had the cruelty which tortured her during the years when the soul is being fashioned left upon her no brand of slavish vice, nor the baseness of those early associations affected her with any irremovable taint? As far as human observation could probe her, Jane Snowdon had no spot of uncleanness in her being; she had been rescued while it was yet time, and the subsequent period of fostering had enabled features of her ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... South Seas or to Japan, or to other countries where lepers are not segregated. This would have worked no hardship on those countries, since such was their law and procedure, while it would have enabled Daughtry and Kwaque to escape the hell of the San Francisco pest-house, to which, because of his baseness, he condemned them for the rest of ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... no appearance of shame, by the Roman historian, Dio Cassius, is sufficiently disgraceful to Trajan, but it does not reveal to us the entire baseness of his conduct. We learn from other writers, two of them contemporary with the events, that the pompous dismissal of Parthamasiris, with leave to go wherever he chose, was a mere pretence. Trajan had come to the conclusion, if not before the interview, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... resolution of taking money from his father and mother without their knowledge. The success of his first attempt (in which he was not discovered, because he was not suspected to be capable of so much baseness) encouraged him to a second; and the success of his second attempt encouraged him to greater extravagances and more expensive risk than he had ventured upon before. But his wickedness, which in the former instances had been ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... danger, far or near; Spurn at baseness, spurn at fear. Still, with persevering might, Speak the truth, and do ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... ourselves? I do not find what Sextus Peduceus did, in faithfully restoring the treasure that C. Plotius had committed to his sole secrecy and trust, a thing that I have often done myself, so commendable, as I should think it an execrable baseness, had we done otherwise; and I think it of good use in our days to recall the example of P. Sextilius Rufus, whom Cicero accuses to have entered upon an inheritance contrary to his conscience, not ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... you. They have persuaded themselves, they have even dared to say, that the Canadians were not capable of distinguishing between the blessings of liberty and the wretchedness of slavery;...but they have been deceived; instead of finding in you a poverty of soul and baseness of spirit, they see with a chagrin, equal to our joy, that you are enlightened, generous, and virtuous; that you will not renounce your own rights, or serve as instruments to deprive your fellow-subjects of theirs. Come then, my brethren, unite with us in an indissoluble ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... It is no Baseness for the Greatest to descend and looke into their owne Estate. Some forbeare it, not upon Negligence alone, But doubting to bring themselves into Melancholy in respect they shall finde it Broken. But wounds cannot be cured without Searching. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Virtues are more attainable than virtue, characteristics than character. And while it is false to assert that Judaism attached more importance to ritual than to religion, yet, the two being placed on one and the same plane, it is possible to find in co-existence ritual piety and moral baseness. Such a combination is ugly, and people do not stop to think whether the baseness would be more or less if the ritual piety were absent instead of present. But it is the fact that on the whole the Jewish codification of religion did not produce the evil results possible or even likely to ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... while the incidents are exceedingly laughable. Old Rapid continually betraying his trade by stuffing his conversation with the technical terms of the taylor—his son's distress at it—the honest rusticity of Frank Oatland—the baseness, vanity and folly of Vortex the nabob—the insolence and amorousness of Miss Vortex his daughter, and the whimsical incidents arising from their various designs, mistakes, detections and disappointments, form altogether a melange of pleasantry highly ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... his power, and less proud of displaying it, would have paused ere he mixed up, thus mockingly, the degradation of humanity with its sufferings, and, content to probe us to the core with the miseries of our fellow-men, would have forborne to wring from us, the next moment, a bitter smile at their baseness. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... They showed that the crowded city life can bring out human nobleness as well as human baseness; that to be crushed into contact with their fellow-men, forced at least the loftier and tender souls to know their fellow-men, and therefore to care for them, to love them, to die for them. Yes—from one temptation the city life is free, to which the country life is ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never see us want what he either had or could by any ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Merton, who now felt all the painful interest of a tender father, and considered this as the critical moment which was to give his son the impression of worth or baseness for life, was determined to examine this affair to the utmost. He, therefore, took the first opportunity of drawing the little boy aside who had mentioned Master Merton's striking Harry, and questioned him ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... usually predominated in his proceedings, violence being often too perilous for him to risk it; he did not consider himself in a condition to say brazen-facedly, "Might before right;" but he disregarded right in the case of his adversaries, and he did not deny himself any artifice, any lie, any baseness, however specious, in order to trick them or ruin them secretly, when he did not feel himself in a position to crush them at a blow. "The end justifies the means"—that was his maxim; and the end, in his case, was sometimes a great and legitimate political object, nothing ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... people thoroughly as to his real conduct, he maintained, before others at least, a gentlemanly demeanor. But this was gradually giving way to the pressure of a constant thorn in his flesh, and the consciousness of his own baseness. He could swear, threaten, and almost strike at slight provocation now. He never really attempted the latter, but once, and it was then I told him I should shoot ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... which his spirit, with all its forces, shall incarnate itself? Coming into actual acquaintance with the people for the first time, the sight of their multiform miseries, their sorrows, even their baseness lays hold of Sordello; it seems as if it were they who were about to make him their instrument, the voice through which their inarticulate griefs should find expression; he is captured by those whom he thought to capture. By all his personal connections he is of the Imperial party—a ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... his chin in his hands, dull, stricken, crushed. He had heard the story of his father's baseness from Frances Cable, and he had been told the true story of Jane; from Rigby he learned of the vile transactions in which his father had dealt. At first, he could scarcely believe his own ears, but in the end lie saw that but—half ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw it all. I blushed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... which have been agitating you this long while, which you have asked at every stage of this long narrative of a sinful life. Shake not your head, lift not your finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader; you can deceive me in nothing. I know the baseness and unworthiness of your soul as I know the baseness and unworthiness of my own. This is a magical tete-a-tete, such a one as will never happen in your life again; therefore I say let us put off all customary disguise, let us be frank: you have been angrily asking, exquisitely ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... sorrow, weariness, and disappointment of life which give dark days their gloom, and cold its icy edge, and work its bitterness. The real sorrows of life are not of Nature's making; if faithlessness and treachery and every sort of baseness were taken out of human lives, we should find only a healthy and vigorous joy in such hardship as Nature imposes upon us. Upon men of sound, sweet life, she lays only such burdens as strength delights to carry, because in so doing ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Mr. Carruthers, who suggests, by way of palliation, that Pope was desirous at the time of providing for Martha Blount, and probably took the sum in order to buy an annuity for her. Now, if the story were proved, it must be admitted that it would reveal a baseness in Pope which would be worthy only of the lowest and most venal literary marauders. No more disgraceful imputation could have been made upon Curll, or Curll's miserable dependents. A man who could so prostitute his talents must have been utterly vile. Pope has sins enough to answer for; ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... call it baseness. Why should we draw you down with us in our misery? You have already served us, Powis, in a situation of terrible trial, and it is not just that you should always devote yourself in behalf of those who seem fated never to do you good. My father will tell you ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... corruption. It may be a bad thing, but many seem to think otherwise. Much may be said on both sides of the question. Oh! don't tell me of a worm selling his birthright for a mess of pottage: I never read of such worms in Buffon, or even in Pliny. But if they do exist in the human form, the baseness consists in the sale, not in the quid pro quo. A mess of pottage in itself is a very good thing—I should say, a very respectable thing; and no exchange can take away from it that character. Still, if what we give for it is an heirloom, coming ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... and good will towards so offensive an object. He has wit, it will be said; chearfulness and humour of the most characteristic and captivating sort. And is this enough? Is the humour and gaiety of vice so very captivating? Is the wit, characteristic of baseness and every ill quality, capable of attaching the heart and winning the affections? Or does not the apparency of such humour, and the flashes of such wit, by more strongly disclosing the deformity ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... tenderness, this sweetness, this regale is nothing else but the Presence of God in the praying soul. At the same time, I believe that we can greatly help toward the obtaining of God's Presence. We obtain it by considering much our own baseness, the neglect and the ingratitude we show toward the Son of God, how much He has done for us, His passion and terrible suffering, His whole life so full of affliction, by delighting ourselves in His word and in His works, and such things as these. And if in these reflections the soul be seized with ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... burst with spite, and die with shame, to be thus apprehended! this is the baseness and cowardice of guilt: an army now were not so dreadful to me as that son, o'er whom the right ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... that people of great genius are always proud as well as humble, and that the consciousness of their own nobility spreads, as it were, the wings of an angel between them and all the baseness and barrenness through which they are often compelled to wade up to the lips? Whenever I think of Burns, my heart tightens itself, to use a French expression, for a most painful physical emotion. Do you know Schiller's ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of being disobeyed."—"But what is to be done? I cannot remain as I am; I have yet resources and partisans. It is said that the Allies will no longer treat with me. Well! no matter. I will march on Paris. I will be revenged on the inconstancy of the Parisians and the baseness of the Senate. Woe to the members of the Government they have patched up for the return of their Bourbons; that is what they are looking forward to. But to-morrow I shall place myself at the head of my Guards, and to-morrow we shall be ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... had never been his wife. Once possessed of this document in her handwriting, the little scoundrel sent copies of it to his own and his wife's relatives in Scotland, whereby she suffered much obloquy and neglect, and when that unhappy lady raised her action of declarator, with peculiar baseness he lodged the letter in process. Fortunately, she had preserved the original draft, together with her faithless husband's letters thereanent. This judgment was, for the gallant defender, now on half-pay, a veritable debacle, ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... abject, it will be viewed as despicable, it will be called corrupt, in a Claudius, in a Sejanus, in a Nero: its energies will be admired, we shall be delighted with its manner, fascinated with its efforts, in a Shakespeare, in a Corneille, in a Newton, in a Montesquieu: its baseness will be lamented, when we behold mean, contemptible men, who flatter tyranny, or who servilely cringe at the foot ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... lived happy and joyous, and go away with a stranger, far from her own home and her own people, to share a struggling life, with no certain assurance of anything, save love alone? What was this but a baseness, of which no honest man could be capable? If,—if even I had read her glance aright,—last night,—or was it a year ago? Still, it was but a thing of a moment, the light springing up of a tiny fire of good will, ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... not, such baseness I disdain; I would not stoop, to purchase all above, And should contemn a power, whom prayer could move, As one unworthy ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... what part of my mind or conduct have you found that baseness, which entitles you to treat ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... men of the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith, and of fear.' 'He would have acknowledged religion had he seen any that was true, anything rather than that baseness which he did see.' 'If there is no other religion than this of popes and cardinals, let us to the robber's ambush and the dragon's den.' 'A little early sympathy, a word of true guidance, perhaps had saved him. What says he of himself? "Despiser of wealth ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... entering into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more. The sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... thus left an orphan and nameless. I was utterly alone in the world. I had not a creature to love me, and I knew that I must never dare to love anyone. Left to myself, I cursed the whole world and its prejudices and baseness." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is always allowed," said Robinson, indignantly; "nor did I think that any member of this chamber would have had the baseness to ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... very injurious to habits of study. The youth had imbibed the venal corruption everywhere prevalent. Hence it not seldom happened that Roman scholars conspired to rob their master of his salary and desert his class in a body. Roman vileness and baseness disgusted Augustine even more than Punic insubordination. He therefore took advantage of a request made by the citizens of Milan of Symmachus who was then Prefect of Rome, that he would procure for them a professor of rhetoric. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... prisoners; a man whom Kineas said the Romans especially valued for his virtue and bravery, but who was excessively poor. Pyrrhus, in consequence of this, entertained Fabricius privately, and made him an offer of money, not as a bribe for any act of baseness, but speaking of it as a pledge of friendship and sincerity. As Fabricius refused this, Pyrrhus waited till the next day, when, desirous of making an impression on him, as he had never seen an elephant, he had his largest elephant ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... commenced reproaching him in an indignant tone of voice, with the baseness of his conduct, and his insatiate demands, Maxence ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Germany wanted peace at the moment when she declared war! That is how sincere she was in pretending that we obliged her to take up arms for her defense! That is the price she intended to make us pay for our baseness if we had the infamy to repudiate our signature as Prussia repudiated hers by tearing up the treaty that guaranteed the neutrality ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... Greville, who crept on tiptoe through the world, observing and recording the littleness of men? His stealthy eye missed nothing; and the men whom he flattered and used little thought that the wizened dandy who pleased them with his old-world courtesy was chronicling their weakness and baseness for all time. A nobly patriotic Ministry came before the world with a flourish of trumpets, and declared that England must fight Russia in defence of public law, freedom, and other holy things. But the wicked diarist had watched the secret proceedings of his dear friends; and he ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... heart. Meanness and grovelling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it, to try to degrade it: thus, all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes truly needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval root of baseness. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hearken to thee, then wilt thou know who among thy captains and who of the common sort is a coward, and who too is brave; for they will fight each after their sort. So wilt thou know whether it is even by divine command that thou shalt not take the city, or by the baseness of thy warriors and their ill skill ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... believe you, sir. I consider that to recommend yourself to your highly respectable uncle, you have deliberately set yourself to blacken my character, which may bear comparison with your own, let me tell you. No words can do justice to such baseness as that!' ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Baseness so gross I had not guessed of them!— The thirty thousand false Bavarians I looked on losing not unplacidly; But these troth-swearing sober Saxonry I reckoned staunch by virtue of their king! Thirty-five thousand and gone! It magnifies A failure into ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the Danes, and Scourge of the Bremen Ships." But Long Peter, "by his own grace, and not that of God," had at length fallen a victim to the vicissitudes of life. The women of Helgoland, revolting against his cruelty, baseness, and tyranny, surrendered the island, the seat of the ancient gods, to Admiral Paulsen, of the Danish navy. This occurred in 1684, and since then Helgoland remained under the authority of the Danish crown until 1807. The conflagration ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... dealings with his fellow-men, however open to censure his life might be in other matters. Careless as he was, and indifferent, to levity, in many things, his ideas of honor were really very pure and elevated; he suffered proportionately now that, through the follies of his own imprudence, and the baseness of some treachery he could neither sift nor avenge, he saw himself driven down into as close a jeopardy of disgrace as ever befell a man who did not willfully, and out of guilty coveting of its ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Familiarity, Fascination, Command, Dogmatism, Combativeness, Aggressiveness, Secretiveness, Avarice, Stolidity, Force, Rivalry, Profligacy, or Lawless Impulse, Irritability, Baseness, Destructiveness, Hatred, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... conduct with other nations. In every other instance, the new government has ushered itself to the world as honest, masculine, and dignified. It has shown genuine dignity, in my opinion, in exploding adulatory titles; they are the offerings of abject baseness, and nourish that degrading vice in ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the price sett upon the bages sent last yeare being 20 lb. which was so much money out of purse here, there was returned 66 lb. of tobacco only, and that of the worst and basest, so that fraight and shrinkage reconed together with the baseness of the comoditie there was not one half returned, which injury the company is sensible of as they demand restitution, which accordingly must be had of them that took uppon them the dispose of them the rather that no man may mistake himself, in accomptinge ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... shoulder. It has been said of men in battle that they have been shot and have run forward some hundred feet without knowing what has happened to them. And so Mr. Crewe got five or six lines into that editorial before he realized in full the baseness of Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... this determination, because the horse was intended as a gift to Eveline on her recovery, in case she did recover, and, also, because, as he believed, the detection of the culprit would expose the baseness of her lover to his daughter, and cause her to discard him at once from her thoughts.—Full of these thoughts, he offered a handsome reward for the horse, and a very large one for the apprehension of the thief. In prospect of obtaining these rewards, as well as to render a service to community, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... of a different "mind" is there abroad! In the school of the world (this "painted world"), how much is there of what is called "policy," double-dealing!—accomplishing its ends by tortuous means; outward, artificial polish, often only a cloak for baseness and selfishness!—in the daily interchange of business, one seeking to over-reach the other by wily arts; sacrificing principle for temporal advantage. There is nothing so derogatory to religion as aught allied to such a spirit among ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... death of my mother—although that is a wound that will never heal; that came from the hand of Providence; against its decrees no man dare murmur. I speak of more bitter, more cruel defeats, occasioned by the ingratitude and baseness of men." ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Miss Whiff and Miss Piff; taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he is let in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his servility he is a going to let the public have 'em, and they snap him up when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a going to answer a public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust. (But it ain't strong.) Once, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... is hopeless. People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction which teaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue is wretched. Want of hope means either distrust of God or a belief in the essential baseness of man or both. It teaches men to be base. It makes a country base. A world wherein there is no hope is a world where there is no virtue. The contrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despair ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... mother also had done. That Tom suspected her was a thought which never crossed her mind; to suspect any one herself was in her eyes a sin; and if the fancy that this man or that, among the sailors who had carried Tom up to Heale's, might have been capable of the baseness, she thrust the thought from her, and prayed to be forgiven ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... give you those instructions, that may add Unto your even judgment in the cause: Which thus we do commence. First, you must know, That where there is a true and perfect merit, There can be no dejection; and the scorn Of humble baseness, oftentimes so works In a high soul, upon the grosser spirit, That to his bleared and offended sense, There seems a hideous fault blazed in the object; When only the disease is in his eyes. Here-hence it comes our Horace now stands tax'd Of impudence, self-love, and arrogance, By those who ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... the incoherence of what I write. Diverse emotions inflame me; thoughts at times assail me truly worthy of my immortal soul; but at times also I fall into a lamentable state of dejection, and I am reminded of the weak and degenerate characters whose baseness you have painted to me in such strong colors, in order that I might abhor them. In the state in which I am to-day I am ready for good or for evil. God have pity upon me! I already know what prayer is—a solemn and reflexive supplication, so personal that it is not compatible ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... wretched as to have done the sin, and so destroy it. The fault of such a child would then cause no interruption of the interchange of sweet affections. The child is forgiven at once. But the treatment of another upon the same principle would be altogether different. If he had been guilty of baseness, meanness, selfishness, deceit, self-gratulation in the evil brought upon others, the father might say to himself: "I cannot forgive him. This is beyond forgiveness." He might say so, and keep saying so, while all the time he was striving to let forgiveness ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... tormented my love beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her—and so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them all—and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in our bedroom at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river—where ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... between statecraft and morality, which recognizes force and fraud among the legitimate means of attaining high political ends, which makes success alone the test of conduct and which presupposes the corruption, baseness, and venality ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... asserted by the enemies of Ian Macdonald that the catastrophe which followed was the result of a desire on his part to prove the truth of his own remark, but we acquit him of such baseness. Certain it is, however, that the very next rapid they came to they ran straight down upon a big stone over which the water was curling in ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... have detected, through the mere blood-poisoning of the prison, the inherent baseness of the man, or may have recoiled from the type. Anyway, his instinct was to get rid of him. And evidently the less he said about anyone in Sapps Court the better. So he replied, surlily enough considering his really amiable disposition:—"No—I could not say ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... better so, Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... this place, flee far away, And seek a new and better fatherland. Here is the spirit's lofty pride repressed; Here baseness smothers each auspicious spark Ere it can break into a burning flame. Come, let us fly;—lo, to the free-born mind The world's wide compass is ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... for you to choose. Do you wish to have friends or lackeys—soldiers or slaves—great men or mere puppets? Do you wish men to serve you, or to bend and crouch before you? Do you wish men to love you, or to be afraid of you? If you prefer baseness, intrigue, cowardice, say so at once, sire, and we will leave you,—we who are the only individuals who are left,—nay, I will say more, the only models of the valor of former times; we who have done our duty, and have ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... notable instance. Amidst the terrors of the Judgment-hall he thrice denied his Lord. The evangelists make no attempt to shield him from adverse criticism; on the other hand, they mention in detail every circumstance that enhances the baseness of his behaviour. But they are equally careful to dwell also upon the reality of his repentance. John, in a passage of marvellous beauty, relates how in a saner mood, on the shore of the sea of ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... heart like a hammer of God. He repents, but in the cowardice of repentance curses her. That baseness I do not think Browning should have introduced, no, nor certain carnal phrases which, previously right, now jar with the spiritual passion of repentance. But his fury with her passes away ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... betrayed many lamentable symptoms of degeneracy. Pride, ambition, discontent, unbelief, presumption, ingratitude, and an undervaluation of the divine favour, are all plainly discernible through the thin veil of an extenuating apology, with which they vainly attempted to conceal their baseness.—"The woman, whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." And the woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Endowed as they were with knowledge, it was a sin against the greatest ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... anxiously propitiated before the petitioner's prayers can reach the ears of Jove himself, seated aloft on his remote Olympian throne. He may be, and for the most part really is—if he belongs to the old stock of aristocratic divinities—generous and gracious, incapable of meanness, baseness, or cruelty. But the tenant has to do, not with the absentee divinity, but with his priest—not with the good spirit, but his medium; and this go-between is not always noble, or disinterested, or unexacting. To him ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... dean shall know, before this hour is expired, the baseness of the nephew whom he supports upon charity; he shall know the misery, the grief, the shame he has brought on me, and how unworthy he ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... have thought of that before; but not even to spare her feelings can I neglect my duty. I cannot demean myself by touching a thing so vile. Ralph, whom you have calumniated, shall inflict upon you a punishment suited to the baseness of your crime. Wilson, you will find a light cane in that corner; ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... out of humour at ... don't you suffer my lady to huff me every day as if I were her dog, or had no more concern with you—I declare I won't bear it and she shan't think to huff me. For aught I know I am as agreeable as she; and though she dares not take any notice of your baseness to her, you shan't think to ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass reaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderer may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry. But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... like some poor little wounded boy, like Putney's Winthrop; the mother that is in every woman's heart gushed out of hers in pity upon him, mixed with filial reverence. She had thought that she should confess her baseness to him, and ask his forgiveness, and offer to fulfil with the people he had chosen for the guardians of his child that interrupted purpose of his. But in the presence of death, so august, so simple, all the concerns of life seemed trivial, and she found herself without words. She sobbed over ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... She thought she had detected a new baseness in the girl. She was going to set up a claim to all which had been her father's property. "They were your father's, and all these rubies, and these yellow diamonds;" and she pushed the tray ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... In pulpit daily prate, Like the Covenanters, Against the Church and State: Yet they cry they love the King, But their baseness will discover; Charles the First they murdered, And so ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... have dwelt with beauty night and morn, Guarding the soul within from every stain, No baseness since the first day she was born Behind those star-lit brows could access again, Bathed in the light that streamed from all things fair, Turning to spirit each delicate door of sense, And with all lovely shapes of earth and air Feeding her wisdom ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... soldier, and a guardian just; Likewise an upright judge. Let no one thrust You in a dubious cause to testify, Through fear of tyrant's vengeance, to a lie. Count it a baseness if your soul prefer Safety above what Honor asks of her: And hold it manly life itself to give, Rather than lose the things for ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... off.] I thank the gods, for calling to my mind My promise, that no words of thine should urge me Beyond the bounds of reason: But in thee 'Twas brutal baseness, so forewarned, to fall Beneath the name of man; to spurn my kindness; And when I offered thee (thou know'st how loth!) The wholesome bitter cup of friendly counsel, To dash it in my face. Farewell, farewell, Ungrateful as thou art: hereafter use The name of brother; ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Majesty's subjects; as a great and sudden increase in the number of married men occasioning the comparative desertion (for a time) of Taverns, Hotels, Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, will deprive the Proprietors of their accustomed profits and returns. And in further proof of the depth and baseness of such designs, it may be here observed, that all proprietors of Taverns, Hotels, Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, are (especially the last) solemnly ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... this small group of women, whose presence consoled him, Jesus had before him only the spectacle of the baseness or stupidity of humanity. The passers-by insulted him. He heard around him foolish scoffs, and his greatest cries of pain turned into hateful jests: "He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... given her Miss Franks's letter, and poured out to her the story of his treachery and baseness. I may have been wrong, but something in me forbade it, and I preferred to ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... tell thee the truth, my sister—only he, since the day when Sichaeus died by our brother's hand, hath moved my heart. But may the earth swallow me up, or the almighty Father strike me with lightning, ere I stoop to such baseness. The husband of my youth hath carried with him my love, and he shall ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... paid to said reputation. A good name is, after the grace of God, mans most precious possession; wealth is mere trash compared with it. You may find people who think otherwise, but the universal sentiment of mankind stigmatizes such baseness and buries it under the weight of its opprobrium. Nor is it impossible that honor be paid where a good character no longer exists; but this is accidental. In the nature of things, reputation is the basis of all honor; if you destroy character, you destroy at the same time its fruit, which is honor. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... companions and said, "What doth he deserve who forgeth a letter in my name and carrieth it to my foe?" They answered all and each, saying this and that, and every one proposing some kind of punishment; but Yahya said, "Ye err in that ye say and this your counsel is of the baseness of your spirits and the meanness of your minds. Ye all know the close favour of Abdullah with the Caliph and ye weet of what is between him and us of anger and enmity; and now Almighty Allah hath made this man the means of reconciliation ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... spirit transcending the hatreds of the time, and glorify human nature; but it is happily questionable whether it produced an example to equal that expounded in these pages, of ignoble treachery and ungrateful baseness. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... this had been prepared by him, they said. His flight was a ruse, his pusillanimity was prudence; he had made the Tartars their own destroyers, without risking the fate of Russia in a battle; and what had just been condemned as dastard baseness was ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... protest as indicating a natural and proper course of public conduct shews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III. at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer indulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... most intimate friends believe that the very next time that it ever occurred to him that the insanity plea was not a mere politic pretense, was when the verdict came in. They think that the startling thought burst upon him then, that if twelve good and true men, able to comprehend all the baseness of perjury, proclaimed under oath that he was a lunatic, there was no gainsaying such evidence and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bestowed on him some abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... deeply repented of the past, George could never summon up courage enough to inform Josiah of his baseness in destroying his trees. A hundred times a day he was on the point of declaring his guilt; but false pride always hindered him from confessing so ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... common people, and for the tendency of events; and she explained the reasons for her belief that the enormities of that period were no new crime, but a remnant of the old not to be eradicated at once, any more than it is possible for an individual to turn from great baseness to real goodness without some backslidings, even after the most unmistakable of conversions. Miss Sunderland was satisfied, the future again became clear to her, and after that she seemed to lose interest in the details of affairs. Her thoughts ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not read me: no! She saw that I might come to The Crossways. She—no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding aloof, in contempt of this baseness.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English schoolboys, but cruel to English poachers, is drawing near that deep place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that the baseness is in the idea of bewildering the tramp; of leaving him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich. But in the older case there were two very important differences, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... her sheets, not for nobody!" Louisa proclaimed savagely. And by that single phrase, with its implications, she laid unconsciously bare the sordid baseness of her ageing heart; she exposed by her mere intonation of the word 'sheets' all the foulness of jealousy and thwarted salacity that was usually concealed beneath her tight dress and neat apron, and beneath her prim gestures and deferential tones. Her undisciplined ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Guasparrino's house several years, ill-clad and worse shod and employed about the meanest offices. But Giannotto, who was now sixteen years of age, and had more spirit than pertained to a slave, scorning the baseness of a menial condition, embarked on board certain galleys bound for Alexandria and taking leave of Messer Guasparrino's service, journeyed to divers parts, without any wise availing to advance himself. At last some three ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Ralph felt towards Nicholas, and the bitter contempt with which he sneered at poor Mrs Nickleby—notwithstanding the baseness with which he had behaved, and was then behaving, and would behave again if his interest prompted him, towards Kate herself—still there was, strange though it may seem, something humanising and even gentle in his thoughts at that moment. He thought ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... my best, that you may well believe. When we're forgotten by a woman's heart, Our pride is challenged; we, too, must forget; Or if we cannot, must at least pretend to. No other way can man such baseness prove, As be a lover scorned, ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... politeness, with a ferocity and practice of savage vices which is probably unparalleled in any other part of the world."[653] One of the first civilised men to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Fijians draws a melancholy contrast between the baseness and vileness of the people and the loveliness of the land in ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and with chalk on their naked feet to show that they were for sale, or who had bawled "sea-urchins all alive" in the Velabrum or the Saburra—who had acquired enormous wealth by means often the most unscrupulous and the most degraded, and whose insolence and baseness had kept pace with their rise to power. Such a man was the Felix before whom St. Paul was tried, and such was his brother Pallas,[9] whose golden statue might have been seen among the household gods of the senator, afterwards the emperor, Vitellius. Another of them might often have been observed ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... allowed him to conclude—I couldn't, with all my resolution, tell him positively!—that Midwinter knew of the contemplated Fraud, and that he was staying away purposely, so as not to compromise me by his presence. This difficulty smoothed over—or, as I feel it now, this baseness committed—I reverted to myself, and came back again to the truth. One after another I mentioned all the circumstances connected with my private marriage, and with the movements of Armadale and Midwinter, which ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... on the part of Jasper," said Melleville to himself, as he left the store. "A lie told with sinister purpose. How given over to all baseness ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... this time he had been loyalty itself, where his obligations lay— treachery was new to him; he had never done an ignoble thing—baseness was new to him; he had never done an unkind thing that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... happened which entirely transformed her life. One day, when she was at work upon a quilt, she suddenly experienced a strange sensation. No—it seemed impossible. Motionless she sat with her work in hand. Was it possible that this was IT. Forgetting everything, his baseness and deceit, her mother's querulousness, and her father's sorrow, she smiled. She shuddered at the recollection that she was on the point of killing it, ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Nath, whom we saw accompanying the prince in his escape from Dehli, continued about him; but the chief favourite was an illiterate ruffian called by the title Hissam-ud-daulah, who stooped to any baseness whereby he could please the self-indulgent monarch by pandering to his lowest pursuits. The duties of the office of Vazir were delegated by Shujaa to his son Saadat Ali, who afterwards succeeded him ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... God, and made your vow to him—had so proclaimed before men, had so lived and worked and striven! Supposing you thought a broken vow was death to your own soul and a trap to the souls of others—a baseness, a treason, a desertion—more cowardly than a soldier's flight—as base as a thief's purloining—meaning to you and those who had trusted you the death of good and the ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying—the earthly beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel; her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to all, tenderly solicitous for, and incessantly ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... assumption of kingship should be recognised and punished by those over whom he usurps power. The King is no longer the just, rather kind, man of affairs who takes power in the earlier, much finer play. He is a swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the ingratitude of a king and all the baseness of one who knows his cause to be wrong. Opposed to him is a passionate, quick-tempered man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant, to any whom he believes to be ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... given time to fully feel the ignoble position into which she had fallen. She must not see the man whom she adored; she must meet—with politeness even if she could not with grace—the man whom she loathed. To one of Dorothy's spirit and fineness there dwelt in this an infamy, a baseness, of which Mr. Harley with his lucky coarseness ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... stop the blood. Our care recovered the wretch; but, when he had collected strength, the ungrateful Dominique, forgetting at once his duty and the signal service which we had rendered him, went and rejoined the rebels. So much baseness and insanity did not go unrevenged; and soon after he found, in a fresh assault, that death from which he was not worthy to be saved, but which he might in all probability have avoided, if, true to honour and gratitude, he ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... our tongues. We took it for granted that Lawless would hold his, and as for my people, they knew nothing, I thought, or if they did, I was sure of them. How the thing got abroad I could not at the time conceive, though now I am well acquainted with the baseness and treachery of the woman I called my friend. The affair was known and talked of every where the next day, and the story was told especially at odious Mrs. Luttridge's, with such exaggerations as drove me almost mad. I was enraged, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... chargeable with an equal and common ignorance: the third, in ignoring the necessity of the presence of the military at the elections referred to, in order that disloyalty and treason might not openly defy the authority of the nation; the fifth, in ignoring two things, first, the monstrous baseness of the rebel treatment of our prisoners, who have been starved alive, with a refinement of cruelty reserved for this Christian age, and practised only by the Christian chivalry of the South; and secondly, the rebel ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... grown weary of this as well, and ashamed of the baseness of his calling, he returned to painting, and executed pictures and paintings for the houses of citizens in Florence. For Giovan Maria Benintendi he painted three little scenes with his own hand; and for the house of the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... many times, had had so many exquisite bubbles float before him, to break at a touch and leave only dirty soap-suds. He let himself be interested slowly, drawing out the pleasure, and getting its full flavor. Then, when he found that it was true metal and might be worked at will without fear of baseness, or alloy, he gave himself up to the pleasure of it. Then, his instinct being always to draw to himself what he desired, he strove to awaken an interest in her. He was a man of unusually brilliant attainments, and he spared ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... if you knew how I have flattered Appius—that was his meaning. "Sic vivitur!"—"It is so we live now." When I read this I feel compelled to ask whether there was an opportunity for any other way of living. Had he seen the baseness of lying as an English Christian gentleman is expected to see it, and had adhered to truth at the cost of being a martyr, his conduct would have been high though we might have known less of it; but, looking at all the circumstances ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... is meet that she should receive the honour of the Stag. And you, my lords, what do you think about it? Can you make any objection? If any one wishes to protest, let him straightway speak his mind. I am King, and must keep my word and must not permit any baseness, falsity, or arrogance. I must maintain truth and righteousness. It is the business of a loyal king to support the law, truth, faith, and justice. I would not in any wise commit a disloyal deed or wrong to either weak or strong. It is not meet that any one should complain of me; nor ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... try my best, that you may well believe. When we're forgotten by a woman's heart, Our pride is challenged; we, too, must forget; Or if we cannot, must at least pretend to. No other way can man such baseness prove, As be a lover ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... of the last session, some excuses may be allowed. A treacherous President stood in the way; and it can be easily seen how reluctant good men might be to admit an apostasy which involved so much of baseness and ingratitude. It was natural that they should seek to save him by bending to him even when he leaned to the side of error. But all is changed now. Congress knows now that it must go on without his aid, and even against his machinations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... stormy and distracted times of politics, and perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life, down to the casual freedom ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true, As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us With base? with baseness? with bastardy? base, base? Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land; Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... who do not know!" he cried. "But you shall—everything—all my cowardly baseness!" The confession burst from him in a torrent of self-denunciation—"That trip to town, when we went to fetch them, I lied to you about those bridge plans. It was not true that I found them. He handed them to me. He took no receipt. I looked at ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... exclaimed "Alack, alack, Signora! these shall be the Austrians." "Nay, Be still," I answered, "do not wake the child!" —For so, my two-months' baby sleeping lay In milky dreams upon the bed and smiled, And I thought "He shall sleep on, while he may, Through the world's baseness: not being yet defiled, Why should he be disturbed by what is done?" Then, gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street Live out, from end to end, full in the sun, With Austria's thousand; sword and bayonet, Horse, foot, artillery,—cannons rolling on Like blind slow storm-clouds ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... queen revenge to seek; Rage moved her breast, and shame possessed her cheek. E'en Cupid, we are told, assistance gave; What from his aim effectually can save? Fair in person was Gyges to behold; Excuses for her easy 'twere to mould; To show her charms, what baseness could excel? And on th' exposer all her hatred fell. Besides, he was a husband, which is worse With these each sin receives a double curse. What more shall I detail?—the facts are plain: Detested was the king:—beloved the swain; All was accomplished, and the monarch placed Among the heroes who ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... lump— Paolo, hark! There are some human thoughts Best left imprisoned in the aching heart, Lest the freed malefactors should dispread Infamous ruin with their liberty. There's not a man—the fairest of ye all— Who is not fouler than he seems. This life Is one unending struggle to conceal Our baseness from our fellows. Here stands one In vestal whiteness with a lecher's lust;— There sits a judge, holding law's scales in hands That itch to take the bribe he dare not touch;— Here goes a priest with heavenward ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... whether it's heroism or baseness. Nicola's the ablest man I've met in Bulgaria. I'll make him manager of a hotel if he can speak ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... side with honied smile, And fawning courtesy, and limping stride, Showing to those who knew the heart, more vile The baseness that his gilding sought to hide; But she went on unmoved, and stood the while Still as a marble statue at his side; Certes, a terror o'er the spirit crept, It had been mercy had ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... fence, and disappeared. Then Phil sighed deeply and shuddered; the fear in the man's eyes had not been good to see; and yet she had been touched with pity for him. The night he had taunted her about her mother she had taken the measure of his baseness; but she was glad she had helped him to escape. If there was really anything of value in the suit-case, as Whittlesey had said, the law might have it and welcome; and she was already wondering just how to dispose of it. If Charles ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... become the scorn of all the world. "Ichabod; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is nothing baser, by all accounts and evidences, than the system of repression and corruption, of shameless dishonesty and unbelief in anything but human baseness, that we now live under. The Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and France is—what is France!"—We know what France suddenly became in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we can trace a considerable share in that event ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... he ought to die worthily and nobly, so that our sorrow at the tragedy shall be tempered with the joy and pride one always feels when a man does his duty well and bravely. There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... in pursuance of established usage on similar occasions. He speedily returned, stating that the deserter was known; he was no less a person than the sergeant-major, who was gone off with his horse, baggage, arms, and orderly-book. Sensibly affected at the supposed baseness of a soldier, who was generally esteemed, Carnes added, that he had ordered a party to prepare for pursuit, and that he had come for ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... is a mean between haughtiness and loutishness; humility is a mean between arrogance and self-abasement; contentment is a mean between avarice and slothful indifference; kindness is a mean between baseness and excessive self-denial; gentleness is a mean between irascibility and insensibility to insult; modesty is a mean between impudence and shamefacedness. People are often mistaken and regard one of the extremes as a virtue. Thus the reckless and the foolhardy is often praised as the brave; the man ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... jealous of somebody or something perhaps!' she said, in tones which showed how fatally all this was telling against the intention of that day. 'I will not be a party to baseness, if it is to save all ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... such dark intrigue and base agents. There were designs against King William that were no more honorable than the ambushes of cut-throats and footpads. 'Tis humiliating to think that a great Prince, possessor of a great and sacred right, and upholder of a great cause, should have stooped to such baseness of assassination and treasons as are proved by the unfortunate King James's own warrant and sign manual given to his supporters in this country. What he and they called levying war was, in truth, no better than instigating murder. The noble Prince of Orange ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... what a great name is Dharini, signifying the fortitude and forbearance that comes from majesty of soul! What an association it carries of the infinite dignity of love, purified by a self-abnegation that rises far above all insult and baseness ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... was being thrilled with sympathy by the superb heroism and the appalling death-roll, four hundred twenty-nine, in the Welsh colliery disaster at Senghenydd; in another thrilled with horror and indignation at the baseness of a sympathetic strike. In one month was immense excitement because the strike of eleven thousand insufferable London taxi-drivers drove everybody into the splendid busses; and in another month immense excitement because the strike of all the insufferable London bus-drivers drove everybody ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... him in Siena, in April, 1302, and from that time began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow agony of his exile and bitter disappointment. Disillusioned, separated from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it is to climb another's stairs. "Alas," he says, "I have gone about like a mendicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without sail ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the inner life is one of simplicity and peace. But there are other people who, as it were, seem to be born two people. They are capable of infinite goodness; also they are capable of the most profound baseness. And never, never, never are they happy. For the good that is in them suffers for the bad, and the bad also suffers, since it knows that it is unworthy. So their inner life is one long struggle to attain that ideal of perfection which they prize more than anything ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the use of our cultivation if it is to cultivate us into cowards? Let us answer those feeble counsels of despair and say, We also have a property which your tyranny of squalor cheats us of; we also have a morality which its baseness crushes; we also have a religion which its injustice makes ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... people become the body in which his spirit, with all its forces, shall incarnate itself? Coming into actual acquaintance with the people for the first time, the sight of their multiform miseries, their sorrows, even their baseness lays hold of Sordello; it seems as if it were they who were about to make him their instrument, the voice through which their inarticulate griefs should find expression; he is captured by those whom he thought to capture. By all his personal connections he is of the Imperial party—a Ghibellin; ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... little porringer: Of me she shall not win renown: For the baseness of its nature shall have ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... "No—no—your honest countenance would be sufficient surety for the truth of a thousand hearts! If all men had as honest tongues, and no more promised what they did not mean to perform, there would be less wrong done in the world, and fine feathers and scarlet cloaks would not be excuses for baseness and deception." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and the Black Prince. 1376.—Ordinary citizens, who cared nothing for theories which they did not understand, were roused against Lancaster by the unblushing baseness of his rule. Nor was this all. The anti-clerical party was also a baronial party, and ever since the Knights Bachelors of England had turned to the future Edward I. to defend them against the barons who made the Provisions ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... Hamburgers, Chastiser of the Danes, and Scourge of the Bremen Ships." But Long Peter, "by his own grace, and not that of God," had at length fallen a victim to the vicissitudes of life. The women of Helgoland, revolting against his cruelty, baseness, and tyranny, surrendered the island, the seat of the ancient gods, to Admiral Paulsen, of the Danish navy. This occurred in 1684, and since then Helgoland remained under the authority of the Danish crown until 1807. The conflagration of Copenhagen melted the ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... opposition to the administration; and the General of course concluded, that the Speaker designed, in ruining him, merely to further his own political schemes. How he boiled with fury against Mr. Clay, his published letters amusingly attest. "The hypocrisy and baseness of Clay," wrote the General, "in pretending friendship to me, and endeavoring to crush the Executive through me, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... a life of Drummond at home," said Hildegarde, simply. "Of course one reads lovely things,—there is no merit in that; and the teasel still flaunts. But I do feel better. That is just my baseness, to be glad when you don't know things, you dearest! But do just look at these sweet-peas! I have picked all these,—pecks! bushels!—and there are as many as ever. Don't you think we ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... soul, once tainted with so foul a crime, No more shall glow with friendship's hallow'd ardour: Those holy beings, whose superiour care Guides erring mortals to the paths of virtue, Affrighted at impiety, like thine, Resign their charge to baseness and to ruin[a]. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... honorable knight commander. And have you not since felt the most cruel neglect from these your early associates, and much obliged friends, with no crime but poverty, with no reproach but the want of prudence? Have you not experienced ingratitude and persecution in every shape that human baseness could find ingenuity to inflict? And can you hesitate to avail yourself of the noble revenge in your power, when it combines the advantages of being morally profitable ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the case for the prosecution with a few brief but very severe remarks upon the baseness of the crime with which the prisoner stood charged, and then ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... lawyer, my life has been spent in a prolonged quarrel about money, land, houses; cattle, thieving, slandering, murdering, and other villainy. The little episodes of politics that have given variety to my career have only shown me the baseness of human nature, and the pettiness of human ambition. There are men who will fill these places and do this work, and who want and will choose nothing better. Let them have all the good they can get out of such things. But the minister of the gospel who ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... baseness, I could not dispense with his services; and had no other resource but to give him a serious admonition, and desire him to return to his duty; after endeavouring to work upon his fears by an assurance, that I would certainly convey him to England for trial, if the Expedition should be ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... that seems to threaten our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cooling sun. God fights against death in every form, against the great death of the race, against the petty death of indolence, insufficiency, baseness, misconception, and perversion. He it is and no other who can deliver us "from the body of this death." This is the battle that grows plainer; this is the purpose to which he calls us out of the animal's round of eating, drinking, lusting, quarrelling and laughing and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... young Girl for Business, and the crying down her Value for being a slight Thing, together with every other Circumstance in the Scene, are inimitably excellent, and have the true Spirit of Comedy; tho it were to be wished the Author had added a Circumstance which should make Leucippe's Baseness more odious. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... been long trusted, and had there been left in him the audacity for ten adroitly used minutes of boldness, he might have been heard that night in his own defence. But Bas had, back of all his brutal aggressions, a soul-fibre of baseness and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... defend himself!" "By my faith," said Charlot, "I mean to do the same by you. Know that I am the son of Duke Thierry of Ardennes, from whom your father, Sevinus, took three castles; I have sworn to avenge him, and I defy you." "Coward," answered Huon, "I know well the baseness that dwells in your race; worthy son of Thierry, use the advantage that your armor gives you; but know that I fear you not." At these words Charlot had the wickedness to put his lance in rest, and to run upon ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... torment that it had wrung confessions even out of men on whom His Majesty's favourite boot had been tried in vain. [124] But it was well known that even barbarity was not so sure a way to the heart of James as apostasy. To apostasy, therefore, Perth and Melfort resorted with a certain audacious baseness which no English statesman could hope to emulate. They declared that the papers found in the strong box of Charles the Second had converted them both to the true faith; and they began to confess and to hear mass. [125] How little conscience had to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... blood mounting to his brow; there was no doubt upon the subject. Danglars defended himself with the baseness, but at the same time with the assurance, of a man who speaks the truth, at least in part, if not wholly—not for conscience' sake, but through fear. Besides, what was Morcerf seeking? It was not ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... vices, your weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness of your origin, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to purchase bliss by the agony of another is unfit for heaven and could not recognize it if he were there. What do we think of a person here who shifts his sins upon another and while that other suffers he goes free and enjoys the fruits of his baseness? ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of the thing that ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... certain proportions according to their usage, these strange monsters did not neglect to set apart a small sum as an offering to Kalee their goddess; and when, after this and several other murders, all characterized by similar features of treachery and baseness, they returned to their village, they proceeded at once to celebrate Tapoonee, or a solemn rite ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet this was the brief analysis of a devotee amongst the ancient Romans. Now, considering that the word religion is originally Roman, [probably from the Etruscan,] it seems probable that it presented the idea of religion under some one of its bad aspects. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... forwarded to Strasburg several days before. He had found willing tools in the brutal hussars. These wretches believed that what a man of high standing asked them to do was agreeable to the will of their imperial master. Baseness is easily able to mislead stupidity, and soldiers thus became the assassins of unarmed men, who stood under the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... may seem brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harshness, and it is generally limited to elemental cruelties. Quite different is the battle for the superfluous—for ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. Never has hunger driven man to such baseness as have envy, avarice, and thirst for pleasure. Egotism grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined. We of these times have seen an increase of hostile feeling among brothers, and our hearts are less ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... middle ones the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall. And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... trap-doors and sliding panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie. The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at 7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister—one of the lealest of H.P.B.'s friends—was at work, and I signed an application to be admitted as fellow of ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... was shared by many of the French, whose sense of national honor was shocked to see so utter a lack of pride and so open a display of treachery in their monarch. They had not deemed his boasted policy capable of such baseness. Louis afterwards excused himself with the remark, "When pride rides before, shame and hurt follow close after," a saying very pretty as a politic apothegm, but not likely to soothe the wounded ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... feeling may justify a man, who has done no harm, in long-continued misery. The sense of violent bodily pain, or of perpetual misfortune, or of the baseness of all in whom he trusted, and other steady influx of many-fountained sorrow, may wear him for a time, and even fetch his spirit lower than the more vicarious woe can do. But the firm conviction that the family of man to which ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... woman in question to bring Before her own face, were a flattering thing, But we think thy father's baseness,' quoth they, 'Might by thy beauty be ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... As thou thyself; we envy not to see Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—we, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy one dying baseness; yet must we Dance anticks on your paper. But were thy warp'd soul put in a new mould, I'd wear thee as a jewel ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Amelie," replied the Lady de Tilly; "I know it is hard to bear, but perhaps Le Gardeur did not send that message to you. The men about him are capable of deceiving you to an extent you have no conception of,—you who know so little of the world's baseness." ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... lady, also an American, (whose Thursday evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. I saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... features and expression gave no sign whatever of relenting. There is one thing remarkable about women: they never reason about their blameworthy actions,—feeling carries them off their feet; even in their dissimulation there is an element of sincerity; and in women alone crime may exist without baseness, for it often happens that they do not know how it came about ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... effect, the uselessness of all argument, the futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible force: and his momentary irritation against the malice of circumstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising lassitude ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... rewards for real services, and as encouragements to other gallant heroes. They were honourably earned in a different sort of campaign than those at Westminster; they were gained by actions full of danger to themselves, of glory and of benefit to this nation—not by corrupt votes of baseness and of destruction to their country. You will find no secret service there; and you will find that, when the warrior was recompensed, the member of parliament was left free. You will likewise find a pension of L1,500 a year to Lord Camden. I recommended his lordship ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thoroughly believe in the baseness of the woman he had trusted. Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which should ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... shown towards the austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the impoverishment of the middle class with their inadequacy. The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by baseness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd. On the contrary, we may ask whether the vile spirit of demagogism had not even thus early laid hold of this matter, and whether expedients were really needed so violent and dangerous as, for example, the deduction of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the weapons of craft against villains," he said. "There is no baseness to equal yours. You are repaid in your own ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... double-dyed, Would pluck an Uncle's whiskers in their pride, What baseness, then, doth such a man disclose Who'd raise a hand ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... was. But I am not afraid of you now; and here, on my knees, I implore you to forgive my baseness, my ingratitude. Oh, Miss Gale, you don't know what it is to be madly in love; one has no principle, no right feeling, against a real passion: and I was madly in love with her. It was through fear of losing her I disowned my physician, my benefactress, who had saved ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... to know nothing whatever; except that Miss Graham had sometimes declared herself an ill-used creature, deceived by the baseness of mankind, and the victim of unmerited sufferings, in the way of poverty and deprivation. Beyond this, Miss Tonks could tell nothing; and although she made the most of what she did know, Robert soon sounded the depth of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... her from dwelling on the thoughts which still caught their breath of life from the undying devotion of the past; which still perversely ascribed Frank's heartless farewell to any cause but the inborn baseness of the man who had written it. The woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her. All she can do is to struggle against it in ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... me rich temporal supplies: for besides the freewill offerings of 2l. 8s. 10d., a 5l. note was put into my hand for the supply of any want I may have. Thus the Lord melted the heart by love, and made me still more see the baseness of my conduct yesterday. Thanks be to God, the day is coming, when Satan will triumph ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... virtues and perfections, and it behoves human genius to seek, accept, nourish, and preserve a love like that; but one should take great care not to bow down or become enslaved to an object unworthy and base, lest we become sharers of the baseness and unworthiness of the same: appositely the Ferrarese ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... impetuous and self-willed, but she could hardly bring her mind to believe that he would actually put in practice such a piece of villany as should cost Aphiz his life. Knowing as much as she did of his imperious and stern habits, she did not believe him capable of such cold-blooded baseness. But no sooner had the officers, sent to execute his sentence against the innocent mountaineer, returned and announced the task as performed, than Komel was summoned to the presence of the ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... own shore; when the king drags the daughter of Pandion into a lofty dwelling, concealed in an ancient wood, and there he shuts her up, pale and trembling, and dreading everything, and now with tears inquiring where her sister is; and confessing his baseness, he masters by force her a maiden, and but one, while she often vainly calls on her father, often on her sister, and on the great Gods above all. She trembles like a frightened lamb, which, wounded, being snatched from the mouth ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... all, that now I am; He taught me first the noble thirst of fame. Shewed me the baseness of unmanly fear, Till the unlicked whelp I plucked from the rough bear, And made the ounce and tyger give me way, While from their hungry jaws I snatched the prey: 'Twas he that charged my young arms first with toils, And drest me glorious in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... outwardly defined, was spiritually and morally insignificant. As in the Renaissance, so now, vice trickled downwards from above, infiltrating the masses of the people with its virus. But now, even more decidedly than then, the upper classes displayed obliquities of meanness, baseness, intemperance, cowardice, and brutal violence, which are commonly supposed to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... were evill himselfe. By Otho, that the fortune of a rash man is Torrenti similis, which rises at an instant, and falles in a moment. By Vitellius, that he that hath no vertue can neuer be happie: for by his own baseness he will loose all, which either fortune, or other mens labours have cast upon him. By Vespasian, that in civill tumults an advised patience, and opportunitie well taken are the onely weapons of advantage. In them all, and in the state of Rome under them thou maiest see the calamities ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... which never crossed her mind; to suspect any one herself was in her eyes a sin; and if the fancy that this man or that, among the sailors who had carried Tom up to Heale's, might have been capable of the baseness, she thrust the thought from her, and prayed to be ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... agents of the government; and his heart sank within him. In an evening when he had dined and drunk his claret, he feared nothing. He would die like a man, rather than save his neck by an act of baseness. But his temper was very different when he woke the next morning, when the courage which he had drawn from wine and company had evaporated, when he was alone with the iron grates and stone walls, and when the thought of the block, the axe ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were almost the only counterchecks to the current of vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the point—she had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious, had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him, precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to commit for herself; and, since he hadn't instantly felt the difference, she would never be able to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... best and highest in him, and she would judge him by that alone. In her sight his genius would stand apart from all in him that was jarring and obscure. It at least was untouched by the accident of his birth, the baseness of his false position. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... people had not found any want of interest in the allegations—nay, had mastered all the details—so long as the charges pointed to some disgraceful issue, and the verdict threatened to be unfavourable. An instance of this baseness, truly shocking to the moral sense, is found in the ridiculous charge against the ministers, founded upon the mail-coach contract. This was not at all too petty to be pressed with rancour. However, it was answered. The answer, on the principle of the case, and coupled with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... that, I would take you out and cane you in the presence of your clerks. I repeat, sir, that I consider you guilty of treachery, falsehood, and knavery. And if I ever see you at Bays's Club, I will make the same statement to your acquaintance at the west end of the town. A man of your baseness ought to be known, sir; and it shall be my business to make men of honour aware of your character. Mr. Boltby, will you have the kindness to make out my account? Sir Barnes Newcome, for fear of consequences that I should deplore, I recommend you to keep a wide berth of me, sir." And ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... take it in a mocking sense. Rachel looked up out of her depths and gave her heart to this high-minded nobleman. He looked down and lifted her, as it were, so that she could forget for the time all the baseness and the brutality that she had known, that she might put aside her forced vivacity and the self that was not in ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... to him. It was like receiving a blow in the face, it was mud upon his honour, it was an insult to his conscience, it was far worse than merely taking back a gift once given in a generous impulse. If he had felt himself capable of such baseness he could never again have looked honest men fairly in the eyes. It would mean that he must turn upon her, to insult her by accusing her of something she had never done; he knew nothing of the divorce laws in foreign countries, except that ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... she had felt when Clarissa came between her and her father—sharpened Miss Granger's suspicions in this case. She was jealous even of that supposed flirtation at Belforet, four or five years ago. She was angry with Clarissa for having once possessed this man's heart; ready to suspect her of any baseness in the past, any treason in ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... that of the Sun in a wholly cloudless sky, became Fierce, and burnt up him who beheld it. Time had been so long a husbandman of her fair demesne, had reaped so many crops of smiles and tears from that comely visage, that it were a baseness to infer that no traces of his husbandry appeared on her once smooth and silken flesh, for the adornment of which she had ever disdained the use of essences and unguents. Yet I am told that her wrinkles ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... sister's baseness was still too fresh for Federigo's reappearance to be in any way agreeable to him, although he believed him to be innocent of any complicity in that business. At the same time, the latter's conscience was apparently not entirely clear in the matter, for there was a certain conscious ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... was right. Gilbert was a man who could be angry enough at baseness or neglect, but who was too kindly to punish it; he was one who could form the wisest and best-digested plans, but who could not stoop to that hail-fellow-well-met drudgery among his subordinates which has been the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... no injustices," said Heathcliff; and though his life had been animated by hate, revenge and passion, let us reflect who have been his victims. Not the old Squire who first sheltered him; for the old man never lived to know his favourite's baseness, and only derived comfort from his presence. Catharine Earnshaw suffered, not from the character of her lover, but because she married a man she merely liked, with her eyes open to the fact that she was thereby wronging the man ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... than that of a rival and pretender to his crown; so no wonder that he was startled at the news of his birth. All Jerusalem, likewise, instead of rejoicing at such happy tidings, were alarmed and disturbed together with him. We {098} abhor their baseness; but do not we, at a distance from courts, betray several symptoms of the baneful influence of human respects running counter to our duty? Likewise in Herod we see how extravagantly blind and foolish ambition is. The divine infant came not to deprive Herod of his earthly ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... battlement or labored mound, Thick wall or moated gate; Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned; Not bays and broad-armed ports, Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; Not starred and spangled courts, Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in the manner I desire, for your own good." "Mother," replied Abou Hassan, "I am persuaded of the truth of what you say, but shall be more certain of a fact which concerns me so nearly, when I shall have informed myself fully of their baseness and insensibility." Abou Hassan went immediately to his friends, whom he found at home; represented to them the great need he was in, and begged of them to assist him. He promised to give bonds to pay them the money they might lend him; giving them to understand at the same ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it—I haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... the unruly sort were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never see ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... and wisdom. All this had been prepared by him, they said. His flight was a ruse, his pusillanimity was prudence; he had made the Tartars their own destroyers, without risking the fate of Russia in a battle; and what had just been condemned as dastard baseness was ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... "Treasure Island" and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite; the squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English schoolboys, but cruel to English poachers, is drawing near that deep place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that the baseness is in the idea of bewildering the tramp; of leaving him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich. But in the older case ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... than half his work was still undone; for, at all times, she disclosed such purity of sentiment, such inviolable attachment to religion and virtue, and seemed so averse to all sorts of inflammatory discourse, that he durst not presume upon the footing he had gained in her affection, to explain the baseness of his desire; he therefore applied to another of her passions, that proved the bane of her virtue. This was her timidity, which at first being constitutional, was afterwards increased by the circumstances of her education, and now aggravated by the artful conversation of Fathom, which he chequered ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... acknowledge to ourselves. And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human life which in one area prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have anticipated them. One, we may suppose, holds some "greatest nobleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness principle;" and then their very systems of axioms will ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... conscience I do fear. Once, for one moment, George, I thought that I would fear nothing. Once, for one moment, I was still willing to be yours; but I remembered what you would think of me if I should so fall, and I repented my baseness. May God preserve me from such sin! But, for the world—why should you ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... what loathing so many of them—"of you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them—what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... revelation would be dishonoring, and a disgraceful exhibition of childishness. He might betray his own secrets, but to betray those of Pepita in order to set himself right with his father, seemed to him contemptible enough. The baseness and the ridiculous meanness of the action were still further increased in his eyes by the reflection that what prompted him to it was the fear of not being strong ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... with them in their homes, and learn the sources of their loves, their hates, their fears, and see wherein domestic happiness, or lack of it, made them strong or weak; follow them to the market-place, and witness their dealings with their fellows—the honesty or baseness of them, and trace the cause; look into their very hearts, if it may be, as they kneel at the devotion they feel or simulate, and become acquainted with the springs of their dearest aspirations ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... consults no interest but its own in the management of government, and which will never make a concession to the manufacturers or the merchants of the North, unless it be to purchase some new act of baseness, or bind them in some new chains of servility.—But have you inquired whether that flood of paper is necessary? We frankly tell you that we do not believe it is; we believe that a better system is possible,—to be brought about, not by greater restrictions on banking, but by greater freedom; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... ever. Would that my loss were all! would that comfort might visit the soul of this fair creature and another. But I dare not—I cannot pray; I am at enmity with God and man. Yet I will make an effort in favour of this victim of my baseness. O God," continued I, "if the prayers of an outcast like me can find acceptance, not for myself, but for her, I ask that peace which the world cannot give; shower down thy blessings upon her, alleviate her sorrows, and erase from her memory the existence of such a ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... only art true! thou only art noble! thou wantest no glory for selfishness! thou doest, thou art, what thou requirest of thy children! I know it, for I see it in Jesus, who casts the contempt of obedience upon the baseness of pride, who cares only for thee and for us, never thinking of himself save as a gift to give us! O lovely, perfect Christ! with my very life I worship thee! Oh, pray, Christ! make me and my brother strong to be the very thing thou wouldst ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... compared with the North, no one who walks the streets of a Northern city, by day or night, with the ordinary discernment of one who sets himself to examine the moral condition of a place, will fail to see that we need not go to the South to find humiliating proofs of baseness and shame. There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... not, in God's name, put off also your enmity? and if you choose to write your lingering affections upon stones, wreak also your delayed anger upon clay. This would be just, and, in the last case, little as you think it, generous. The true baseness is in the bitter reverse—the strange iniquity of our folly. Is a man to be praised, honored, pleaded for? It might do harm to praise or plead for him while he lived. Wait till he is dead. Is he to be ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III. at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer indulges in torture in the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... to be dispersed with a vengeance," said Chandos. "The confession of yonder mutinous traitors will clear you from all that your accusers have said, by proving their villainy and baseness!" ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doubtless Dubois who was mostly responsible for the baseness in the Regent's character—Dubois who had taught him a contempt for religion and morality, the cynical view of life which makes the pleasure of the moment the only thing worth pursuing, at whatever cost; and who had impressed indelibly on his mind that no woman ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... high and mighty Courage, an invincible Patience, an immovable Grandeur; which is above the reach of Injuries; a high and lofty Spirit allayed with the sweetness of Courtesy and Respect: a deep and stable Resolution founded on Humilitie without any Baseness ... a generous confidence, and a great inclination to Heroical deeds; all these conspire to compleat it, with a severe and ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... gazed at his stepbrother and tried in his stupid way to read the secrets beneath that curly hair. But he had no success. He caught himself calculating how much Sidney had cost him, at periods of his career when he could ill spare money; and, having caught himself, he was angry with himself for such baseness. At eight o'clock he ventured to knock at Ella's door and explain to her that Sidney had not been quite well. She had passed a peaceful night, for he had, of ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of his country, of which until then I was ignorant. It seems that any younger brother, next heir, might claim the estate by turning Protestant, or drive the incumbent to the same act. I was rejoiced to hear that there was hardly an instance of such profligacy known.[26] To what baseness will not the struggle for political ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... last that you are in sober verity a lackey, an impostor, and a thief, even as you said. Ay, a lackey to your honour! an imposter that would endeavour—and, oh, so very vainly!—to impersonate another's baseness! and a thief that has stolen another person's punishment! I ask no questions; loving means trusting; but I would like to kill that other person very, very slowly. I ask no questions, but I dare to trust the man I know of, even in defiance of that ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Harold Rein and determines to attend the Radical meeting. Not finding him at home he goes to the house of his brother Halfdan, where he leaves the copy of the paper. The sick man picks it up, reads an onslaught on himself which in baseness surpasses the attack on Evje, starts up in uncontrollable excitement, and dies of a hemorrhage. The maid, who sees him lying on the floor, cries out into the street for help, and the editor, who chances to pass by, enters. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... degrade themselves, by employing one of our generals, whose talents, even before we knew his treachery, we held in light estimation: abilities must, in truth, be rare in New York. But whilst speaking of baseness, Colonel Laurens will tell you of the fine embassy sent by General Clinton to some mutinous soldiers. He will describe to you also the details of that mutiny; the means employed to arrest it with the Pennsylvanians, and also those we employed with the Jersey troops. This ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... right," said Claude. "You are a subordinate. I am wasting words to talk with you. Take me to your captain, or to the Count de Cazeneau. Let me learn what it is that induces him to act towards us with such unparalleled baseness." ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... of fear.] Cowardice. — N. cowardice, pusillanimity; cowardliness &c. adj.; timidity, effeminacy. poltroonery, baseness; dastardness[obs3], dastardy[obs3]; abject fear, funk; Dutch courage; fear &c. 860; white feather, faint heart; cold feet * [U. S.], yellow streak*. coward, poltroon, dastard, sneak, recreant; shy cock, dunghill ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... this horrible exhibition of baseness, my solicitor came to me and told me that he had had an interview with the Attorney-General, and that he had authorized him to say, that if I would enter into bonds and give securities to keep the peace, he would not ask ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... still passing good; Gloster is still Henry's true hate, foe to John's froward will, No more of that: for them in better time. If this same hermit be an honest man, He will protect me by his[517] simple life; If not, I care not; I'll be ever Gloster, Make him my footstool, if he be a slave, For baseness over worth can have no power. Robin, bethink thee, thou art come from kings, Then scorn to be [a] slave to underlings, Look well about thee, lad, and thou shalt see Them burst in envy, that would injure thee. Hermit, I'll meet you in your hermit's gown, Honest, I'll love you: worse, I'll ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... his heart at the remembrance of her treachery. The baseness of it all was so appalling. He tried to think if he had ever wronged her; wondered if perhaps she loved someone else, and wished him out of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... this letter, he had actually written himself into a sort of persuasion of its truth. When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and the effort he was now making to bring himself up to the firmness needed for the important interview with Mr. Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it; but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His purpose never wavered. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... cowardice fill you with disgust as it does myself? Does not your soul shrink with dismay at the infamy we behold everywhere at the present time? Oh, I know your heart is noble and pure, and despises the baseness which is now the master of the world. Let us, therefore, escape from it. Come, dearest, come! I have two pistols at my rooms. They are loaded, and will not fail us. A pressure of my finger—and we are free! Say one word, and I will bring them—say, my Camilla, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... invite the royal ambassadors, the cardinals, the prelates, the Roman barons, and municipal dignitaries to make procession with all their suite to meet the Duke of Valentinois; and as it always happens that the pride of those who command is surpassed by the baseness of those who obey, the orders were not only fulfilled to the letter, ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mother passed away. I was thus left an orphan and nameless. I was utterly alone in the world. I had not a creature to love me, and I knew that I must never dare to love anyone. Left to myself, I cursed the whole world and its prejudices and baseness." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... story of utter baseness. From St. Louis to Springvale Mrs. O'Meara's escort was more like a lover than a friend and business director of her affairs. This land was an Osage reservation then. O'Meara's half-section claim ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... ranks as equals, every youth, every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect, virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some lofty standard, and showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness, incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens. Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most worthy—the most highly organised in body and in mind—perpetually recruited from below: from which, or from any other ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... threw off the damp cloth, and revealed the clay model of a head. The face was unmistakable, but it expressed every baseness—cunning, arrogance, cruelty, and sensuality. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... unpleasant but accurate description of what happened. He looked at the clock again, and wished for the hundredth time that the cab would come. Jill's photograph smiled at him from beside the clock. He looked away, for, when he found his eyes upon it, he had an odd sensation of baseness, as if he were playing some one false ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... he should condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." Christ himself says, "Man, who made me a judge, or a divider over you?" And in another place, "The Son of man came not to judge, but be judged himself." In his first coming, he comes from high majesty to baseness and humility; he came from his Father's glory to shame and ignominy; he came from a palace to a crib; from the seat of his majesty to a tree; he came like a Lamb to be slain, and as a Saviour to save sinners: as the Apostle says, it was a true saying, "That Christ came into the world to save sinners, ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... Conformity to Fashion tends rather to disgust than respect. Deep down in the hearts of all people there is a sense of the hollowness of Fashion, and a just loathing of its pretension and show. Even its votaries secretly despise it, and obey its dictates only because they think they must. They know its baseness better than we can tell them. True, they do not fully realize its sinfulness nor wholly appreciate its evils. But its hollowness and falseness they feel at times most keenly. Else why their perpetual unrest, their longing, dissatisfied condition of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... quite fair and moderate in politics; and perhaps rather too indulgent and tender towards individuals of all descriptions,—more full, at least, of kindness and veneration for genius and social virtue, than of indignation at baseness and profligacy. Altogether it is not much like the production of a mere man of letters, or a fastidious speculator in sentiment and morality; but exhibits throughout, and in a very pleasing form, the good sense and large toleration of a man ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... may guess at the violent effects of my despairing flame, I am yet so vain to hope it. Antonet gave me the intelligence of your design, and raised me up to a madness that hurried me to that barbarity against your unspotted honour. I own the baseness of the fact, but lovers are not, my lord, always guided by rules of justice and reason; or, if I had, I should have killed the fair adulteress that drew you to your undoing, and who merits more your hate than your regard; and who having first violated ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... contributions to this question are the merest Okenism, remanie.") and the French work on the Archetype (points you do not put quite clearly), he never did a baser act...You are so good a Christian that you will hardly understand how I chuckle over this bit of baseness. I hope you keep well and hearty; I honour your wisdom at giving up at present Society for Science. But, on the other hand, I feel it in myself possible to get to care too much for Natural Science and too little for other things. I am getting better, I almost ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lustfulness of the flesh: also, if he have "a dry scurf," which covers the body without giving pain, and is a blemish on the comeliness of the members; which denotes avarice. Lastly, he is rejected "if he have a rupture" or hernia; through baseness rending his heart, though it appear not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... "I might have the baseness to abandon that poor old man whose life I am; but, my friend, those other feeble creatures there before us, Madeleine and Jacques, would remain with their father. Do you think, I ask you do you think they would be alive in ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... defiance would be as naught. Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she had never flinched. Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew she had ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside other things—a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the ornaments of another? Which can in no wise be. For if any adjoined thing seem precious, it is that which is praised, but that which is covered and enwrapped in it remaineth, notwithstanding, with the foul baseness which it hath of itself. Moreover, I deny that to be good which hurteth the possessor. Am I deceived in this? I am sure thou wilt say no. But riches have often hurt their possessors, since every lewdest companion, who are consequently ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... of Great Britain) will do nothing to prevent him. If he chooses to go through any sort of nuptial ceremony, provided it does not simulate a legal marriage, with some or all of them he may. And to any one who evades the legal marriage bond, there is a vast range of betrayal and baseness as open as anything can be. "Free Love" is open to any one who chooses to practise it to-day. The real controlling force in these matters is social influence, public opinion, a sort of conscience and feeling for the judgment of others that ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... his headquarters. He did not reckon on the jealousy of his success which filled the breasts of the rulers of his country, a jealousy which even self-interest was unable to overcome. From the first he had borne their burden alone, and owing to the treachery and baseness of his own nation in the end it proved too heavy ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... men. His largeness of views and generosity of spirit were such that he seemed incapable of personal resentment. He was once exhorted to visit moral indignation upon some men who had wronged him deeply. Fully appreciating the baseness of their conduct, he said he would try, but added: 'I am afraid some one will have to ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... but there can be naught of harm in them. Thy life hath been so innocent in thy Hampshire wilds that there is no act or thought of thine but could be laid open to the queen. Thou hast naught to fear from any gossip. 'Tis only when conscious of baseness that we fear to have our lives searched. Thou hast done nothing ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
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