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More "Irreverent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old ladies. When she stood before them there was a delicate submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the dignity of their years and state. Strongly conservative and rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully attentive as if she had been ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... where the Virgin cowers on her bed as the angel floats in with flames round his feet; such a suggestion as that of the unfinished lily on the embroidery frame, was reserved for our sceptical and irreverent, but imaginative times. ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... see from the enclosed that I am in full force, and going to finish my readings, please God, after Christmas. I am in the hope of receiving your promised notes in due course, and continue in the irreverent condition in which I last reported myself on the subject of speech-making. Now that men not only make the nights of the session hideous by what the Americans call "orating" in Parliament, but trouble the peace of the vacation by saying over again ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... ignorant of the progressive change that had taken place in him since his last visit to the cave, now wept like a child, and Reilly himself experienced something that amounted to remorse, when he reflected on the irreverent tone of voice in which he had replied ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... first Sunday after 'Kiah took the music in hand, the old deacon really rubbed his eyes and looked about him; for the psalm was sung off before he was ready to get his mouth opened, and he really looked upon it as a most irreverent ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... irreverent criticism of the Word of God. That there is a reverent criticism all will allow, and that many who are walking these paths are devout believers in God and in his word I would like to be among the first to acknowledge. There are three kinds of critics to-day. First: Those ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... single remark did she then offer. If she was cool, she was not irreverent before the thought of the awful thing ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... She gazed spell-bound on the form which, though human, transcended humanity as eternity transcends time, as the light of the sun transcended the blazing beacon on Pharos; and she said to herself that it was impossible that an irreverent hand should be laid on this supremely lovely statue, crowned with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of a traveller upon the subject be deemed hasty or irreverent, I beg to quote Bishop Tomline's opinion. He says—"Great objections have been made to the clauses which denounce eternal damnation against those who do not believe the faith as here stated; and it certainly is to be lamented that assertions of so peremptory a nature, unexplained ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... perhaps quite inaccessible for us) he may seem at times to ignore some of our pet formulae—this, I think, would convict us of a lamentable lack of wisdom and humility. And if at times we feel pained by what may seem irreverent, let us remember that Goethe wrote also these words: 'With many people who have God constantly on their tongues He becomes a phrase, a mere name uttered without any accompanying idea. If they were penetrated by God's greatness, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... homily, the Prelate took his departure, leaving the Abbess highly incensed, though she prudently forbore returning any irreverent answer to his ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century wore on, this vicarious indignation ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... thing," said the girl, in a repentant voice; "but, truly, I didn't mean to be irreverent—I only wanted you to know how pat the doctor reels off the scientific phrases; and"—assuming an important air—"I guess I know that Christian Science is the 'new tongue' spoken of in the Bible. I've been to the service all summer; ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... "Is that thy little 'grace before meat'? But, I pray thee, Sir Robin, who said there was cheese in my wallet? Nay, is there like to be cheese in a wallet already containing five-and-twenty holy Ladies on their way back from Vespers? Out upon thee for a most irreverent little glutton! I fear me thou hast not only a high look, thou hast also a proud stomach; just the reverse of the great French Cardinal who came, with much pomp, to visit us at Easter time. He had a proud look and a— Come down again, thou little ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... earlier. She had learnt immeasurably from her contact with Toby. She had kept her eyes open. She was unscrupulous. It was of no use to be scrupulous in this world; you lost all the fun of the fair. Sally was hilarious at her own irreverent unscrupulousness. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... the down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old Hundred from the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang together ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... together through the darkening streets. One cheerful and irreverent, brimful of remark or criticism; the other silent, his usual dreaminess was modified, but had not departed, and once, gazing up through the clear, dark blue, where the stars were shining, he had a momentary ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... ejaculated, taken completely off her guard; but the exclamation was far more of a prayer than an irreverent mention of ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... his works an essay upon the etymology of the word 'sublime,' too vast to be printed whole. Stewart was an upholder of Whig principles, when the Scottish government was in the hands of the staunchest Tories. The irreverent young Edinburgh Reviewers treated him with respect, and to some extent applied his theory to politics. Stewart was the philosophical heir of Reid; and, one may say, was a Whig both in philosophy and in politics. He was a rationalist, but within the limits fixed by respectability; ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... greatest sang-froid known to be exhibited during the flood, but the most irreverent was that of an old man who was saved by E.B. Entworth, of the Johnson works. On Saturday morning Mr. Entworth rowed to a house near the flowing debris at the bridge, and found a woman, with a broken arm, and a baby. After she had ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... rude, irreverent feet, I tread where sacred sorrows lie; But gently raise, in accents meet, My voice in earnest sympathy: In sympathy with one bereaved, Who mourns a loss which all deplore: Whose grief by Hope is unrelieved— For tears bring back the Past ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... presented by a delegation representing most of the religious organizations of Chicago, he said, respectfully but pointedly: "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by religious men who are certain they represent the Divine Will.... I hope it will not be irreverent in me to say that if it be probable that God would reveal His will to others, on a point so closely connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.... If I can learn His will, I will do it. These, however, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a composer of such innate spirituality that to analyze and classify him in a formal manner seems well-nigh irreverent. His music once heard is never forgotten, and when thoroughly known is loved for all time. Nor is an elaborate biographical account necessary; for Franck, more than any other modern composer, has been fortunate in that his life and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... edifice, rich in picturesque memories, and blending into one complex harmony elements contributed by a long series of centuries. And you, wretched French revolutionists, with your love of petty precision, and irreverent radicals and utilitarians, with your grovelling material notions, propose to level, and destroy, and break in upon my delicious reveries. No old Hebrew prophet could be more indignant with the enemy who threatened to break ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... attack his work with fresh vigour. She was so young, so plainly girlish, that as yet there was no room for dread or jealousy; the feeling in his heart was a kind of gentle angel-worship; and he would have turned from the idea of marrying her, if indeed it had ever presented itself, as an irreverent thought, which he dared not for a moment be guilty of entertaining. It was besides, an idea too absurd to be indulged in by one who, in his wildest imaginations, always, through every Protean embodiment, sought and loved and clung to the real. His chief thought was simply to find favour in the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... is iconoclastic. It seeks to destroy sacred memorials, hallowed associations, holy shrines, everything that tells of the faith and the worship of a God-fearing past. The spirit of the age is irreverent, destructive, faithless. Against this and all despoiling forces we as patriots are called to arms. For what does America stand? What are the truths that have gone into her blood and made her strong and beautiful and dominant? The divineness of human rights, the claims ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... have always found it easier to forget a wife than to forget a sweetheart. When a couple are fairly married, all is settled but the death, as one may say, which must finally part us all; and it seems to me awfu' irreverent to disturb the departed; whereas there is so much anxiety and hope and felicity in expectation like, with the lassie, ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... satisfaction of native Romans, the clamorous indignation of irritable Jews—all sounded together in one incessant chorus of discordant noises. Nor were the senses of sight and smell more agreeably assailed than the faculty of hearing, by this anomalous congregation. Immodest youth and irreverent age; woman savage, man cowardly; the swarthy Ethiopian beslabbered with stinking oil; the stolid Briton begrimed with dirt—these, and a hundred other varying combinations, to be imagined rather than expressed, met the attention in every direction. To ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the notorious Wilkes was a member, were a fraternity whose motto was "Do as you please," and that invitation still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind, whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that were to follow ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman. Their irreverent ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... to further contributions in favour of patriot Parliamentarians, but to protest with all the fervour of the conveners' souls, with all the eloquence of their powerful intellects, with all the solemnity of a sacred deed, against the irreverent naming of the animals in the Central Park Zoological Gardens after Irish ladies, Irish gentlemen, Irish saints. Misther Daniel O'Shea, of County Kerry, stated that the great hippotamus had actually been named Miss Murphy! A hijeous baste from ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... mighty Princes! Shame! shame! noble Lords! Is it with this irreverent glee, these scurvy flouts, and indecorous mockery, that you would have this stranger believe that we celebrate the ceremonies of our Father Rhine? Shame, I say; and silence! It is time that we should ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... ancient brush fence and am fairly within the old hemlocks, and in one of the most primitive, undisturbed nooks. In the deep moss I tread as with muffled feet, and the pupils of my eyes dilate in the dim, almost religious light. The irreverent red squirrels, however, run and snicker at my approach, or mock the solitude with their ridiculous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... as he paced irresolutely up and down the square in front of Euston, after seeing Kate and Haddington safely away, while the porter and cabman wondered why the traveler seemed not sure where he wanted to go. Of their wonder and their irreverent ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I should name William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, 'Slender Billy,' as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise S. B., ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Tiber, all the domes and rising ruins and afar the campagna. "I wouldn't make my Heaven here," thought this dreadful Mae, "not if it is beautiful. I'd not stay here a single other day. Bah no!" and she shook her irreverent little fist right ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... shown emphatically by those cases which we do not clearly understand; I take for example the strangest, as is fitting. Some irreverent zealots have hailed the Phaloenopsis as Queen of Flowers, dethroning our venerable rose. I have not to consider the question of allegiance, but decidedly this is, upon the whole, the most interesting of all orchids in the cultivator's point of view. For there are ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... The barons of Normandy had decided to support him, and on April 25 he was invested with the insignia of the duchy by the archbishop, Walter of Coutances, taking the usual oath to respect the rights of Church and people. His careless and irreverent conduct during the ceremony displeased the clergy, as his refusal to receive the communion on Easter day, a week before, had offended Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who came a part of the way with him from Chinon. As the lance, the special ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... to clear up the dishes as usual, but Miss Mehitable pushed her out of the room with a violence indicative of suppressed passion. So, humming a hymn at an irreverent tempo, Araminta went out and sat down on the front porch, spreading down the best rug in the house that she might not soil her ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... government monopoly so long as the agreed-upon duty was paid. Then there was the Starch Monopoly, a very profitable one because starch was a new delight which soon enabled Elizabethan fops to wear ruffed collars big enough to make their heads—as one irreverent satirist exclaimed—'look like John Baptist's on ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... chere, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine—even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been left below for ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... that the "Anbiy" (prophets, or rather announcers of Allah's judgments) were not sinless. But this dogma is branded as most irreverent and sinful by the Shi'ahs or Persian "followers of Ali," who make capital out of this blasphemy and declare that if any prophet sinned he sinned only ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... crooked streets, many a beggar or poor widow waved her a blessing. Out into the market-place, with its clear fountain adorned with arches and statues, past the rising Dome Kirk, where the swarms of workmen unbonneted to the master-carver, and the reiter paused with an irreverent sneer at the small progress made since he could first remember the building. How poor little Christina's soul clung to every cusp of the lacework spire, every arch of the window, each of which she had hailed as an achievement! The tears had well-nigh blinded her in a gush ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some one on very partikler business," growled the irreverent member, and the secretary made his way to ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... to say that he was not profound. This is because he was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity he laughed, and was called irreverent. He thought God would not damn even a priest forever. This was regarded as blasphemy. He endeavored to prevent Christians from murdering each other, and did what he could to civilize the disciples of Christ. Had he founded a sect, obtained control of some country, and burned a ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Kenmure, abruptly, if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus giving Laura. "Madame Recamier was not quite pleased," I said, "that Canova had modelled her bust, even from imagination. Do you never shrink from permitting irreverent eyes to look on Laura's beauty? Think of men as you know them. Would you give each of them her miniature, perhaps to go with them into scenes of ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... had got to that stage of the game of thought-interchange when the young proudly use newly acquired word-counters. "I think, Uncle Jim, you're—you're irreverent." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... money for such masquerades of eloquence as were exhibited that night on the platform. Yes, it occurred to me that if one had not a dollar one could not become an atheist. Billah! I was scandalized. For no matter how irreverent one likes to pose, one ought to reverence at least his Maker. I am a Christian by the grace of Allah, and my ancestors are counted among the martyrs of the Church. And thanks to my parents, I have been duly baptized and confirmed. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... or Dagon's man," said one of the younger soldiers, with a half-irreverent tone, "I wish we had him here ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... beliefs and customs about bees and other interesting animals. An old woman once went to her friend, and asked her what she did to make her hive so gainful. And this was what the old wife said; it sounds rather strange to us, but if there is anything irreverent in it, it is the word and not the meaning; 'I go,' she said, 'to the priest, and get a little round Godamighty, and put it in the hive, and then all goes well; the bees thrive, and there is plenty of honey; they always come, and stay, and work, when ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... glass, which I half expected to hear shiver and crack as our keel ploughed through it. And how color and sound stood out in the transparent air! How audibly the little ripples on the beach whispered to the open sky! How our irreverent voices seemed to jar upon the privacy of the little cove! The mossy rocks doubled themselves without a flaw in the clear, dark water. The gleaming white beach lay fringed with its deep deposits of odorous sea-weed, gleaming black. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... among the proud population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at him by irreverent urchin. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... a thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one's conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began: it is the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and common-sense, of red ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... accept any blessing now, while a single fallow-creature remains destitute of it? A fourth (a lady too) declares "there is no theory God, of an author of nature, of an origin of the universe which is not utterly repugnant to her faculties, which is not (to her feelings) so irreverent as to make her blush, so misleading as to make her mourn"; and now Harrington, instead of being thankful for his glimpse of happiness, and yielding to the better instincts and convictions it partly awakened, and learning patience, submission, and faith under his shattered hopes, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and clergymen, have vied with each other in the vehemence with which they declare absolution un-Christian, un-English. All that is most abominable in the confessional has been with unsparing and irreverent indelicacy forced before the public mind. Still, men and women, whose holiness and purity are beyond slander's reach, come and crave assurance of forgiveness. How shall we reply to such men? Shall we say, "Who is this that speaketh ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... accompanying words. The old nature of Peter was not so completely changed but that a flash of it breaks out still. The same self-confidence which had led him to 'rebuke' Jesus, and to say, 'This shall not be unto Thee,' speaks in his unhesitating and irreverent ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... we can devise some way to counteract the prevailing narrow, vulgar, disrespectful, and irreverent attitude towards all aspects of sex and reproduction; unless we can make people see sexual processes in all their normal aspects as noble, beautiful, and splendid steps in the great plan of nature; unless we can substitute a philosophical and aesthetic view of sex relationship ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... "Irreverent cur! do you rail on the afflicted of Heaven? The Founder of your creed would abhor you, for He, they say, was pitiful. I spit upon ye, and I curse ye. Be accursed!" And flinging up his hands, like St. Paul at Lystra, he rose to double his height and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the woodsman. And so we knew. This old soldier had come in from the Long Trail to bear again the flag of his country. If his clothes were old and ill-fitting, at least they were his best, and the largeness of the empty sleeve belittled the too-largeness of the other. In all this ribald, laughing, irreverent, commonplace, semi-vicious crowd he was the one note of sincerity. To him this was a real occasion, and the exalted reverence in his eye for the task he was so simply performing was Smith's real triumph—if he could have known ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... he began Cain, a Mystery. Cain was an attempt to dramatize the Old Testament; Lucifer's apology for himself and his arraignment of the Creator startled and shocked the orthodox. Theologically the offence lay in its detachment. Cain was not irreverent or blasphemous, but it treated accepted dogmas as open questions. Cain was published in the same volume with the Two Foscari and Sardanapalus, December 19, 1821. The "Blues," a skit upon literary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Tilling with something approaching veneration, but there seemed singularly little veneration at the back of the comments this morning. Following so closely on the encounter with Miss Mapp last night, this irreverent attitude was probably due to some atheistical manoeuvre of hers. Such, at least, was the Major's view, and when he held a view he usually stated it, did ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... at this pleasantry, Frances thanked the irreverent speaker, made devoutly the sign of the cross, advanced some steps into the church, and knelt down upon the stones to repeat the prayer, which she always offered up before approaching the tribunal of penance. Having said this prayer, she went towards a dark corner of the church, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... An irreverent little workmate of mine in the spinning-room made a string of jingling couplets about ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... up her little chin and said irreverent things about precedence, and Commissioners, and matrimony. Mr. Beighton rubbed the top of his head; for ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... stupidity". But on examining philologically the name Kronos, Socrates decides that it must really mean Koros, "not in the sense of a youth, but signifying the pure and garnished mind". Therefore, when people first called Zeus the son of Cronus, they meant nothing irreverent, but only that Zeus is the child of the pure mind or pure reason. Not only is this etymological system most pious and consolatory, but it is, as Socrates adds, of universal application. "For now I bethink me of a very new and ingenious notion,... that we may put in and pull out ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... exclaims "The clerical politician is a useless preacher; the political Christian is a dangerous statesman." On the title page of this address appeared the epigram, "Our statesmen to the Constitution; our Clergy to the Bible." The unfortunately irreverent parallel which Bishop drew between the Saviour of the world and the leader of the national Republican party, or of the democracy or common people, gave to the epigram an evil significance not intended, and to its author a reputation not ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... former position, he was tempted to take out the other volumes, and was rewarded with the further discovery of a small box of ivory counters, known as "poker-chips." It was really very extraordinary! It was quite the cache of some habitual gambler. Herbert smiled grimly at the irreverent incongruity of the hiding-place selected by its unknown and mysterious owner, and amused himself by fancying the horror of his sainted predecessor had he made the discovery. He determined to replace them, and to put some mark upon the volumes before them in order to detect any future ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Acts vii. 60; Acts ix. 40; Acts xx. 36, xxi. 5. Our blessed Lord Himself "kneeled down" when He prayed, Luke xxii. 14. How the example of David and Solomon, Ezra and Daniel, St. Stephen, St. Peter and St. Paul, nay, of our Saviour Himself, condemns the lolling, irreverent posture assumed by too many Christians of the present day in the public worship ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... Parliament, presented petitions for representation of the clergy in parliament, for the administration of the Communion in both kinds to the laity, for the suppression of irreverent language about the Sacrament, and for sanctioning the marriage of the clergy. The first was ignored; the two next were embodied in Acts of Parliament; the last was deferred for a year. The session was rounded off in January by ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... remarked, "dat die dinners dat Montame Zipod cooks for me are better as de messes dey eat at der royal dable!" In his eagerness, Schmucke, usually so full of respect for the powers that be, so far forgot himself as to imitate the irreverent newspapers which scoffed at the "fixed-price" dinners ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... their circumstances; some of them may have dwelt in the old time on this very spot of ground now covered by the Museum. Like other people who grow too rich and comfortable, the citizens of Tarentum loved mirth and mockery; their Greek theatre was remarkable for irreverent farce, for parodies of the great drama of Athens. And here is testimony to the fact: all manner of comic masks, of grotesque visages; mouths distorted into impossible grins, eyes leering and goggling, noses ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... them. She was short in stature, but made up in spirit for her lack of inches, and would fix her dark eyes on offenders against discipline with the personal magnetism of a circus trainer or a leopard-tamer. Schoolgirls are irreverent beings, and though to her face her pupils showed her all respect, behind her back they spoke of her familiarly as "The Bantam," in allusion to her small size but plucky disposition, or sometimes, in reference to her sarcastic ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... moved slowly down the main street and across the railroad track. "He really has been a valuable horse in his day, and there was a time when nothing could go by him,—why, what is the matter?" And she looked around at the girls on the back seat, as they burst into an irreverent laugh. ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... the English character,' is nothing more nor less than le manque de bonheur—'a want of anything like happiness.' An English thinker, on the other hand, finds in the very language of France the evidence of superficial emotion and unaspiring, irreverent intelligence. 'How exactly,' writes Julius Ham, 'do esprit and spirituel express what the French deem the highest glory of the human mind! A large part of their literature is mousseux; and whatever is so, soon grows flat. Our national quality is sense, which may, perhaps, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... law of Moses or the creed of Nicea has than the law of Mana or the text of the Zendavesta? The scepticism of our age is not so much directed against the great truths of religion as against the man-made dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found manifested among the throng of young men gathered at our most progressive University,—Harvard. But Dr. Lyman Abbot, after several weeks' association with the students there, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... don't say such things! They sound irreverent: they shock me!" exclaimed Mr. Allen, deeply pained by Mercy's ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... church for his Dyaks. He then instructs them in the baptismal service. This makes five daily services in church, two English, two Chinese, and one Dyak. We clothed all the candidates in a new suit of cotton garments with a bright-coloured handkerchief for their heads. It would be considered very irreverent for Easterns to uncover their heads in church. I taught the school-children to sing 'Veni, Creator Spiritus' at this baptism, while the clergy were arranging the candidates and sponsors round the font. The font was wreathed with flowers by my children. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... Hodges, will be gratefully remembered in Canada. Thanks to the latter, the plot of ground on which the monument is raised is set apart for ever, so that the remains of those interred there will henceforth be sacred from any irreverent treatment. ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... 'O, dry up.' The minister had his eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked at Pa> Pa was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... quips, Because his very presence made them grave. Amphryssius, after their translucent stream, They called him, but Admetus knew his name,— Hyperion, god of sun and song and silver speech, Condemned to serve a mortal for his sin To Zeus in sending violent darts of death, A raising hand irreverent, against The one-eyed forgers of the thunderbolt. For shepherd's crook he held the living rod Of twisted serpents, later Hermes' wand. Him sought the king, discovering soon hard by, Idle as one in nowise bound to time, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of the scornful is one of the special dangers of this age. Pride, presumption, and scorn are closely linked together, and are far indeed from the mind which was in CHRIST JESUS. This spirit often shows itself in the present day in the form of irreverent criticism. Those who are spiritually least qualified for it are to be found sitting in the seat of judgment, rather than taking the place of the inquirer and the learner. The Bereans of old did not scornfully reject the, to them, strange teachings of the ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... large and more astounding erection than can be found in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Troitza. In small churches these sacred placards, bearing the character of drop-scenes, are apt to be paltry, indeed the irreverent stranger may even be reminded of painted caravans at village fairs. But in large cathedrals the screen which stands between the people in the nave and the priests in the holy of holies, presents a vast facade, upon which are ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... men to set her on fire, and get off as well as they could in their boats. This piece of conduct afforded matter of speculation to all the wits, either in the army or navy, who were at last fain to acknowledge it a stroke of policy above their comprehension. Some entertained such an irreverent opinion of the admiral's understanding, as to think he expected the town would surrender to his floating battery of sixteen guns: others imagined his sole intention was to try the enemy's strength, by which he should be able to compute the number of great ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... desire the vindication at such a price as she would have to pay for it. When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big word. The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education, habits, enlightenment, to pronounce decisively ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was accompanied by shouts of laughter, and no more attempt was made by the amused spectators to preserve the least semblance of decorum. The president, pale with rage, rose from his seat, and darting fiery glances at the irreverent crowd, whom the duchess had named as her ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... "Isn't that almost irreverent?" she asked. "Surely the righteous must have their reward. And your father is good. See how much he gives to all the established charities, how many things he has founded. He's always thinking of others, and planning for them. And surely, for us he does everything. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... rather you did not call me that," she told him coldly, "It sounds irreverent." And she dropped her eyes, which had filled again miserably, to the film of white in her lap. Then, with a pitiful attempt to hurt him in return: "Of course you realize that I really don't know much about you. I ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... corporation. Mr. Bascom hinted, at an animus: there was no more need for a railroad in the Pingsquit Valley than there was for a merry-go-round in the cellar of the state-house. (Loud laughter from everybody, some irreverent person crying out that a merry-go-round was better than poker tables.) When Mr. Bascom came to discuss the gentleman from Leith, and recited the names of the committees for which Mr. Crewe—in his desire to be of service to the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... myself, that I felt it more keenly at times to speak of them than I should have done in confessing grave sins, particularly when the graces I had to reveal were great. I thought they did not believe me, and that they were laughing at me. I felt it so much,—for I look on this as an irreverent treatment of the marvels of God,—that I was glad to be silent. I learned then that I had been ill-advised by that confessor, because I ought never to hide anything from my confessor; for I should find great security if I told everything; ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... Nevertheless the idea caught hold of the popular mind, and it has acquired an amazing vogue. Non-astronomical writers have asserted that Alcyone, the brightest Pleiad, is the centre of the entire universe; some have even been sufficiently irreverent to declare that it is the seat of heaven, the throne of God. A popular London divine, having noticed a bright ring round Alcyone on a photograph of the group, took that halo, which every photographer ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... cast odium and ridicule upon astrology, in the name of which they pretended to operate.[17] It must be remembered that astrology, like medicine, was not only a science ([Greek: episteme]), but also an art ([Greek: techne]). This comparison, which sounds irreverent to-day, was a flattering one in the eyes of the ancients.[18] To observe the sky was as delicate a task as to observe the human body; to cast the horoscope of a newly born child, just as perilous as ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... for social truth, yet all the time she was toadying secretly the people whose luxurious exclusiveness made me tremble sometimes for the future of our country. She and her husband were prosperous, and everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. It may sound irreverent, James, but there was a time during my life in New York when I was discouraged; when it seemed as though heaven were mocking me and my husband in our homely struggle against the forces of evil, and bestowing all its favors on a woman ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... London, 1877, the excellent author dismisses Roman cookery with a few lines of "warning." Kettner, admirer of Sala, evidently was still under the baneful influence. Twenty years later, Danneil, colleague of Kettner's, joined the chorus of "irreverent critics." They all based their judgment on mere idle conversation, resulting from disappointments in ill-fated attempts to cook in the Apician style. Even the best experts, it appears, fall victims to the mysterious spell surrounding, protecting things of sacred antiquity, hovering like ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... complain that your neighbour, aged twenty-two, living in idleness on an allowance, and married to a chorus-girl still in her teens and childless, should be free to decline service if he chooses (as he does), we cannot but disapprove of your irreverent and almost immoral attitude towards the holy condition of matrimony. If the tie of wedlock is not to take precedence of every other tie, including that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... is next seized and involved in the serpents' coils. He struggles to tear them away, but they overpower all his efforts and strangle him and the children in their poisonous folds. This event was regarded as a clear indication of the displeasure of the gods at Laocoon's irreverent treatment of the wooden horse, which they no longer hesitated to regard as a sacred object, and prepared to introduce with due solemnity into the city. This was done with songs and triumphal acclamations, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in a garden where "Nat"—we must protest against this irreverent abbreviation of the name of that honored Governor whose life in little we are about to behold—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the wind and the rise and fall of the intensity. A few days later Mr. MacDowell played a recital in Chicago, and among the other selections was this same "March Wind," which he played fortissimo throughout. When I saw him the next day I began, in that irreverent manner which critics and composers have with one another (for Mr. MacDowell was not yet a professor): "You're a fine fellow! To mark your own 'March Wind' pianissimo and then play it fortissimo. What's the good of my working two hours with a pupil to get ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... distills only purity. His example is the lodestar of our aspirations, and we fain would be his disciples. We feel him to be something worshipful in that his life constantly beckons to our better selves. To be reverent is to be liberally educated, while to be irreverent is to dwell in darkness and ignorance. To be reverent is to live on the heights, where the air is pure and tonic and where the sunlight is free from taint. To be reverent is to acknowledge our indebtedness to all those who, in art, in science, in literature, in ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good Sheffield," he said, "the thing is irreverent, not the manner. It is irreverent to liken your holy mother ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... great sin; did it condemn that spirit of self-importance and sensitiveness of disgrace, which calls itself a love of honour; did it think little of temporal prosperity, wealth, rank, grandeur, and power, did it condemn arrogant and irreverent disputing, the noisy, turbulent spirit of ambition, the love of war and conquest, and the perverse temper which leads to jealousy and hatred; did it prefer goodness and truth to gifts of the intellect; did it think little of quickness, wit, shrewdness, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... the thicket. Presently, Cartier's two interpreters issued from the wood and declared that the god Coudouagny had sent his three chief priests to warn the French against ascending the river, predicting dire calamities if they should persist. Cartier's reply to the Indian deity was brief and irreverent, and he ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... was urged to issue his Proclamation of Emancipation he waited on God for guidance. He said to some who urged this matter, who were anxious to have the President act without delay: "I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that, if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to me, for, unless I am more deceived in myself that I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... standards. The spirit may be woefully lacking in the most artistic rendition: it may be vitally present in the most humble song of worship. While we may with righteous indignation condemn the sacrilege of a spiritless or irreverent singing of the sublime service of the church, it is very bad form to sneer at the earnest and sincere work of a choir whose "limitations," in natural gifts or culture, render their work somewhat commonplace. It is good form to ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... will be all right. You'll not be irreverent, and maybe it will reawaken your own ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... unknown to India, or even to China. The rampant vigor with which Japanese Buddhism began to absorb everything in heaven, earth and sea, which it could make a worshipable object or cause to stand as a Kami or deity to the mind, will be seen as we proceed. The native proverb, instead of being an irreverent joke, stands for an actual truth—"Even a sardine's head may become ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Lalage for more than a year and is therefore entitled to respect. Her predecessor, a Miss Thomas, resigned after six weeks. It was my mother who recommended Miss Battersby to Canon Beresford. I felt that I ought to protest against Lalage's irreverent way of speaking. In mere loyalty to my mother, apart altogether from the respect which, as a landed proprietor, I naturally entertain for all forms of law and order, I was absolutely bound to ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... his life, he found himself divested of that princely character, he was completely at a loss. The trouble was that he had no sense of humour. So he found it impossible to gossip with plebeian unknowns, or engage in card-games with irreverent middle-class artisans and drummers. He could not even carry on a flirtation with any of the pretty girls! He had attempted it with one of them; but, after a very few minutes, she had left him with her chin in the air, and an exclamation which sounded singularly like "Beast!" ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... gone to the great city, and back had come his star. He wore it secretly at first, but was moved at length to display it to a few chosen friends; not wisely chosen, it would appear, for now there were mockers of Billy among the irreverent of the town. As he sat aloft on his boot-blacking throne, waiting for crime to be done among us, conning meantime one of those romances in which his heroes did rare deeds, he would be subjected to intrusion. Some coarse town humorist would leer upon him from the doorway—a leer of ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... to his unceremonious bearers, as they were about to transport him to the place designated by their Captain; "I have one word yet to say. Honest and loyal Rebel, though I do not accept your service, neither do I refuse it in an unseemly and irreverent manner. It is a sore temptation, and I feel it at my fingers' ends. But a covenant may be made between us, by which neither party shall be a loser, and in which the law shall find no grounds of displeasure. I would ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Church had withdrawn the light of its countenance from Moscow, the nest of irreverent vipers who had bombarded the Kremlin. Dark and silent and cold were the churches; the priests had disappeared. There were no popes to officiate at the Red Burial, there had been no sacrament for the dead, nor were ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... his fingers curled round his glass. And, as he looked at him, Oliver felt a little sickish, for, on the whole, he respected Mr. Piper a good deal more than his irreverent habit of mind permitted him to respect most older people, and at the same time felt pitifully sorry for him—it must be intensely humiliating to have to explain this way—and yet the only thing Oliver could do was to take the largest advantage possible of his very humiliation ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... their devastation. They occupied the Piraeus, but Athens itself was spared, and Alaric was entertained as a guest in the city of Athene. But the great temple of the mystic goddesses Demeter and Persephone, at Eleusis, was burned down by the irreverent barbarians; Megara, the next place on their southward route, fell; then Corinth, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... he was a good boy—Julia Bryant, the little angel, hoped so. Her blood would have frozen in her veins if she had listened to the irreverent words he had uttered in the shop. He had broken his resolution, broken his promise to the little angel, on the first day he had been in the city. It was a bad beginning; but instead of permitting this first failure to do right to discourage him, he ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... close. Like Vikings of old (under a figure) we have harried the country round, and (in a sense) ravished its many charms. We have explored shrines consecrated by olden memories, enriched by the associations of centuries; but (unlike the Vikings), we have done this in no irreverent spirit, and with no predatory purpose. We have carried off our hoards of treasure, but we have left no ill traces behind us of our raid. No burning monasteries or homesteads have marked our track; no orphaned children or widowed wives follow us ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Aristotle to a belief in the Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations, spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising. To remain sceptical when ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... to have been oppressed by a disbelief in any kind of good in the world. His philosophy, whenever he ventured upon any, was sceptical and irreverent. His best attempt in this direction was a poem ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of Rogers and the beginning of the Irish ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... with laughter. And underneath the thin flooring, as though roused by her irreverent merriment, the big car shook itself awake with a roar and splutter of indignation. But the sliding doors were thrown open, and its rage died down at the prospect of release. It began to purr ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... admirably indifferent. He never thought of speculating about what people thought of Mr. Helwyse; but to his own approval—something not lightly to be had—he was by no means indifferent. Towards mankind at large he showed a kindly but irreverent charity, which excused imperfection, not so much from a divine principle of love as from scepticism as to man's sufficient motive and faculty to do well. Of himself he was a blunt and sarcastic critic, perhaps because he expected more of himself ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... traverse so much ground that they forget that not the sleeping railroad passenger, but the botanist, the geologist, the poet, really see the country, and that, to the former, "a miss is as good as a mile." In a word, the tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally. This tendency is no way balanced by the slight literary culture common here, which is mostly English, and consists in a careless reading of publications ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... upon the young man to see what effect this coarse and irreverent allusion to his father would have. A slight tinge of shame was in his face; but I saw that he had not sufficient moral courage to resent the shameful desecration of a parent's name. How should he, when he was himself the ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... came in faintly, and now and then I heard a noise in the water-butt under the spout, the snapping of an old rafter, or something falling behind the wall. The toads crawled from under the plantain leaves, and hopped across the broad stone before the kitchen door, and the irreverent cat, with whom I sympathized, raced like mad in the grass. Growing duller, I went to the cellar door, which was in the front entry, opened it, and stared down in the black gulf, till I saw a gray rock rise at the foot of the stairs which affected my imagination. The ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... down, and be at the hall door ready to greet the incomer, before she was halfway up the stairs. The cat never got down for the wrong person, and she never neglected to meet any and every member of our family who might be entering. The irreverent scoffer may call it "instinct," or talk about the "sense of smell." ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... sentinel, especially as they had never seen me in India-rubber clothing, and I can always disguise my voice. It was easy to distinguish those who did make the discovery; they were always conscious and simpering when their turn came; while the others were stout and irreverent till I revealed myself, and then rather cowed and anxious, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... mean to be irreverent. You must continually bear in mind the fact that he didn't know the meaning of the word; that he knew nothing about the Bible, nor dreamed that the words which so delighted him were those of inspiration, sounding down through the ages for the peace and comfort ...
— Three People • Pansy
... colouring of the whole. In general, I will only say, that I have written nothing which savours of immorality or profaneness; at least, I am not conscious to myself of any such intention. If there happen to be found an irreverent expression, or a thought too wanton, they are crept into my verses through my inadvertency; if the searchers find any in the cargo, let them be staved or forfeited, like contrabanded goods; at ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Money, and, therefore, an irreverent age; it is also the age of Respectability (with a very large R),—and ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... good joke to talk to him of religion. But he had periods of despondency and remorse which brought out visions of spiritual life. He would speak of death coming to take him from his wife and little girl in the most piteous way, and then I had to say to him, 'Do not be so irreverent to your Creator. Think of His imperishable goodness in saving you and me from the abysses that have so often confronted us. Think of those piratical throat-cutters whom He assisted us in vanquishing, and remember ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... ship, a little, ugly French surgeon's mate, who had lived several years in London, and in the southern part of America. He could speak, and read the English language equally well with his own. He ridiculed all religion, and talked in such an irreverent style of the bible, of Jesus Christ, and of the Virgin Mary, that our sailors would not associate with him, nor, at times, eat with him. On one occasion, his profanity was so shocking, that he ran some risk of being thrown overboard. He was a witty, comical fellow, and they ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves. Whenever we do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none of us are reverent—in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are all irreverent. There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the earth. There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing to boast ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 'tend him, turn and turn about," continued Mrs. Benton, ignorant of Marty's irreverent remark. "He's to be put into Mr. Ma'sh's room at the quarters, and I'll take this first night's job. I shall begin it with a dose of picra, and the first page of the Westminster catechism; and if that ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... island, while engaged in tremulously reading his introductory speech, came to a sudden stop. An irreverent youth shouted, "Is that a blot?" After the laughter provoked by this query had subsided, the chairman said: "I feel to-night like a square pin in a round hole, or rather, like the Irishman who, when asked if he was dead, replied, 'No, I'm not ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... with a certain familiarity of deportment, as if each one were everybody's grandfather. I have frequently observed, in old English towns, that Old Age comes forth more cheerfully, and genially into the sunshine than among ourselves, where the rush, stir, bustle, and irreverent energy of youth are so preponderant, that the poor, forlorn grandsires begin to doubt whether they have a right to breathe in such a world any longer, and so hide their silvery heads in solitude. Speaking of old men, I am reminded of the scholars ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Barnim had reigned several years, with great blessing to his people, it happened that word came from Ruegenwald how that his brother, Duke Casimir, was sick. This was the Prince whom, we may remember, Sidonia had whipped with her irreverent hands upon his princely podex, when he was ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... Desmond reciprocated by another the next day, in St. Patrick's Church, though it was then, as the Anglo-Irish Annalist remarks, the penitential season of Lent. A work of peace and reconciliation, calculated to spare the effusion of Christian blood, may have been thought some justification for this irreverent ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Watson Gilder, or out of Hayd Sampson, a glorious old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy whom I once found toiling in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faith is firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in our irreverent, Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the master by proxy—"canned virtue." In that event the twenty-first centurion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for a God-forsaken environment without a supply of "canned virtue" than of ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... That's no reason why it should not be true and orthodox. You will soon hear a good many more things, which are true enough—though whether they are orthodox or not, the court cooks must settle. Of course, I am a disappointed, irreverent old grumbler. Of course, and of course, too, young men must needs buy their own experience, instead of taking old folks' at a gift. There—use your own eyes, and judge for yourself. There you may see what sort of saints are bred by ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... never be thus irreverent with the greatest authors, and positive against all antiquity without some certain demonstration of truth—and what is it? Why, "there is written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... When the irreverent Mr. Pepper had warmed his hands sufficiently to be able to transfer them from the fire, he lifted the right palm, and with an indecent jocularity of spirits, accosted the ci-devant ornament of "The Asinaeum" ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from being intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and irreverent a population coming about his house and woods now presented itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions of the insulted majesty ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... saddle-hardened specialists of the back country how to ride a buckjumper; which makes a party of resourceful bushmen stand helpless in the presence of flood or fire, till marshalled by some hero of the croquet lawn; above all, which makes the isocratic and irreverent Australian fawn on the 'gentleman,' for no imaginable reason except that the latter says 'deuced' instead of 'sanguinary,' and 'by Jove' instead of 'by sheol.' Go to; I'll no more on't; it ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the irreverent Jake. "I own I wasn't at a temp'rance meetin' las' night, but I was in bed long before you ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... trust, and eschew the irreverent empty phrases and contradictions of a mis-called 'Science,' professing which some have missed their true aim in regard to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the questions to which he could give a clear answer were never such as to commit any one. In exchange for this the smugglers would go aboard the Tabernacle and allow Israel to preach to them. And woe betide the irreverent on these occasions! Black Rob o' Garlies or Roaring Imrie from Douglas-ha' thought nothing of taking such a one by convenient parts of his clothing and dropping ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... and as it was pretty evident that the repairs on the boat would take a large part of the night, we camped where we were. The talkative lady, whom the irreverent called "the glass front," occupied a tent which belonged to the captain of the launch and the rest of us made our beds down ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... church, in Basinghall-street, he perceived, to his great surprise, that it was lighted up, and at first supposed some service was going on within it, but on approaching he heard strains of lively and most irreverent music issuing from within. Pushing open the door, he entered the sacred edifice, and found it occupied by a party of twenty young men, accompanied by a like number of females, some of whom were playing at dice and cards, some drinking, others singing ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... not for man even to guess what thoughts may have passed through the mind of Christ when He sighed over the very defect which He was healing. But it is surely not irreverent in us to say that our Lord had cause enough to sigh, if He foresaw the follies of mankind during an age which was too soon to come.—How men, instead of taking the spirit of His miracles and acting on it, would counterfeit the mere outward signs of them, to feed the vanity or the superstition of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... never met his match, how did he die?" pursued the irreverent piou-piou—a little wiry man, black as a berry, agile as a monkey, tough and short as ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of God as a living friend, sure to help in time of need. And how real is the sense of God's presence! The mention of the two longitudinal ridges, and of the refusal of the people to give more than two canoes, side by side with the most solemn appeals, would have been incongruous, or even irreverent, if Livingstone had not felt that he was dealing with the living God, by whom every step of his own career and every movement of his enemies were ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... come or lightly go: Though thy heart presage thee woe, Vales and many a wasted sun, Oread let thy laughter run, Till the irreverent mountain air Ripple all thy ...
— Chamber Music • James Joyce
... conservator of the peace of Westminster. You cannot fail to have remarked the grace with which he saluted the noble Lord who passed just now, or the excessive dignity of his air, as he expostulates with the crowd. He is rather out of temper now, in consequence of the very irreverent behaviour of those two young fellows behind him, who have done nothing but laugh all the time they ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... directions—now by the beauty, order, and deep symbolism of the Catholic ritual, now by the spirituality and earnestness of the men among whom he lived. At one moment the worldly pomp, the mechanical and irreverent worship, and the gross and vicious habits of many of the clergy repelled him; at another the reverence and conservatism of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... be d—d!" said the officer, with an irreverent disrespect to the palladium. "If you are not more civil, sir, I will call the police, of whom we have plenty. You say you want to go out; ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the "prima," or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however, it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as a comical incongruity rather than gravely blamed. A row of cheap pictures hung side by side upon the wall. First Luther, the rougher characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated. The shoulders ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... and by the Protestant Pietists, both English and foreign, is all in St Augustine better said than it ever has been since. Some of the Pietist hymns, as we know, are very beautiful; but there are things in them which one wishes left out; which seem, or ought to seem, irreverent when used toward God; which hurt, or ought to hurt, our plain, cool, honest English common-sense. A true Englishman does not like to say more than he feels; and the more he feels, the more he likes to keep it to himself, instead of parading it and talking of ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... composed herself on a low stool by her grandmother's side, he, however, did not conduct himself as a babe of grace. He resisted all Miss Ruey's efforts to make him sit down beside her, and stood staring with his great, black, irreverent eyes during the Bible-reading, and laughed out in the most inappropriate manner when the psalm-singing began, and seemed disposed to mingle incoherent remarks of his own ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... this championship of his views if it were not for his suspicion that Elder Wardle sometimes spoke in a tone of levity, and had indeed more than once been reckoned as a doubter. It was even related of him that a perverted sense of humour had once inspired him to deliver an irreverent and wholly immaterial address in pure Choctaw at a service where many others of the faithful had been moved to speak in tongues; and that an earnest sister, believing the Holy Ghost to be strong upon her, had thereupon arisen and interpreted his speech to be the Lord's ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... a name!" This medium came to the capital in 1863, under eminent auspices, and the President and his wife, members of the Cabinet, and other first citizens were induced to patronize the illusions. The spirits were irreverent, "pinching Stanton's and plucking Welles' beard." As for the President, a rapping at his feet announced ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... he never met his match, how did he die?" pursued the irreverent piou-piou—a little wiry man, black as a berry, agile as a monkey, tough and short ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old Hundred from the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang together ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... end to princes and pomatum," said this irascible republican, with a laugh of triumph, as he ground the remnants of the vial under his irreverent heel. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... long and arduous apprenticeship (if it is not irreverent so to style it) which Val had to pass in order to fit himself for priestly work; he was curate for I know not how many years in a large and extremely poor mission in one of our big towns. He worked well and thoroughly, as any one who knows Val will be ready to affirm; ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... quoth Giles, "'tis an irreverent knave, that maketh the monk in me arise, my very toes do twitch for to kick his lewd and sacrilegious carcase—and, lord, he would ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... remember than many problems in Euclid; and perhaps a few of the best might still be selected for youth as curious exercises of the understanding. However, a great part of these peculiar productions are loaded with the most trifling, irreverent, and even scandalous discussions. Even Aquinas could gravely debate, Whether Christ was not an hermaphrodite? Whether there are excrements in Paradise? Whether the pious at the resurrection will rise with their bowels? Others again debated—Whether the angel Gabriel appeared to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will.... I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.... What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... garden, which was once Angermann's, famous for its company, kings, composers, poets, wits, and critics, all mingling there in discordant harmony. Now it is overrun by Cook's tourists in bicycle costumes, irreverent, chattering, idle, and foolish. Even Wagner has grown gray and the Ring sounded antique to me, so strong were the disturbing influences of ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... book interesting and suggestive. It is disgraced by none of the flippant and irreverent sentimentalism ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fragrance of youth hung about his idea of her. Bridget Rendle had been a girl too, younger perhaps than the other one; but Bridget had dipped into the waters of life, and sorrow and sin had closed over her. The two girls were as far apart as the poles, it seemed almost irreverent to think of them in ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Stretch," was Gimpy's irreverent answer. "This here ain't no regular meetin', an' we ain't goin' to have none o' yer rot. Lem he says, says he, let's break de bank an' fill de Kid's sock. He won't know but it wuz ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... malevolent, but they are regarded as inclined to resent any intrusion or the taking of any liberties with them or their belongings. If one little stick of wood from a tc[)i]'ndi hogan is used about a camp fire, as is sometimes done by irreverent whites, not an Indian will approach the fire; and not even under the greatest necessity would they partake of the ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... John Willet, turning his eyes from the ceiling to the face of his interrupter, and uttering the monosyllable in capitals, to apprise him that he had put in his oar, as the vulgar say, with unbecoming and irreverent haste; 'IF, sir, Natur has fixed upon me the gift of argeyment, why should I not own to it, and rather glory in the same? Yes, sir, I AM a tough customer that way. You are right, sir. My toughness has been proved, sir, in this room many and many a time, as I think you know; and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... was even more eloquent than the applause. It was of such a kind that the snapping of a pipe-stem too long for him by old Solomon Longways, who was one of those gathered at the shady end of the room, seemed a harsh and irreverent act. Then the ventilator in the window-pane spasmodically started off for a new spin, and the pathos of Donald's song ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the least, I admitted him only as a Visitant, but at present I must be more particular with him; he's of late grown a little irreverent towards our Sex, and I must check an insolent Humour he has got of despising Matrimony; he'll be with me instantly, I'll dispose you, that you may over-hear all, how I'll turn and wind him, cross him, humour him, and confound him; when you think it proper make your Appearance, and ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... were the despair of Mr. Potter, the master of the Lower Fourth, rudely called Pottles behind his back; and even Mr. Wilson, the somewhat absent-minded Head Master, nicknamed Billy by his irreverent scholars, was beginning to wonder whether it would not be better to suggest to the parents to try whether sending them to a fresh school would have any effect on them. It was useless to cane them, it was useless ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Petersburg "Gazette" of December 13, 1901. As a characteristic specimen of Russian peasant folk-lore, it seems to me to have more than ordinary interest and value. The treatment of the supernatural may seem, to Occidental readers, rather daring and irreverent, but it is perfectly in harmony with the Russian peasant's anthropomorphic conception of Deity, and should be taken with due allowance for the educational limitations of the story-teller and his auditors. The Russian muzhik often ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... of glass, which I half expected to hear shiver and crack as our keel ploughed through it. And how color and sound stood out in the transparent air! How audibly the little ripples on the beach whispered to the open sky! How our irreverent voices seemed to jar upon the privacy of the little cove! The mossy rocks doubled themselves without a flaw in the clear, dark water. The gleaming white beach lay fringed with its deep deposits of odorous sea-weed, gleaming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Kennedy, in his frolicsome and happy moods, had, in ways, childish, perhaps, but completely harmless, offended the sensitive dignity of the college official, and these trivial eccentricities the Dean regarded as heinous faults—the symptoms of a reckless and irreverent character. There was one particular transaction which gave him more than usual offence, in which Kennedy, hearing a very absurd story at a don's party, while the Dean was present, parodied it with such exquisite humour and such complete command of countenance, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... O my master! when my useful strength is gone do not turn me out to starve, or sell me to some cruel owner to be slowly tortured and starved to death; but do thou, my master, take my life in the kindest way, and your God will reward you here and hereafter. You will not consider me irreverent, I know, if I ask all this in the name of Him Who was born in ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... tent—long since folded up and transplanted—and her start of involuntary terror when the fat evangelist had said: "Your Saviour knows everything. Come and confess your guilt." There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown. The impulse did not shape itself in thought: she only knew she must save her baby, and hide herself with it somewhere where no one would ever come to ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the choice, my lord," said Mrs. Courthope, her temper yielding somewhat, though in truth his speech was not half so irreverent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... be so dishonest and so irreverent, both towards the Holy See and our authority, as to disregard this order [and proceed first in our tribunals against one of the Roman clergy], he shall forfeit 10 lbs. of gold [L400], to be exacted by the officers ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... locked on the inside. Whereupon Mr. Sidney expressed the hope that the religious society were responsible for the board, for he would never again lead that flock like a shepherd. It was subsequently ascertained that the parson had in a very irreverent manner slipped down the spout to the kitchen and jumped from there to the ground, and, what is "very remarkable," like the load of voters upset by Sam Weller into the canal, "was never heard ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the picture. Such a composition as that of Rossetti's Ancilla Domini, where the Virgin cowers on her bed as the angel floats in with flames round his feet; such a suggestion as that of the unfinished lily on the embroidery frame, was reserved for our sceptical and irreverent, but ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... always to be found the chewink,—a creature whose dress and song are so unlike those of the rest of his tribe that the irreverent amateur is tempted to believe that, for once, the men of science have made a mistake. What has any finch to do with a call like cherawink, or with such a three-colored harlequin suit? But it is unsafe to judge according to the outward appearance, in ornithology as in other matters; ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... peril! See! they trample upon our wise and well- established laws in the person of our chief magistrate; for Governor Endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long habits of authority,—and not one of the irreverent vagabonds has moved his bat. Did you note the ominous frown of the white-bearded Puritan governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted the staff that has become a needful support ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... after a moment's reflection, "that any one who dares so misuse his tongue as to revile the sublime majesty of his emperor or empress with irreverent language, such criminal shall have the instrument of his crime, his tongue, torn out by ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... colored marbles and mosaics, spendthrift of light and gilding; on every side shone the signs and seals of predatory wealth. Its walls were like costly confectionery, its ornaments insolent, its waste criminal. Every decorative feature was hot, restless, irreverent, and cruel, quite the sort of avenue one might expect to find in his walk towards the glittering woman of ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... shrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all the flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and cracked covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable in its irreverent copy of age if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice than there is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distracts one between pity, terror, and disgust, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... there is a form of oath—to be taken reverently—reverently, and there's an end of it. But to talk in a public place about one's most sacred and private sentiments—well, I call it bad taste. (Slight applause.) I call it irreverent. I call it irreverent, and I'm not ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles's strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, "Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton's? Is it Dryden's? ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... reconstructed; the nineteenth also destroys, but would substitute nothing instead. The sixteenth reminds us of audacious youth, still clinging to parental authority; the nineteenth reminds us of cynical and irreverent old age, believing in nothing but the triumphs of science and art, and shaking off the doctrines of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... would cease to be true if its main idea were misleading. He presses the metaphor of sonship as if mere human relations could exhaust the meaning of the divine; and soon works round to the conclusion that it is no proper sonship at all. In his irreverent hands the Lord's deity is but the common right of mankind, his eternity no more than the beasts themselves may claim. His clumsy logic overturns every doctrine he is endeavouring to establish. He upholds the Lord's divinity by making ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... so noticed, from the body of the chapel, and laughter was often the consequence of these rejoinders, which Father Phil never permitted to pass without a retort. Nor must all this be considered in the least irreverent. A certain period is allowed between two particular portions of the mass, when the priest may address his congregation on any public matter: an approaching pattern, or fair, or the like; in which, exhortations to propriety ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... was not a great appreciator of poetry—at all events of his nephew's; and an irreverent remark on 'Sordello', imputed to a more eminent contemporary, proceeded, under cover of a friend's name, from him. But he had his share of mental endowments. We are told that he was a good linguist, and that he wrote ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... dance in the groves of Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions, powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and insensibility to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ancient dramatic work of modern Europe, and gives the whole Gospel narrative from the birth of our Saviour until His death. Being too long for a play of one act, it was continued from day to day. What would seem irreverent on a modern stage was regarded as perfectly simple and natural in the Middle Ages, and it was a potent factor in teaching the masses the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... possible. But James's irreverent style is hardly suited in parts for her ladyship's ears. You, dear child, must make an improved copy of the letter. Your own good taste will tell you which sentences require to be altered or expunged. Here and there ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... and you will be one of the proudest achievements of our great undertaking. We shall be able to point to you in proof that zeal for knowledge may thrive even under the pressure of secular callings; that mother-wit does not necessarily make a man idle, nor inquisitiveness of mind irreverent; that shrewdness and cleverness are not incompatible with firm faith in the mysteries of Revelation; that attainment in Literature and Science need not make men conceited, nor above their station, nor restless, nor self-willed. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... prominent on all occasions, very proudly felt that sacred music would be the right thing on Sabbath evening, and, with a few of hew own ilk, was giving a florid and imperfect rendering of that peculiar style of composition that suggests a poor opera while making a rather shocking and irreverent use of ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the working of some inward and automatic monitor; while Dermott, among whose many sterling qualities delicate fancy was not included, put it down to the smell of some special dish indigenous to Sunday breakfast. My brother-in-law's contribution to the debate was an unseemly and irreverent parallel between Saturday night potations and Sunday ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... devils? Truly the only tongue that is understood by a savage Must be the tongue of fire that speaks from the mouth of the cannon!" Thereupon answered and said the excellent Elder of Plymouth, Somewhat amazed and alarmed at this irreverent language: "Not so thought Saint Paul, nor yet the other Apostles; Not from the cannon's mouth were the tongues of fire they spake with!" But unheeded fell this mild rebuke on the Captain, Who had advanced to the table, and thus continued discoursing: ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... time of suspense, telling them of the sins that had moved God to give them up to their foolish passion, so as to put them in fear, and lead them to repentance. One of these sins was vanity, and love of finery and pleasure; and another was their irreverent behaviour at church. They did repent heartily; and before the emperor's men had time to do more than begin to try some of the ringleaders, there came other messengers at full speed, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... there," Jeff laughed goodnaturedly. He had not in his make-up a grain of envy. Even his laughter was generally genial, though often irreverent ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... without attention, and the jest started at the expense of some unfortunate wight, conspicuous for peculiarity of dress or demeanour, was taken up by a hundred voices. None were spared. A trim staff officer was horrified at the irreverent reception of his nicely twisted moustache, as he heard from behind innumerable trees: "Take them mice out o' your mouth! take 'em out—no use to say they ain't there, see their tails hanging out!" Another, sporting immense whiskers, was urged "to come out o' that bunch of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... action than the volunteers, whose only school was actual practice in the field. And look at our Senate and House of Representatives, sir; are the most distinguished statesmen there graduates of colleges? Quite the reverse. I do not wish to be so irreverent as to disparage schools and colleges, sir, I only wish to be so just as to exalt talent, industry, and perseverance to their proper level," ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that he was not profound. This is because he was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity he laughed, and was called irreverent. He thought God would not damn even a priest forever. This was regarded as blasphemy. He endeavored to prevent Christians from murdering each other, and did what he could to civilize the disciples of Christ. Had he founded a sect, obtained ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... had been misinterpreted, the first citizen riveted his gaze upon the Lindon Evening News. But he could not read. Jimsy's irreverent air of friendliness was not the only disturbing factor in his Christmasing. Jimsy, plainly, was ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... botanist, the geologist, the poet, really see the country, and that, to the former, "a miss is as good as a mile." In a word, the tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally. This tendency is no way balanced by the slight literary culture common here, which is mostly English, and consists in a careless reading of publications of the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... character; here, where, for the first time in his life, he found himself divested of that princely character, he was completely at a loss. The trouble was that he had no sense of humour. So he found it impossible to gossip with plebeian unknowns, or engage in card-games with irreverent middle-class artisans and drummers. He could not even carry on a flirtation with any of the pretty girls! He had attempted it with one of them; but, after a very few minutes, she had left him with her chin in the air, and an exclamation which sounded singularly like "Beast!" What is gallantry ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... a very early period of her career, had bestowed on her the sobriquet of the Beautiful Wretch; and that partly because she was a pretty and winning child, and partly because she was in the habit of saying surprisingly irreverent things. Now, all children say irreverent things, simply because they read the highest mysteries by the light of their own small experiences; but Nan Beresford's guesses at the supernatural were more than usually audacious. When, for example, she arrived at the conclusion ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... amusements. Strong-minded,—if I may use a modern contemptuous phrase,—she never rebelled against the ordinances of nature or the laws dictated by inspiration. She was a model woman: beautiful, yet not vain; witty, yet never irreverent; independent, yet respectful to authority; exercising private judgment, yet admired by bishops; learned, without pedantry; hospitable, without extravagance; fond of the society of the great, yet spending her life among ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Raindrops on the roof waked us shortly before three. We hoped it was but a passing shower. At daylight, however, the rain was pouring profusely. Wealthy actually cried; Ellen scolded a little; Halstead made certain irreverent remarks; while Gram sought to inculcate resignation ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... the pious audience, and then a roar of laughter from irreverent men, in which, I must confess, I light-heartedly joined. For once in her life Miss Anthony lost her presence of mind; she did not know how to meet the situation, for she had no idea what had caused the laughter. It bubbled ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... what say they of Bonaparte? Your shop appears to be well supplied. You surely have a great deal of custom. What do people say of that buffoon; Bonaparte?" He was made quite happy one day when we were obliged to retire hastily from a shop to avoid the attacks drawn upon us by the irreverent tone in which Bonaparte spoke of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... fail to have remarked the grace with which he saluted the noble Lord who passed just now, or the excessive dignity of his air, as he expostulates with the crowd. He is rather out of temper now, in consequence of the very irreverent behaviour of those two young fellows behind him, who have done nothing but laugh all the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth." He attacks the pedantry and formalism of university education in his day, the dissipation and false taste of the traveled gentry, the foolish pretensions to learning of collectors and virtuosi, and the daringly irreverent speculations of freethinkers and infidels. At the close of the book he represents the Goddess as dismissing her worshipers with a speech which she concludes with "a yawn of extraordinary virtue." Under its influence "all nature ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... did not call me that," she told him coldly, "It sounds irreverent." And she dropped her eyes, which had filled again miserably, to the film of white in her lap. Then, with a pitiful attempt to hurt him in return: "Of course you realize that I really don't know much about you. I don't want you to think that I distrusted you exactly—" ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... about the Bible; that it was God's own book—divinely inspired—in fact, written by God Himself. Then I inquired if the original manuscript in God's handwriting was still in existence; and was told I was very wicked and must hold my tongue. Yet I had no idea of being in any way irreverent or blasphemous; I was merely perplexed, and longed to have my difficulties settled. Failing this, they grew, and I began to question whether the terms "merciful" and "almighty" were terms that could be ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... your trust, and eschew the irreverent empty phrases and contradictions of a mis-called 'Science,' professing which some have missed their true aim ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... would be a vain task to seek anywhere in nature for evidence of Divine action, such that no one could sanely deny it. God will not allow Himself to be caught at the bottom of any man's crucible, or yield Himself to the experiments of gross-minded and irreverent inquirers. The natural, like the supernatural, revelation appeals to the whole of man's mental nature and not to ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... said no more about it. But he chose to consider his dignity and the dignity of his empire affronted by the follies of a crowd. He lodged a formal complaint with the English Government. The English Government could do nothing more than express regret with such gravity as it could muster. As for the irreverent rogues who had laid their hands upon the feet of the representative of a friendly State, it was not in the power of the Government to punish them. The earth has bubbles as the water has, and they ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Mr. Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many others ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... undervalue the importance of any Truth. We utter no word that can be deemed irreverent by any one of any faith. We do not tell the Moslem that it is only important for him to believe that there is but one God, and wholly unessential whether Mahomet was His prophet. We do not tell the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ceiling. Round two sides of it, the sides nearest to the interior of the church, ran heavy wooden presses, worm-eaten and gaping with age. Hooked to the inner corner of one of these presses hung several surplices, all bulging out at their lower ends in an irreverent-looking bundle of limp drapery. Below the surplices, on the floor, stood three packing-cases, with the lids half off, half on, and the straw profusely bursting out of their cracks and crevices in every direction. Behind them, in a corner, was a litter of dusty ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... from educational circles in which collegiate influences prevail, I did not deem it prudent to introduce some of the noblest thoughts that belong to the great theme. The book was sent forth limited and incomplete, hoping that, heretical as it was, and quite irreverent toward the ignorance descended from antiquity, it might still receive sufficient approbation and appreciation to justify later introduction of matter that would ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... and excursions to a close. Like Vikings of old (under a figure) we have harried the country round, and (in a sense) ravished its many charms. We have explored shrines consecrated by olden memories, enriched by the associations of centuries; but (unlike the Vikings), we have done this in no irreverent spirit, and with no predatory purpose. We have carried off our hoards of treasure, but we have left no ill traces behind us of our raid. No burning monasteries or homesteads have marked our track; no orphaned children or widowed ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... heeding not the irreverent interruption, "as I have said, I pity you with all my heart. More than that, so deeply do I feel, so great a loathing and indignation has your story sown in my heart, that were our liberty now restored us I would willingly join hands with you in wreaking ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... afar off; and even the far-off imitations have not been very satisfactory. The English Muse seems to have set, at the joining of the old and new ages, this one person with the learning and tastes of the ancestors, with the irreverent criticism of the moderns, to comment on the transition; and, having fashioned him, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, and saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. Saying it!—rather taught to say it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... unaided. For his mother was ill, how deeply and in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from all clear thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something indelicate, in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her, notwithstanding a gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very individual grace of dress and of bearing remained to her likewise. But she was uncertain in mood, the victim of strange fancies, a being almost alarmingly ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Wilkes was a member, were a fraternity whose motto was "Do as you please," and that invitation still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind, whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that were to follow them, five ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... over the purity of womanhood and of youth, we, the best witnesses, turn for a moment from our sorrow to bear the fullest and the most willing testimony that the high and noble spirit of MARK LEMON ever prompted generous championship, ever made unworthy onslaught or irreverent jest impossible to the pens of those who were honoured ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... eyes upon the young man to see what effect this coarse and irreverent allusion to his father would have. A slight tinge of shame was in his face; but I saw that he had not sufficient moral courage to resent the shameful desecration of a parent's name. How should he, when he was himself the first to desecrate ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... he rose from his knees and went to drink at the spouting rock lip. It was decided now, this thing he had been holding half-heartedly in abeyance. There would be no more dallying with temptation, no more rebellion, no more irreverent stumblings in the dark valley of doubtful questions. More especially, he would be vigilant to guard against those backslidings that came so swiftly on the heels of each spiritual quickening. His heart was fixed, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... duty, an idea circulated among the people that our constitution is not so perfect as it ought to be, before you are sure of mending it, is a certain method of lessening it in the public opinion. Of this irreverent opinion of Parliament, the author himself complains in one part of his book; and he endeavors to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Welsh parishes men seem occasionally to have smoked in churches without any intention of being irreverent, and without any consciousness that they were doing anything unusual. Canon Atkinson, in his delightful book "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish," tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland—then very remote from the great world—and had to take ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... Wylo continued for several days to flirt and fight. He had a glorious time, and so, too, had the piccaninnies, for Yan-coo, for reputation's sake, dared not model debils-debils merely to have their horrible heads knocked off with irreverent grass darts. Rather have no debil-debil than one subject to Wylo's profane but splendid marksmanship. So the naked black kiddies danced about Wylo, while Yan-coo fortified himself with the grim knowledge that he had Wylo's heart's blood securely sealed up, and that Wylo had ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... glorious world without wall or bound or end, where I hope to live free and for ever, in the sight of my Redeemer, and, perhaps, of him who was Hugh Fitzarthur, Esq., of Tallylynn hall, when here? I hope I am not irreverent, but in truth, friend, I fear I have almost as vehemently longed for the presence of him once more, as for that more awful presence: heaven pardon me if it was wicked! So welcome prison, welcome death! Half a hundred ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... anniversary observance. Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in him ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... single fallow-creature remains destitute of it? A fourth (a lady too) declares "there is no theory God, of an author of nature, of an origin of the universe which is not utterly repugnant to her faculties, which is not (to her feelings) so irreverent as to make her blush, so misleading as to make her mourn"; and now Harrington, instead of being thankful for his glimpse of happiness, and yielding to the better instincts and convictions it partly awakened, and learning patience, submission, and ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... no denying that this is Dickens's dark moment. It adds enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men have done; he descended into Hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the quotation from the Creed, for in the next book he was to write he was to break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest voice to speak of the triumph of the weak ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Irreverent as this speech appeared, there was really no trace of such intention in his manner, and his evident profound conviction that his suggestion was practical, and not at all inconsistent with ecclesiastical dignity, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words, like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a mythological personage resembling an old ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... upright man was Andrew Johnstone, a terror to evil-doers and so prone to carry out all the law and the prophets by physical force that he had earned, among the irreverent youth of the community, the ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Indeed, one irreverent, but "pretty smart feller," who lived on the top of a hill known as Drift Hill, where certain adventurous farmers dwelt for the sake of its smooth sheep-pastures, was heard to say, after a mighty sermon by Parson Manners about the seven-times heated furnaces of judgment reserved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... know what gases of the physical world these spirits were permitted, through a special interposition of the Deity and for the furtherance of His divine ends, to assemble together into a concrete form for their temporary dwelling and as a medium through which to communicate with man? And who is so irreverent as to suppose that God would now, in these days, give spirits special permission to return to earth and take upon themselves such forms for the mere purpose of tipping tables and piano-fortes, rapping upon ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent—like one of those medieval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... they drank is a criterion, the good name of the ship was established. Then the assembly adjourned to the sitting room and—yes, even the front parlor. Not since the days when that sacred apartment had been desecrated by the irreverent city boarders, during the Howes regime, had its walls echoed to such whoops and shouts of laughter. The children played "Post Office" and "Copenhagen" and "Clap in, Clap out," while ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... breeze, just as you may see Asiatics doing in our "land of mist and snow." But the natives regard those unhappy exotics with a fanatical pride, pointing them out to all comers as living witnesses to the perfection of the climate; they would gladly stone any irreverent stranger who should suggest a comparison between their sacred shrubs and the giants of Indian seas. The only inhabitant of the place who ever attained any eminence any where (he really was a good ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... about that girl," said Poppins. Poppins had an offhand, irreverent way of speaking, especially on subjects which from their nature demanded delicacy, that was frequently shocking ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... intensity. A few days later Mr. MacDowell played a recital in Chicago, and among the other selections was this same "March Wind," which he played fortissimo throughout. When I saw him the next day I began, in that irreverent manner which critics and composers have with one another (for Mr. MacDowell was not yet a professor): "You're a fine fellow! To mark your own 'March Wind' pianissimo and then play it fortissimo. What's the good of my working two hours with a pupil ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... that some women are injudicious and occasionally one is irreverent, are not men, in advocating their peculiar views on politics, the same, only in much larger proportion? Are they, therefore, deprived of the franchise or other privileges? If men were obliged to come to such a standard as they lay down ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... of this bright, playful, unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said, "have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... bent in his disposition, that might have issued in deeds of high and noble daring had its possessor been thrown into circumstances favourable to the display. As matters stood, George was master of his own household. Here none questioned his authority; no profane, irreverent approach ever awakening the dormant energies of his character, or thwarting the current, visible ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... with a coloured portrait of the Marquess of Lorne, very handsome and elegantly dressed, the object of Mrs. Kemp's adoration since her husband's demise; the other a Jubilee portrait of the Queen, somewhat losing in dignity by a moustache which Liza in an irreverent moment had smeared on ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... nervous young man with the celluloid collar sat a stout individual with a bald head. This was Abijah Thompson, known by the irreverent as "Barking" Thompson, a nickname bestowed because of his peculiar habit of gradually puffing up, like a frog, under religious excitement, and then bursting forth in an inarticulate shout, disconcerting to the uninitiated. During Baxter's speech and the singing ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... place to bring out a young lady, though Major Dalrymple's daughters, immortalized in Lever's novel, could not well have found a better hunting-ground. But then Major Dalrymple's daughters were regular garrison hacks—so the irreverent subs of the Rovers used to call them—and never stood a chance beside the daughters of the county families. There are racing and chasing at the station, and theatricals and balls. I arrived at the wrong season. The three days' local racing, for horses of every breed but English, was ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... begun. At first they eyed each other steadily, and made feints, and changed their ground. And this went on so long that at last some irreverent bystander, longing to see business done, cried out, "Allons, mes amis, avancez." And at that moment a skilful thrust from Malin wounded Poivre in the face, and the first blood was drawn. But Malin received it back with interest, ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... departure, casting a frowning glance on the two boys. Having reached the door he turned round, as if to watch what the head master would do. Dr Freeman on this called up A'Dale and Ernst, and spoke in a loud voice with great severity to them, threatening them with condign punishment for their irreverent behaviour. As, however, he did not proceed further than words, they had reason to hope that he did not consider them guilty of any very atrocious crime. As soon as the priest had taken his departure, they were allowed to return to their seats, with ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... times. Now and then they 'rally'—there was one ghastly wig-and-hollow-pumpkin effort at recovery in the trembling, rattle-jointed Peace Movement of these last summer months. Where is it now? There answers a gay laugh and merry stave from the corners of irreverent ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts;—faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions;—faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... serious derangement of his organism!" Michael broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a practical machine—even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must have been ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... should live,—that the wealth which she affected to despise was eating into the soundness of her character, not by its splendour, but by the style of life which it had seemed to produce as a necessity. She knew that she was gradually becoming irreverent, scornful, and prone to ridicule; but yet, knowing this, and hating it, she hardly knew how to break from it. She had seen so much of the blacker side of human nature that blackness no longer startled her as it should do. She had been the prize at which so many ruined spendthrifts had ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... whose appointment to the command of the British force in Flanders would doubtless meet with his warm approval. After a little more fencing, Pitt gave the name of the Marquis Cornwallis, who had just returned from his Viceroyalty in India. Mack by no means welcomed the proposal, and made the irreverent remark that the best General, after fighting elephants in India, would be puzzled by the French. Pitt thereupon observed that the Duke of York had not the confidence of the army, to which Mack and Merveldt replied by praising ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... thing was worked, as I remember, from the room above, and was used by the robber host to persuade his guests to part peaceably with their valuables. But I fear that you are going to show an irreverent attitude of mind toward ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... service. This makes five daily services in church, two English, two Chinese, and one Dyak. We clothed all the candidates in a new suit of cotton garments with a bright-coloured handkerchief for their heads. It would be considered very irreverent for Easterns to uncover their heads in church. I taught the school-children to sing 'Veni, Creator Spiritus' at this baptism, while the clergy were arranging the candidates and sponsors round the font. The font was wreathed ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... Prelate took his departure, leaving the Abbess highly incensed, though she prudently forbore returning any irreverent answer to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Colonel is not here. Never speak of the big drum in that irreverent tone to him, I pray. It would well-nigh give him a fit. The big drum is his fetish, though he nearly ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... little of this zeal, so many of our churches would not be untidy, neglected, ruinous. There would not be moth-eaten altar-cloths, and worm-eaten altars. There would not be green mouldering walls, and broken pavements. There would not be a service slovenly, unmusical, irreverent, or if not irreverent, at least unworthy of ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... was to keep worrying the Germans, and that the final crushing stroke would be given on the east by the Russians. He also told us that to us was assigned the place of honour on the extreme left of the British line next to the French Colonial troops. I (p. 053) overheard an irreverent officer near me say, "Damn the place of honour", and I thought of Sam Hughes and his warning about not objecting to swearing. The General, whom I had met before, asked me to walk with him up to his car and then said, "I have had reports about the Canadian Artillery, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... With no irreverent voice or uncouth charm I call up the departed. Soul of Albert! Hear our soft suit, and heed my milder spells: So may the gates of Paradise unbarr'd Cease thy swift toils, since haply thou art one 15 Of that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... when a lady passed, He, having eyes, did see her! You had said— "On such a day I scanned her, head to foot; Observed a red, where red should not have been, Outside her elbow; but was pleased enough Upon the whole." Let such irreverent talk Be ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... John xiii-xviii, the discourse at the Last Supper. As he grew older, he sometimes stumbled over his words. He was not an imposing figure, with his eyes somewhat a-squint and his slight limp; and sometimes the younger monks fell into a titter, irreverent souls, to hear him so eager in his reading and so unconscious. It was not his eyesight that was at fault: to the end he could read the smallest hand without any glasses, like his great namesake, John Wesley, whom a German traveller noticed on ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... their exclamations against this irreverent conduct of Sir Francis Bernard. But Grandfather defended him as well as he could. He observed that it was then thirty years since the chair had been beautified by Governor Belcher. Most of the gilding was worn off by the frequent scourings ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... amusingly associated with "Old Town," the former San Diego, three miles from the present city. He had offended Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, by his irreverent wit, and was punished by exile to this then almost unknown region, which he called "Sandy Ague," chiefly inhabited by the flea, the horned toad, and the rattlesnake. Mr. Ames, of the Herald, a democratic paper, asked Derby, a stanch whig, to occupy the editorial chair during a brief absence. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... even surpass in beauty those of Shakspeare (Angiolina, Myrrha, Anna): they said that Faliero wanted interest, that Sardanapalus was a voluptuary; that Satan in "Cain" did not speak as a theologian (how could he?), that there were irreverent tendencies in his sacred dramas—and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... counted by Professor Fortescue as a friend. Even then it was a puzzling friendship. Could it be that to Professor Fortescue, he shewed only his best side? His manner was more respectful towards his colleague than towards other men, but even with him he was irreverent in his heart, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... surprised to find that he had disliked and despised them. Moreover, the naughty diarist had an ugly habit of recording men's private conversations; and thus a good many sayings which should have been kept secret became public property. A very irreverent wag wrote— ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Vavasor to himself. "There's a bee in every bonnet of them! An odd, irreverent way the old fellow has with him—for an old fellow pretending to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... mistaken, Miss Dulan; and recollect that it is very irreverent in a young lady to express an opinion at variance with the spirit of what her father has ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... He appeals to the authority of the Christian religion, which indeed might be a fair argumentum ad hominem against 'Parson Malthus.' He declares that Nature takes more care of her work than such irreverent authors suppose, and 'does not ask our aid to keep down the excess of population.'[449] In fact, he doubts whether population increases at all. Malthus's whole theory, he says, rests upon the case of America; and with the help of Mr. Booth and some very unsatisfactory statistics, he tries ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... businesslike was her conduct that they could never convict her of any infringement of rules. Little did these pompous invaders suspect how this slender capable girl with the hazel eyes was spicing the hours behind their backs, and drawing with nimble and irreverent pencil portraits of her captors, daring caricatures which she exhibited in secret to the terrified delight of her patients. Luckily for her this harmless vengeance had not been discovered, for doubtless she would have paid ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... Felicia D. Hemans in the early years of the last century and she has been much derided by the thoughtless and irreverent who have said that the landing of the Pilgrims was not on a stern and rock-bound coast. Such scoffers evidently never sailed in by White Horse beach and "Hither Manomet" when a winter northeaster was shouldering the deep sea tides up against the cliff ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... with scriptural phrase, and the gross mockery would have been taken seriously if the speaker had not been so notoriously irreverent. As it was the words won him applause which Redfield and his friends were not able to quell. The joke was caught up and tossed back and forth; the Little Flock outside raised their hymn, the scoffers within joined in derision, and carried the hymn ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... those degraded human beings from whom the anthropologist who puts no bridle on his hobby-horse is pleased to claim descent. Near the base is one of those symmetrically scooped-out hollows which are such a striking peculiarity of the formation here, and which suggest to the irreverent that a cheese-taster of prehistoric dimensions must have been brought to bear upon the rocks when their consistency was about the same as that of fresh gruyre. According to one theory, they were ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... converting the universities from the cult of Aristotle to a belief in the Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations, spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising. To remain sceptical when the Church had defined was ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... with the veto!" and on that day at vespers the choristers preconcerted to use loud and threatening emphasis when chanting the words, "Deposuit potentes de sede," in the "Magnificat." Incensed at such an irreverent proceeding, the royalists in their turn thrice exclaimed, "Et reginam," after the "Domine salvum fac regem." The tumult during the whole time of divine service ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... tables, reading, smoking, chatting, breakfasting, and reading the morning papers. In an alcove at the upper end of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat. Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... with Parliament, presented petitions for representation of the clergy in parliament, for the administration of the Communion in both kinds to the laity, for the suppression of irreverent language about the Sacrament, and for sanctioning the marriage of the clergy. The first was ignored; the two next were embodied in Acts of Parliament; the last was deferred for a year. The session was ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... old roamer, Will ne'er find a rest 'neath collegiate dome or Anywhere else. As to Seneca, Any cur Safely may snub him, or urge ill Effects from the reading of Virgil. Cornelius Nepos Wont keep us Much longer from pleasure's light errands— Nor Terence. The irreverent now may all scoff in ease At the shade of poor old Aristophanes. And moderns it now doth behoove in all Ways to despise poor old Juvenal; And to chivvy Livy. The class-room hereafter will miss a row Of eager young ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... skill. The author maintains that in his ridicule of the Church of Rome and of Protestant dissenters, he is only displaying the abuses which deform the Christian Church; but no defence can be urged for his wild and irreverent method of turning subjects into ridicule which by a vast number of people are regarded as sacred. In judging of Swift's satire from a moral standing-point, one test, as Mr. Leslie Stephen observes, may be supposed to guide our decision. 'Imagine the Tale of a Tub to be read ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... a truck. Away went the long line of carriages,—away went the diligence, standing up like a huge leathern castle upon its truck; while the engine whistled, snorted, screeched, groaned, and uttered all sorts of irreverent and every-day sounds, just as if the Alps had not been looking down upon it, and classic towns ever and anon starting up beside its path: a glorious vision of fresh meadows, bordered with little canals, brimful of water, and barred with the long shadows of campanile and sycamore,—for the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... denunciations to the righteousness of the world or of the heathen—the righteousness dependent upon reason and controlled by secular government, by laws and regulations—his teaching would not have seemed so irreverent. But he distinctly specifies the righteousness of God's Law, or the Ten Commandments, to which we owe an obligation far above what is due temporal powers, for they teach how to live before God—something no heathenish court of justice, no temporal authority, knows anything about. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... to him, might possibly strike Moggy as irreverent, and the worthy father paused, and, with upturned eyes, murmured a Latin ejaculation, crossing himself; and having thus reasserted his clerical character, he proceeded to demonstrate the uselessness of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... is rather malicious, I own, To play with a name that is true, But I hope you'll condone my irreverent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... what is meant by infamous conduct and indecent talk; but the allusion is probably to irreverent utterances touching the Governor in which the officers from France were apt to indulge, not always without the knowledge of their chief. Vaudreuil complained of this to Montcalm, adding, "I am greatly above it, and I despise it."[674] To which the General replied: ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... is not irreverent, and certainly it is not intended as reproach, when I say, that I know no stronger expression in our language than that which describes the restoration of the wayward son,—"he came to himself." He had broken away from all the ties of love, family, and friendship. He had forsaken every ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... accepted fact. Her fame had not been a dashing offensive but an inevitable advance quietly over-running the world. People who never read knew her name as well as Napoleon's. There was, somehow, something a little irreverent about being her contemporary. To attend the birth of so many masterpieces gave you the feeling of a legendary ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... water-butt under the spout, the snapping of an old rafter, or something falling behind the wall. The toads crawled from under the plantain leaves, and hopped across the broad stone before the kitchen door, and the irreverent cat, with whom I sympathized, raced like mad in the grass. Growing duller, I went to the cellar door, which was in the front entry, opened it, and stared down in the black gulf, till I saw a gray rock rise ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... several years, with great blessing to his people, it happened that word came from Ruegenwald how that his brother, Duke Casimir, was sick. This was the Prince whom, we may remember, Sidonia had whipped with her irreverent hands upon his princely podex, when he was a ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
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