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More "Pretension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of thirty, though sundry deep lines, and hues formerly florid and now faded, speaking of fatigue, care, or dissipation, might have made him look somewhat older than he was. There was nothing very prepossessing in his appearance. He was dressed with a pretension ill suited to the costume appropriate to a foot-traveller. His coat was pinched and padded; two enormous pins, connected by a chain, decorated a very stiff stock of blue satin dotted with yellow stars; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... foot as if an ague-fit were on her, and her sobs almost mounted to a scream. No heart that had any pretension to humanity could have helped pitying her. Her husband did pity her; but Arundel was carried away by passion, and Bilson had no heart. Through all this tempest, however agonised, firm and ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... outlay, and more taste, to avail himself of the ancient building for a sequestered and private retirement. The chairs and couches were covered with Eastern wove mats, and were of the simplest and most primitive form. But on touching a spring, an interior apartment was displayed, which had considerable pretension to splendour and magnificence. The furniture and hangings of this apartment were of straw-coloured silk, wrought on the looms of Persia, and crossed with embroidery, which produced a rich, yet simple effect. The ceiling was carved in Arabesque, and the four corners of the apartment were ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Anti-Slavery Societies. He is tall and well made. His vast and well-developed forehead announces the power of his intellect. His voice is full and sonorous. His attitude is dignified, and his gesticulation is full of noble simplicity. He is a man of lofty reason, natural, and without pretension, always master of himself, brilliant in the art of exposing and of abstracting. Few persons can handle a subject with which they are familiar better than Mr. Douglass. There is a kind of eloquence issuing from the depth ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... words—monstrous in such a connection—had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism. Any persons whom it could please ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... two years throughout the civilized world. His coming to take full command of the Union forces was an augury of success to every loyal citizen of the United States. His personal memoirs, written in the face of death, tell the story of his life in a modest way, without pretension or guile. I am not sure that he added to his fame by his eight years of service as President of the United States, but what he did in subduing the Rebellion will always keep his name among those of the greatest benefactors of his country. He was elected because of his military ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... sorry to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui. In him I often admire that fine trait of his race: the clarifying instinct. He possesses—with no pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere—an innate rigour of judgment in every matter of the mind; he avoids crooked thinking by a process of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear intuitive. Even as a true collector of antiques has quite a peculiar way of handling some rare snuff-box ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... cheaper, as a residence. It may have four or five thousand inhabitants, and possessing one or two considerable squares, it covers rather more ground than places of that population usually do, in Europe. It has no edifice of much pretension, and yet it ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... virtues which are foreign to the character of boys. If any proof of it is needed, it is only too true that if a boy applies any of the three adjectives holy, saintly, or pious to a person, it is not intended to be a compliment. The words in their mouths imply sanctimonious pretension, and a certain Pharisaical and even hypocritical scrupulousness. It is a great mistake to overlook this fact; I do not mean that a preacher should not attempt to praise these virtues, but if he does, he ought to be able to translate his thoughts into language which ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... foolishly to the force of our party, the unarmed condition of Too-wit and his men, the certain efficacy of our firearms (whose effect was yet a secret to the natives), and, more than all, to the long-sustained pretension of friendship kept up by these infamous wretches. Five or six of them went on before, as if to lead the way, ostentatiously busying themselves in removing the larger stones and rubbish from the path. Next came our own party. We walked ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the others analogous of the historically beautiful and of human beauty, seem less absurd in the Aesthetic of the sympathetic, which means, at bottom, by the words "aesthetic beauty" the representation of what is pleasing. But the pretension to determine scientifically what are the sympathetic contents, and what are the irremediably antipathetic, is none the less erroneous, even in the sphere of that doctrine and after the laying down of those premises. One can only answer such questions by repeating ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... argument that this or that belief must be true because so many generations have believed it, so many countries, so many famous men,—as if error, like stolen property, gained a title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says, "are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some as though ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... recreation, that of studying the manners of the middle class in their intimate relations with each other. I have lived with the aristocracy and with the canaille; in the highest and lowest conditions of life are found entire absence of pretension; in the highest, because their position is assured; in the lowest, because it is simply impossible to alter it. None but poets are really unhappy because they cannot climb to the stars. A half-way position is the ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... on the street was a wooden building of some pretension, having bow-windows and a veranda. High pickets enclosed a secluded garden. It was very unlike the ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... articles in the "Straits Times," and after they appeared so many applications were made for reprints that we were encouraged to issue the articles in handy form for the information of those who intend to visit the neighbouring Dutch Colony. There was no pretension to write an exhaustive guide-book to the Island, but the original articles were revised and amplified, and the chapters have been arranged to enable the visitor to follow a given route through the Island, from west to east, within ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... great and sudden change of condition; in maintaining his self- possession; in subjecting himself to no refusals; in being sage and measured in his manners; very reserved in speech, with an air as though he cared for nothing; and in adapting himself to everything without questions, without pretension, without complaining, dissimulating everything, and untiringly pretending to regard Morcieu as an accompaniment of honour. He received, then, no sort of civility on the part of the Regent, of Dubois, or of anybody; and performed the day's journeys, arranged by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... he states that he had seen many persons so cured of madness, and countless other evils" (quoted from "Origen against Celsus" in "Sup. Rel.," vol. i., p. 154. A mass of evidence on this subject will be found in chap. v. of this work, on "The Permanent Stream of Miraculous Pretension"). St. Augustine's testimony has been already referred to. St. Ambrose discovered the bones of SS. Gervasius and Protasius; and "these relics were laid in the Faustinian Basilic, and the next morning were translated into the Ambrosian Basilic; ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... delusion was still the most monstrous delusion on record. In this expression of opinion every man present agreed—the lawyer even included. Not one of them could call to mind the innumerable instances in which the sexual influence has proved irresistible in the persons of women without even the pretension to beauty. The very members of the club whom the Countess (in spite of her personal disadvantages) could have most easily fascinated, if she had thought it worth her while, were the members who wondered most loudly at Montbarry's ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull perches, with an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave. Without quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her love—and deem rich in beneficent influences—nature itself, when the hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and the works of genius. And certainly every part one saw ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... vessels on the high seas, and also urged that the relinquishment of it at this time would go far to the overthrow of their naval power, on which the safety of the state essentially depended." In support of the abstract right was quoted the report from a law officer of the Crown, which "justified the pretension by stating that the King had a right, by his prerogative, to require the services of all his seafaring subjects against the enemy, and to seize them by force wherever found, not being within the territorial limits of another Power; that as the high seas were extra-territorial, the merchant vessels ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... those who so egregiously blunder are to be spared the castigation justly merited, we see by late occurrences to what it may lead; and your correspondent, in my judgment, is conferring a favour on all true lovers of our great poet by exposing pretension and error, from whatever quarter it may come,—a duty which has been sadly neglected in some late partial reviews of MR. COLLIER's "clever" corrector. MR. ARROWSMITH's communications have been so truly ad rem, that I think I shall be expressing the sentiments of all your readers ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... themselves as if they thought that competition actually does, in all cases, whatever it can be shown to be the tendency of competition to do. This is partly intelligible, if we consider that only through the principle of competition has political economy any pretension to the character of a science. So far as rents, profits, wages, prices, are determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them. Assume competition to be their exclusive regulator, and principles of broad generality and scientific ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... (he said) when all monopolies are denounced, I must he permitted to say that, to my mind, the monopoly which is the most intolerable and odious is the pretension to the monopoly of ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... here, evidently, a degree of pride in being thought to resemble the wicked Lord Lyttleton; and, lest his known irregularities should not bear him out in the pretension, he refers mysteriously, as was his habit, to certain untold events of his life, to warrant the parallel.[84] Mr. Dallas, who seems to have been but little prepared for such a reception of his compliments, escapes out of the difficulty ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... bring all the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the hearts and the pocket-books of the little society at Lichfield as it then was. The town must have been an agreeable sojourn in those days for people of some pretension and small performance. The inhabitants of Lichfield seem actually to have read each other's verses, and having done so to have taken the trouble to sit down and write out their raptures. They were a pleasant lively company living round about the ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... electric light, a stop-watch, or as the big Krupp gun, the concussion of which nearly scared the soldiers out of their wits, by shaking down the little minars of one of the city gates, close to which they had unwittingly discharged it on first trial. The foreign office, like every building of pretension, whether public or private, in the land of the Lion and the Sun, is a substantial edifice of mud and brick, inclosing a square court-yard or garden, in which splashing fountains play amid a wealth of vegetation that springs, as if ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... as he used to say, "my august confederates and myself," he has suddenly conceived the pretension that he and he alone is the sole master in Germany. Accordingly the august confederates by common consent, although invited by the Grand Marshal of the Palace, Count Eulenberg, have refused to take part in the trifling folly of the Golden ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... understands every language; is versed in every literature; yet the mighty we does not even know the word for bread in Armenian. It knows bread well enough by name in English, and frequently bread in England only by its name, but the truth is, that the mighty we, with all its pretension, is in general a very sorry creature, who, instead of saying nous disons, should rather say nous dis: Porny in his "Guerre des Dieux," very profanely makes the three in one say, Je faisons; now, Lavengro, who is ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... such pretension, Mr. Burgomaster!" said the soldier hastily, fearing above all things to prejudice the judge against him: "only, as the girls are in bed, and already much frightened, it would be a proof of your good heart to examine ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... in mind also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales. For purely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodist sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to singe so poor a worm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when I had ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... originally in the humblest possible way; and how many of the dregs of colonial society—the occupiers of the lowest rung on the colonial ladder—reached their new home with all the pomp and circumstance of quarter-deck sublimity, and all the humbug and pretension of real or fancied aristocracy. Is the result we see—for these contrasts are to be found plentifully in all the colonies at the Antipodes—what it ought to be, or ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the letters flame with all the beauty of gold, and jasper, and amethyst. It must state the date of incorporation, and the fact that "all subscribers shall get the benefit of the original undertaking. While it does not make so much pretension as some other companies, it must be distinctly announced that this is a safe and permanent investment." The circular must state that "there are a goodly number of flowing wells, and others which the company are happy to say have a very good smell of oil." "The ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... woman, who makes much pretension to fine manners and an elegant education, takes the steam-car for a rostrum, and exclaims about her French teacher as "awfully funny but awfully horrid, don't you know; awfully lovely sometimes, but awfully awful at others!" we wonder why she gives so much attention to French when her ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... years this pretension has been made by a President of the Society. In 1855, Lord Rosse presented a confidential memorandum to the Council on the expediency of enlarging their number. He says, "In a Council so small it {27} is impossible ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... place of meeting. During the war they had always been commissioned to resolve in common on matters regarding the liberty of the land. These deputies, thus assembled, represented, by commission, the States; but they are not, in their own persons, the States; and no one of them had any such pretension. "The people of this country," said the States, "have an aversion to all ambition; and in these disastrous times, wherein nothing but trouble and odium is to be gathered by public employment, these ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... another noise of children. More sliding? Oh no! This is a sport of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy of joy and wonder! Oh what happy spectators! And what a happy performer! They admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity never excited ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... purchased an island in the Tuscan archipelago, and, as he told you to-day, has founded a commandery. You know the same thing was done for Saint Stephen of Florence, Saint George, Constantinian of Parma, and even for the Order of Malta. Except this, he has no pretension to nobility, and calls himself a chance count, although the general opinion at Rome is that the count is a man of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... neighborhood. They joined together eagerly in the effort to obtain schools for their children. As yet there were no public schools supported by government in any part of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education. Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... elsewhere, was about the only musician that ever delighted the ear of young or old in those days. I do not know that there was a piano in the Province. If there were any their number was so small that they could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Now, every house in the land with any pretension to the ordinary comforts of life has either a piano or a melodeon, and every farmer's daughter of any position can run over the keys with as much ease and effect as a city belle. Passing along one of our streets not long since, I heard some one playing in a room adjoining a ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... slender as to appear taller than he really was. He had an air of great activity; and though he sat leaning back, there was no lounging in his attitude, and at the first summons he roused up with an air of alert attention that recalled to mind the eager head of a listening greyhound. He had no pretension to be called handsome; his eyes were his best feature; they were very peculiar, of a light hazel, darker towards the outside of the iris, very brilliant, the whites tinted with blue, and the lashes uncommonly thick and black; the eyebrows were ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... authority, a judgment which may not be questioned, then the claim of authority in such a case, for any man, or set of men, is either a folly or a revelation. Such an authority is not human, but divine: if any man pretends to possess it, let him show God's clear warrant for his pretension, or he must be regarded as a deceiver or ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... intense delight. He had a deep and just perception of what was beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he did not pay much regard, or perhaps quite do justice, to the masters of the 17th century. To technical criticism he made no sort of pretension; painting was to him but the visible language of emotion; and where it did not aim at exciting it, or employed inadequate means, his admiration would be withheld. Hence he highly prized the ancient paintings, both Italian and German, of the age which preceded the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... twenty years ago—to remember the deference which (in New York and the larger cities at least) was paid to English ideas, English manners, English styles in dress—the enthusiasm with which any literary man was received who had some pretension to an English reputation—the disrepute in which all "domestic" manufactured articles were held throughout the country in comparison with the "imported," which generally meant English. In all manufactured products this was so nearly universal that "domestic" was almost ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... the Senate as squatters, as if that were a term of reproach. Our glorious Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the pilgrims who landed on Plymouth rock, the early settlers at Jamestown, were squatters. They settled this continent with less pretension to title than the settlers on the public lands. Daniel Boone was a squatter; Christopher ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... even unto death. But what Christian can harbour a money-getting spirit, or be concerned in an extensive accumulation of wealth? If a Quaker therefore should go into the common road, and fall down before the idol mammon, like any other ordinary person, how can the world give him any pretension ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... in. Mrs. Clandon is between forty and fifty, with a slight tendency to soft, sedentary fat, and a fair remainder of good looks, none the worse preserved because she has evidently followed the old tribal matronly fashion of making no pretension in that direction after her marriage, and might almost be suspected of wearing a cap at home. She carries herself artificially well, as women were taught to do as a part of good manners by dancing masters and reclining boards before these were superseded by the modern artistic cult of beauty ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... of dead words, to the unavoidable exclusion of nearly every thing that is of value? First, we are told that we can not understand the English language without a knowledge of Latin, from which it is derived. The inaccuracy of this pretension is at once made manifest by reference to Webster, where ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... difficulty and danger as grizzly bear hunting, yet the climate in which you carry on this pursuit—vile as it is—is warm, which to me is almost an essential of existence. I beg you to understand that I make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the threshold. "Ich weiss nicht all doch viel ist mir bekannt," as Faust said—and, like him after he had said it, I have got a ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... going very far back into history to reclaim doubtful rights. Napoleon keenly criticised the pretension: "His Majesty needs to make no researches to become aware of the fact that in times of ignorance the court of Rome usurped the right of giving away crowns and temporal rights to the princes of the earth; but if we found that in other ages ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... it will hardly be believed, that, by that means, there was less talking among the society Madame assembled together than elsewhere. Madame hated people who talked much, and took a remarkably cruel revenge upon them, for she allowed them to talk. She disliked pretension, too, and never overlooked that defect, even in the king himself. It was more than a weakness of Monsieur, and the princess had undertaken the amazing task of curing him of it. As for the rest, poets, wits, beautiful women, all were ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to set himself up independent of Rome, and while his next two successors were soliciting the recognition of Rome, but at the same time were refusing to surrender his person to condemnation, a Council at Rome pulled down the whole scaffolding on which the pretension of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... Omnipresence of the Deity commences with a description of the creation, in which we can find only one thought which has the least pretension to ingenuity, and that one thought is stolen from Dryden, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sign that care or thought upon dress had been bestowed; the simplicity of his costume was absolute and severe. On his plain shirt-front there gleamed not a stud, on his fingers there sparkled not a ring. Enguerrand, on the contrary, was not without pretension in his attire; the broderie in his shirt-front seemed woven by the Queen of the Fairies. His rings of turquoise and opal, his studs and wrist-buttons of pearl and brilliants, must have cost double the rental of Rochebriant, but ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fundamental rules for the behavior of any man who has the faintest pretension to being a gentleman, is that never by word or gesture must he compromise a woman; he never, therefore, writes a letter that can be construed, even by a lawyer, as damaging ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... whose caricature he is the living model. He wished to play capital parts, the parts of MOLE, and he completely failed. He ventured to appear in the Inconstant, in which MOLE is captivating, and it was only to his disgrace. Being compelled to relinquish this absurd pretension, he now confines himself to new or secondary parts, in the former of which he has to dread no humiliating comparison, and the latter are not ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... office to which so many people laid claim: and here the old saying is aptly introduced, 'A pound of good luck is worth a ton of merit.' Thou, who, in comparison to me, art doubtless an ignorant dunce, without rising early or sitting up late, or, indeed, exerting the least industry: without any pretension more or less than that of being breathed upon by knight-errantry, seest thyself created governor of an island as if it was ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... national unwillingness to remain in the ruts of one's ancestors. Possibly the best club-players of England are at least as good as the best Americans, but the general average of play and the general interest in the game are distinctly higher in the United States. Every English whist-player with any pretension to science knows what he has to expect when he finds an unknown lady as his partner, especially if she is below thirty; but in America he will often find himself "put to his trumps" by a bright girl in her teens. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... associations which do not affect to represent the majority, or which do not believe that they represent it. This conviction or this pretension tends to augment their force amazingly, and contributes no less to legalize their measures. Violence may seem to be excusable in defence of the cause of oppressed right. Thus it is, in the vast labyrinth of human laws, that extreme liberty ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... was my answer. "I have told you the fact, that I have no pretension whatever to the lady—that I am wholly unacquainted even with the person of your friend—that the idea of intentional injury on my part, therefore, is ridiculous; and let me add, for the benefit of your friend, that to expect an apology for imaginary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the present day; the first chiefly by writers not belonging to the Brahminical order, while those of the Urdu dialect follow Persian models. The writings in each, though numerous, and not without pretension, have little interest for ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the furious blows dealt by either warrior, and expected with each stroke the annihilation of one or other of the combatants. As yet their strength and agility seemed somewhat equally matched, although those who judged with more pretension to knowledge, were of opinion, that Count Robert spared putting forth some part of the military skill for which he was celebrated; and the remark was generally made and allowed that he had surrendered a great advantage by not insisting upon his right to fight upon horseback. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... THE CITIES.—What passed for thriving cities in those days were collections of a thousand or two houses, very few of which made any pretension to architectural beauty, ranged along narrow streets, none of which were sewered, and few of which were paved or lighted even on nights when the moon did not shine. During daylight a few constables kept order. At night small parties of men called the night ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... fanciful colors, chiefly yellow, red, or blue; the roofs of tin or zinc, and nearly all of a bright green, giving them a very lively effect in the sun; nothing grand or imposing about them in detail, and but little pretension to architectural beauty. Very nearly such houses may be seen every day on any of the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... some secret aperture, he returns as quickly through another equally unseen passage. Upon an average, I set his bibliomaniacal peregrinations down at the rate of a full French league per day. It is the absence of all pretension and quackery—the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which he opens his well-charged battery of information upon you—but, more than all, the glorious honours which are due to him, for having assisted to rescue the book treasures of the Abbey ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... acquired his profession. There was much enthusiasm in his character, and much of generous impulse; yet they were modified by Christian principle. Henry was a sincere Christian. There was little of noisy pretension, or loud profession; but in his soul was a deep and abiding sense of obligation to God; a supreme desire to do his will, and a fervent love to his fellow-men. To a remarkably fine person, was added an intellect ...
— Arthur Hamilton, and His Dog • Anonymous
... the Swedish and American country girls; for I am led to conclude, from all the observations I have made, that there is always a mixture of sentiment and imagination in voluptuousness, to which neither of them have much pretension. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience to the highest. His books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension." ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... perfect in etiquette, costume, and most particular in their society; but the rank and position of the noble Lady de Tilly made her friendship most desirable, as it conferred in the eyes of the world a patent of gentility which held good against every pretension to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Priscilla carried the day. They went down to breakfast, and during the meal Hugh would speak to nobody. When the gloomy meal was over he took his pipe and walked out to the cottage. It was an untidy-looking, rickety place, small and desolate, with a pretension about it of the lowest order, a pretension that was evidently ashamed of itself. There was a porch. And the one sitting-room had what the late Mr. Soames had always called his bow window. But the porch looked as though it were tumbling down, and the bow window ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... more to do with philosophy than with the permanent conflicts which agitate the world; the other of which could not alone furnish us with rules in practice, nor with a formulary for the measures to be taken in a given case, since such a pretension would be both vain and ridiculous, but which would inform the practical judgment of men charged with the solution of the numberless difficult and complicated questions which come up every day. If pure science refuses to interfere in the affairs of this world; if, as the learned originator ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... acknowledged that there was certainly much vague admiration and pretension amongst young Englishmen in this matter; but thought that profounder views were to be gathered from these ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... were travelling amongst Hindoos, his caste obtained him everything, while money alone availed me. I took him roundly to task for his treachery, which caused him secretly to throw away a leg of mutton he had concealed; I also threatened to expose the humbug of his pretension to caste, but it was then too late to procure more food. Having hitherto much liked this man, and fully trusted him, I was ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of a German scholar was Coleridge? We dare say that, because in his version of the Wallenstein there are some inaccuracies, those who may have noticed them will hold him cheap in this particular pretension. But, to a certain degree, they will be wrong. Coleridge was not very accurate in any thing but in the use of logic. All his philological attainments were imperfect. He did not talk German; or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the pretension to know God without intermediary, and, so to speak, face to face. For Mysticism, whatever is between God and us hides Him from us." "Mysticism consists in substituting direct inspiration for indirect, ecstasy ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... off into a little corner and carefully embellishing it, while the denouement waits and the interest grows cold. Neither can he write a page without sending a sly bolt of amused perception through it, in which he discovers some foible or pricks some bubble of pretension, but always tenderly, as if he loved his victim. To the fact that Mr. Blackmore's success came late in life, we have perhaps to be thankful for the softened and indulgent maturity which finds a hundred excuses, and knows ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... "The Sportsman"—he stands over a dormer window in the red-tiled roof of an old house of the Sheraton period, immediately opposite the famous "Chequers Inn." The house itself is very interesting; it has evidently been, in its early days, of considerable pretension, but has been an ironmonger's shop since 1804. On going within to make inquiries about the vane, I gathered that it is at least 120 years old, probably much more, the oldest part of the house being contemporary with ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of the refined. Their own notions of elegance lie so much on the surface, that they seem at first to suspect an ambush, and it is probable that, finding so much repose where, agreeably to their preconceived opinions, all ought to be fuss and pretension, they imagine themselves to ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... brick castle, with its paltry half-dozen acres, entered by lodges of the utmost pretension, and his coach-houses full of flashy carriages, with the family coat-of-arms(!) upon each, I thought the whole place one of the most contemptible patches of snobbery on this fair earth; and I was glad ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... out and complete the philosophic design,—to exhibit the extant learning in its airy flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to escape from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur, those particulars of which man's life consisteth. It is the vain pretension and assumption of those faulty wordy abstractions, whose falseness and failure in practice this school is going to expose elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstractions and idealisms that the Novum Organum was invented ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... said Cynthia, always ready with her mockery to exaggerate any pretension of her mother's. 'We are so high in rank that our sovereign must give us her sanction before we can play a round game ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to session, for expenses incident to that kind of duty, and also as an indemnification for the consequent loss of fees at the Irish Bar. Yet now, in 1843, having ceased to attend his duty in Parliament, Mr. O'Connell could no longer claim in that senatorial character. Such a pretension would be too gross for the understanding even of a Connaught peasant. And in that there was a great loss. For the allegation of a Parliamentary warfare, under the vague idea of pushing forward good bills for Ireland, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part in the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over like the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... too, was like her own. Such books as Miss Keeldar had read with the most pleasure were Miss Helstone's delight also. They held many aversions too in common, and could have the comfort of laughing together over works of false sentimentality and pompous pretension. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the first outlines of a comedy loosely sketched in. It is the story of a novel dramatized with very little labour or pretension; yet there are passages of high poetical spirit, and of inimitable quaintness of humour, which are undoubtedly Shakespeare's, and there is throughout the conduct of the fable a careless grace and felicity which marks it for his. One of the editors (we believe, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... anti-Christian. They openly shake off the control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says Professor Robertson, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... there, but on schemes of incursion or trade; and in all the wars they had with the French, on being superior to them, they contented themselves with putting them to ransom; and though they sometimes took their fortified places, they did not settle in them. As all their pretension in Acadia was trade, they sometimes indeed detained such French as they could take prisoners; but that was only for the greater security of their traffic in the mean while with the savages. Traders, continually obliged to follow the savages in their vagabond journeys, ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... clear-sighted, monsieur, in spite of your pretension to be an observer: for, with a little sense, all that seems obscure to you would have been explained. Was it not very natural that Madame de Montpensier should be interested in the fate of M. de Salcede, in what he might be tempted ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... They are, besides, philological absurdities, because they are fabricated on the false assumption that their primaries indicate men. They are, moreover, liable to the charge of affectation and prettiness, to say nothing of pedantic pretension to accuracy. ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... common soldiers in the two armies, took sides with their respective sovereigns. One great source of trouble was, that Richard claimed to be the feudal sovereign of Philip himself, on account of some old claims that he advanced, as Duke of Normandy, over the French kingdom. This pretension Philip, of course, would not admit, and the question gave rise to endless disputes ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... that he was skilled in cookery. We have made proof of him in cookery and have found him the skilfullest of men; and now, if we send after him and prove him on jewels, [the truth or falsehood of] his pretension will ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... some pretension, in a doublet of purple velvet with sleeves of a lighter color. His short, full trousers were garnished at the knee with immense roses; his shrunken nether limbs were cased in silken hose of a pale lavender hue, ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... first white man who had visited this quarry, and induced geologists to name the pipestone "Catlinite." Mr. Sibley, in his communication to the legislature presenting this slab, in answer to this pretension, says: ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... yet very thankful to accept any commission, however humble. And as a human document there is a touch of peculiar, almost pathetic interest about the Schoolmaster's Signboard preserved by Bonifacius Amerbach, and now with his collection in the Basel Museum (Plate 3). It is a simple thing, with no pretension to a place among "works of art"—this bit of flotsam from 1516, when it was painted. Originally the two views, the Infant Class and the Adult Class, were on opposite sides of the sign; but they have been carefully split ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... runs the race of public life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... and, riding up behind the three mounted men, she soon found herself leaving what for years had been her home. Not once did she look back. She hoped she would never see the squalid, bare pretension ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... no pretension to eloquence, Mr. Townsend. I was merely recalling to Miss Hamlyn's attention the beautiful lines of our immortal poet, Owen Meredith, which run, as ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... At this juncture I may mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram.": Periphrastic methods spurning, To this audience discerning I admit this show of learning Is the fruit of ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... other nations; the Jura gentis amicissimcae, conferred by her late treaties, having reference expressly to the nations of Europe only; and those conferred by the more ancient ones, not being susceptible of any other interpretation, nor admitting a pretension of reference to a nation which did not then exist, and which has come into existence under circumstances, distinguishing its commerce from that of all other nations. Merchandise received from them, takes employment from the poor of France; ours gives ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... first charges, Mistress Barbara and Mistress Anne, were young ladies of gentle spirit. Their sister had said of them that their spirit was as poor as their looks. It could not be said of them by any one that they had any pretension to beauty, but that which Mistress Clorinda rated at as poor spirit was the one element of comfort in their poor dependent kinswoman's life. They gave her no ill words, they indulged in no fantastical whims ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... delightful hamlets, pleasant villages, and even tranquil county towns, are losing their primitive characters for simplicity and contentment, by the passage of these fiery trains, that drag after them a sort of bastard elegance, a pretension that is destructive of peace of mind, and an uneasy desire in all who dwell by the way-side, to pry into the mysteries of the whole length and breadth of the region ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... pretension would be attended with serious results, invasive of the jurisdiction of this Government and highly dangerous to our citizens in foreign lands. Therefore I have denied it and protested against its attempted exercise as unwarranted by the principles ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which she invited her most select friends. Mr. and Mrs. Perley were there, and the Misses Thorpedyke, two maiden ladies who constituted the family of the highest social pretension of Plainton. There were other people who were richer, but Miss Eleanor Thorpedyke, now a lady of nearly seventy, and her sister Barbara, some ten years younger, belonged to the very best family in that part of the ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... actually claimed the worship of his followers; declaring that the institution had been established by Enoch and Elias, and that he had been summoned by "spiritual" agencies to restore it to its pristine glory. In fact, this pretension, which influenced thousands upon thousands of believers, was one of the most daring impostures that ever saw the light; and it is astounding to think that, so late as 1780, it should, for a long time, have been entirely successful. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... any pretension within sight of Otter was situated at the other extremity of the bay, on a peninsula projecting far into the sea. It had been built in the days when each mansion was a fortalice, and when safety from enemies was of more moment ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... not only of disaffection, but of being too friendly to the English. Hasthadal, however, is now one of the Chautariyas. The command of the army in the west has been continued to Bara Amar Singha, whose birth gives him no pretension to raise disturbances; but who has good abilities, and there is reason to believe is firmly attached to the present ruler. Bhim Sen, himself, now in the vigour of youth, and of the most determined courage, has ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... me charming," Lady de la Paule confessed. "Not the least pretension, and her clothes are marvellous. You are abominably severe, Etta. I am quite sure if she wanted to she could succeed ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... carpet, nor noteworthy work of art pleased the eye in this bare, strangely narrow room. The weapons and pieces of armour of the aged champion of the faith, which hung high above the window, made no pretension to beauty. Besides, the rays of the dim candle did not extend to them any more than to the valueless pictures of saints and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in the simple announcement of the Prophet, his sin was more pardonable; for, inasmuch as Isaiah had not proved himself outwardly as a divine ambassador, Ahaz sinned to a certain degree against man only, against the Prophet only, by unjustly suspecting him of a deceitful pretension to a divine revelation. Hence, Isaiah continues mild and gentle. But when Ahaz declined the offered sign, God himself was provoked by him, and his wickedness came evidently to light. It is substantially the same difference ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... accepts the mediation of Russia, and requests the mediation of the Emperor, she declares, that she is ready to make peace, as soon as the league between France and her revolted subjects shall be dissolved. That this pretension had met from the Court of France the contempt which it deserved. She on her part has declared, that if this proposition contained the last determination of England, it would be in vain to think of peace; and she has desired the English Ministry ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... naturally bloodthirsty, and a beast of prey by instinct, yet that the true sportsman is distinguished from the rest of the human race by his "love of nature, and of noble scenery." In support of this pretension to a gentler nature than the rest of mankind, the author proceeds to attest his own abhorrence of cruelty by narrating the sufferings of an old hound, which, although "toothless," he cheered on to assail a boar at bay, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... "The pretension to smashing world rule by a single people, in virtue of a monopoly of every title, every gift and every right, ought perhaps to confound us more by its grotesqueness than to alarm us by its energy; but never do cherished possessions, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... got Olympus, one must take the Hotel de Rambouillet. Juno resolves herself into Araminta. A pretension to divinity not admitted creates affectation. In default of thunderclaps there is impertinence. The temple shrivels into the boudoir. Not having the power to be a goddess, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... man to appropriate to himself the faculties of another without his consent, I certainly retain my early opinions. On that, however, of third persons to interfere between the parties, and the effect of conventional modifications of that pretension, we are probably ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... a straggling little place, without much pretension to gentility. A row of white lodging-houses, with green verandas, looked over the little parade; there was a railed-in green enclosure before the houses, where a ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... above the middle size, a brunette with expressive blue eyes; and her face, though without pretension to beauty, was uncommonly interesting. She had a fine figure, a majestic and dignified air, rather attractive than intimidating, and united with such numberless graces, even in trifles, that I have never seen her equal either in person or mind. Flattering, engaging, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the most populous city in New Jersey, is separated from New York, of which it is practically a part, only by the Hudson River; has no pretension to beauty, but is a busy railway centre; has very varied manufactures, including sugar, flour, machinery, and chemicals, extensive shipping interests, and great trade in iron, coal, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that the Roman court has not made any new provision in regard to that matter shows that, just as in virtue of the allegations of the regulars the said archbishop found it necessary not to carry his pretension farther, so likewise the supreme pontiff has tacitly approved and has left the religious with the exemption that they enjoyed before the above-mentioned brief. Therefore, in regard to either law, they will safely be able to proceed with the administration ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... what you shall please to set down to me: But is it necessary or convenient that I should know 'em first? It is, (answer'd Sir Philip) let us sit, and you shall understand 'em.—I am very sensible (continu'd he) of your sincere and honourable Affection and Pretension to my Niece, who, perhaps, is as dear to me as my own Child could be, had I one; nor am I ignorant how averse Sir George your Father is to your Marriage with her, insomuch that I am confident he would disinherit you immediately ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... on the claim that he had come into possession of a patented device through which it became possible to turn the low-grade sulphuric coal of Nova Scotia into coke without sacrificing either the valuable by-products, such as ammonia, tar, etc., or illuminating gas. This was a very remarkable pretension, for we had long ago eliminated these low-grade coals from consideration as material for gas-making; but if Whitney's device actually was what he claimed, undoubtedly he would be a dangerous competitor. Whitney's petition set forth further, that because of the exceedingly ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... chairman of the committee, Sir William Stawell, and it appears to have been backed up by those kind of general testimonials as to ability which recommend a man almost equally for any grade or position. Of special aptitude or scientific training he possessed no pretension, and his selection was a fatal blunder. In saying this, there is no reflection on the private character of the mistaken leader; he paid for the wrong estimation he held of his own fitness with his life, and the fault rests with those who placed him in a position ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... should propound a formulary of her faith, enlarge this formulary from time to time, as further interpretation is wanted, and enforce acquiscence in it by spiritual censures, is consistent with her principles. Whether such a pretension can be avowed, without inconsistency, by any Protestant Church, has been a subject of much discussion. In point of fact, however, no Protestant Church is without her formulary, or abstains from enforcing it by temporal provisions and spiritual censures. To enforce ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... river Touques, is a place of greater pretension even than Trouville. It is, however, quite in its infancy; it was planned for a handsome and extensive watering-place, but the death of the Duc de Morny has stopped its growth,—large tracts of land, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... "No!" I knew you would answer no. And now, gentlemen who have laughed at my pretension to discover a profession, say, have I not? I have laid my finger upon the spot where the social deficit exists. I have shown that we labor under a want; and when the world wants, do we not know that a man will step ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... material of my speeches. I dare say it was sad stuff, furbished up at a moment's notice. We carried the election. Cobden sent me a challenge to attend a public discussion of the subject. Whether this was quite fair, I am not certain, for I was young, made no pretension to be an expert, and had never opened my lips in parliament on the subject. But it afforded me an excellent opportunity to decline with modesty and with courtesy as well as reason. I am sorry to say that, to the best of my recollection, I did far otherwise, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to leave Dufresnoy at Metlaoui. In him I often admire that fine trait of his race: the clarifying instinct. He possesses—with no pretension at knowledge beyond his mining sphere—an innate rigour of judgment in every matter of the mind; he avoids crooked thinking by a process of ratiocination so swift and sure as to appear intuitive. Even as a true collector of antiques has quite a peculiar way of handling some rare snuff-box or Tanagra ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Societies. He is tall and well made. His vast and well-developed forehead announces the power of his intellect. His voice is full and sonorous. His attitude is dignified, and his gesticulation is full of noble simplicity. He is a man of lofty reason, natural, and without pretension, always master of himself, brilliant in the art of exposing and of abstracting. Few persons can handle a subject with which they are familiar better than Mr. Douglass. There is a kind of eloquence issuing ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... Hatteras, "it is well you should learn upon what undeniable facts my pretension to arrive at the Pole is founded. In 1817 the Neptune got up to the north of Spitzbergen, as far as the eighty-second degree. In 1826 the celebrated Parry, after his third voyage to the Polar Seas, started also from Spitzbergen Point, and ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... we were travelling amongst Hindoos, his caste obtained him everything, while money alone availed me. I took him roundly to task for his treachery, which caused him secretly to throw away a leg of mutton he had concealed; I also threatened to expose the humbug of his pretension to caste, but it was then too late to procure more food. Having hitherto much liked this man, and fully trusted him, I was greatly ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... street was a wooden building of some pretension, having bow-windows and a veranda. High pickets enclosed a secluded garden. It was very unlike the log-cabins of ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... attack the enemy, or canter off without coming to close quarters, as circumstances may recommend. After using for nearly ten minutes a sort of metaphysical jargon, which might, according to Alice's pleasure, have been interpreted either into gallantry, or the language of serious pretension, and when he supposed her engaged in fathoming his meaning, he had the mortification to find, by a single and brief question, that he had been totally unattended to, and that Alice was thinking on anything at the moment rather than the sense of what he had been saying. She asked ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... in the valley? Children and dogs tumbled over each other on the barren slope which looked like one vast back yard; donkeys grazed there, apparently fattening upon a rich diet of tin cans and shavings. Over yonder was a charred heap which had once been a building of some pretension, as was evident from the rude stone foundation which the blackened timbers leaned against. So Lame Gulch had its history, its traditions, its ruin. The charred timbers already looked older than the everlasting hills that towered on every hand, wrapped ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... name he found favor with the tailors, and bourgeoned forth a few days later in the best cloth the shops afforded, and strutted and plumed himself like a turkey-cock before Bertha, keeping up meanwhile a pretension of ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... relief of the irreverent, that the journal long survived the ordeal of the publication. Nevertheless this book appears on its merits, or otherwise, and seeks no support from past attainment. Neither does it make any pretension to originality of matter or method, though it may, perhaps, contain ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand. Under both the pretension and the fact is the common motive of fear—in brief, the common motive of the insecure and uncertain man, the average man, at all times and everywhere, but especially the motive of the average man in a social system so crude and ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... that the first church was erected at Glastonbury; and this tradition may seem to deserve credit, because it was not contradicted in those ages when other churches would have found it profitable to advance a similar pretension. The building is described as a rude structure of wicker-work, like the dwellings of the people in those days, and differing from them only in its dimensions, which were threescore feet in length, and twenty-six in breadth. An abbey was afterwards erected there, one of the finest of those edifices, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... a receiving-house for the women on their first arrival (if not assigned from the ship), or on their transition from one place to another, and also a house of correction for faults committed in domestic service; but with no pretension to be a place of reformatory discipline, and seldom failing to turn out the women worse than they entered it. Religious instruction there was none, except that occasionally on the Sabbath the superintendent of the prison read prayers, and sometimes ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... to please, it is always the latter that has a better chance of development and of making new discoveries; for the first is oppressed by traditions that become ever stiffer and more pedantic, while the other with its simplicity and lack of pretension is able to accommodate itself to any manner of life. How many artists have revolutionised their times while they were merely looked upon as people who amused! Frescobaldi and Philipp Emanuel Bach brought ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the winter, she was not too violently shaken to perceive her old friend's enjoyment of the effect of this news on Miss Overmore. That young lady opened her eyes very wide; she immediately remarked that Mrs. Farange's marriage would of course put an end to any further pretension to take her daughter back. Mrs. Wix enquired with astonishment why it should do anything of the sort, and Miss Overmore gave as an instant reason that it was clearly but another dodge in a system of dodges. She wanted to get out of the bargain: why else had she now left Maisie ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... a change of the termination of the verb, into se, ce, sion, tion, ation, or ition: as, expand, expanse, expansion; pretend, pretence, pretension; invent, invention; create, creation; omit, omission; provide, provision; reform, reformation; oppose, opposition. These denote either the act of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the text makes no pretension of being anything more than an attempt to state in broad outline the salient facts in the life of Tegnr and in the genesis and development ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... paper perished with the third issue. It was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit—"The Aged Pilot Man"—which were thereby saved ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Accordingly, this must be assumed of course to exist amongst the positive objects of every boarding-school. Yet so far are the laws and arrangements of existing schools from at all aiding and promoting this object, that their very utmost pretension is—that they do not injure it. Much injustice and oppression, for example, take place in the intercourse of all boys with each other; and in most schools 'the stern edict against bearing tales,' causes this to go unredressed (p. 78): on the other hand, in a school where ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... — N. affectation; affectedness &c adj.; acting a part &c v.; pretense &c (falsehood) 544, (ostentation) 882; boasting &c 884. charlatanism, quackery, shallow profundity; pretension, airs, pedantry, purism, precisianism, euphuism; teratology &c (altiloquence) 577. mannerism, simagree, grimace. conceit, foppery, dandyism, man millinery, coxcombry, puppyism. stiffness, formality, buckram; prudery, demureness, coquetry, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Larchmont, on the Sound. "Grey Rocks," he called it. It was a long, low rambling house, built of stone and of darkened wood. It sat ensconced in a deep phalanx of great, green trees at the head of a great, green lawn. It was not a big house, of pretension, of arrogant wealth, of many servants—of closely-shaven shrubbery and woodeny landscape gardening. It was, rather, a house that was a home—and there is a distinction—a vast distinction; for there is many a ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... presumption in me, to speak of the diseases of children, as this more properly belongs to the faculty; but let it be observed, that my pretension is not to cure the diseases that children are subject to, but only to prevent those which are infectious from spreading. I have found that children between the ages of two and seven years, are subject to the measles, hooping cough, fever, ophthalmia, ringworm, scald-head, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... set forms of Italian opera had already yielded in large degree to the energy and pomp of French declamation, when Rossini poured into them afresh such exhilaration and sparkle as again placed his country in the van of musical Europe. With no pretension to the grand, majestic, and severe, his fresh and delightful melodies, flowing without stint, excited alike the critical and the unlearned into a species of artistic craze, a mania which has not yet subsided. The stiff and stately ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... aquatic habits of several of the tribe, and the lemuridae into the suctorial, to which their length of muzzle and remarkable saltatory power are highly suitable. At the same time, the simiadae are degraded from the typical place, to which they have no sort of pretension, and placed where their mean and mischievous character seem to require; the cebidae again being assigned that situation which their comparatively inoffensive dispositions, their arboreal habits, and their extraordinary development ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... undertaken a journey to Milan, in the hope of accomplishing a negotiation in which the whole of the smaller provincial city had felt itself deeply interested. He had gone thither for the purpose of engaging the celebrated prima donna, Bianca Lalli, to sing at Ravenna during the coming Carnival. The pretension was a very ambitious one on the part of the impresario—or, as it may be more properly said, on the part of the city—for the step was by no means the result of his own independent and unaided enterprise. Such matters were not done in that way in the good old times in the smaller cities ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of interest is the darga, or tomb of a famous Mahommedan saint named Mayud-uddin. It is situated at the foot of the Taragarh mountain, and consists of a block of white marble buildings without much pretension to architectural beauty. To this place the emperor Akbar, with his empress, performed a pilgrimage on foot from Agra in accordance with the terms of a vow he had made when praying for a son. The large ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... note that the improvement of the last fifty years is almost wholly confined to Great Britain. Here and there a book is printed in France or Germany with some pretension to good taste, but the general revival of the old forms has made no way in those countries. Italy is contentedly stagnant. America has produced a good many showy books, the typography, paper, and illustrations ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... only to add that I can make no pretension to be a teacher of science. I trust that there is no material error of statement; if there is, I shall be the first to retract and correct it. I am quite confident that no correction that may be needed in detail will ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... little great men who seek to impose on you by pompous ways, proud looks, and high-sounding words; but there was no such poor pride and pretension about Sir Philip Sidney. He was gay and free-hearted, frank in his words, simple and gentle in his manner, and always earnest in the endeavor to be and do good. His writings were full of noble thought and pure, sweet feeling, worthy his true heart ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... remainder of the defile. This service our hired attendant from Palermo declined, and we push on unmolested to Partenico, our halting-place during the heat of the day. It is a town of some extent, large enough to afford two fountains of a certain pretension, but execrably dirty within. Twelve thousand inhabitants has Partenico, and five churches. Out of its five locandas, who shall declare the worst? Of that in which we had first taken refuge, (as, in a snow-storm on the Alps, any roof is Paradise,) we were obliged to quit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... pure and just man, he knew always how to appreciate those who dissented from him about forms of government, because he could discover in them the true love of nationality, to which Italy aspires. Wise without pretension, beneficent without ostentation, chaste in deed and word, exquisitely tender-hearted, he tempered the harsh lessons of experience by the unchanged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... lords, and a thousand others, will be avoided by an easy tax; in favour of which I cannot but wonder, that it should be necessary to plead so long, since every nation, which has any pretension to civility or a regular government, will agree, that heavy imposts are not to be wantonly inflicted, and that severity is never to be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... an elephant—the elephant rests on the back of a turtle." But what does the turtle rest on? So it is with our "Public School Brahmins." They will tell you, with all the coolness of Hindoo hypocrisy and pretension, that the "State depends on the schools—the schools on the State or people," but they do not say what the turtle stands on. This is the dilemma that all who rest society on the State, or on an atheistical basis, get into. They would cut the world loose from its assigned order of dependence ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... record. In this expression of opinion every man present agreed—the lawyer even included. Not one of them could call to mind the innumerable instances in which the sexual influence has proved irresistible in the persons of women without even the pretension to beauty. The very members of the club whom the Countess (in spite of her personal disadvantages) could have most easily fascinated, if she had thought it worth her while, were the members who wondered most loudly at ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were forever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... symbols indicate, deistic and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says Professor ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... made me stop short at the attic floor. I recognised the sound, and caught the words. The mendicants were at their prayers. "The benevolent stranger" was not forgotten in the supplication, nor was he unmoved as be listened in secret to the fervent accents of his fellow man. Whilst I have no pretension to the character of a saint, I am free to confess, that amongst the fairest things of earth few look so sublime as piety, steadfast and serene, amidst the cloud and tempest of calamity. Was it so here? I had yet to learn. A striking improvement had taken place in the aspect of the room ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the slope, as well as various meadows and plough lands. The manor house, still bearing the name of the Moat House, was near the old church in the meadows, and entirely surrounded with its own moat. It must have been a house of some pretension in the sixteenth century, for there is a handsome double staircase, a rough fresco in one room, and in the lowest there was a panel over the fireplace, with a painting representing apparently a battle between Turks and Austrians. The President ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... position conveniently close to the General, to whom, moreover, we had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his horseback, with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs nor fuss nor pretension beyond what his character and rank inevitably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... literature; yet the mighty we does not even know the word for bread in Armenian. It knows bread well enough by name in England, and frequently bread in England only by its name, but the truth is, that the mighty we, with all its pretension, is in general a very sorry creature, who, instead of saying nous disons, should rather say nous dis: Porny in his "Guerre des Dieux," very profanely makes the three in one say, Je faisons; now, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... important milestone in northern literature. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in so far as Scandinavia is concerned he created a new method of literary approach and a new artistic prose. There is scarcely a writer in these countries, since 1880, with any pretension toward literary expression who has not directly or indirectly come under ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... spirit of the Sullan constitution. It was absolutely necessary to send a strong army and an able general to Spain; and Pompeius indicated, very plainly, that he desired, or rather demanded, this commission. The pretension was bold. It was already bad enough that they had allowed this secret opponent again to attain an extraordinary command in the pressure of the Lepidian revolution; but it was far more hazardous, in disregard ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... branches, that its conclusions, even in its own peculiar province, are only true conditionally, subject to interference and counteraction from causes not directly within its scope: while to the character of a practical guide it has no pretension, apart from other classes of considerations. Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew that ill) ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... preceding chapter, we have seen that the distinctive characteristics of those who have more pretension than right to the honors of gourmandise, consists in the fact, that, at the best spread table, their eyes are dull ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... time, shirts with buttons behind were unusual. Lincoln took in the situation at once. Knowing the prejudices of the primitive people against pretension of all sorts, or any affectation of superior social rank, arising, he said: "Gentlemen of the jury, having justice on my side, I don't think you will be at all influenced by the gentleman's pretended knowledge of the law, when you see he does not even ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... strawberries and cream, he suggested that the port wine should be taken out into the garden. In the farther corner of Mr. Neefit's grounds, at a distance of about twenty yards from the house, was a little recess called "the arbour," admonitory of earwigs, and without much pretension to comfort. It might hold three persons, but on this occasion Mr. Neefit was minded that two only should enjoy the retreat. Polly carried out the decanter and glasses, but did not presume to stay there for a moment. ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... British nobleman with some curiosity. Evidently Lord Bedford was no dude. His suit was of rough cloth and ill-fitting. He was barely five feet six inches in height, with features decidedly plain, but with an absence of pretension that was creditable to him, considering that he was really what he purported to be. Stuyvesant walked by his side, nearly a head taller, and of more distinguished bearing, though of plebeian extraction. His manner was exceedingly deferential, and he was praising England and ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... is every way unjust. The nothings, or somethings, which form the staple of the book, are not laboured; and they are presented without the semblance of pomp or pretension. The Preface commences thus: ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... poetry, in the number of whom are Cino, da Pistoia and his friend, and the next, that its writers seem to adhere to, certain general rules of grammar, and in so doing give it, in the opinion of the intelligent, a very weighty pretension to preference." ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... from Anna of Lenkenstein, direct out of Milan: an English lady, calling herself Mrs. Sedley, and a particular friend of Countess Anna. At the first glance Violetta saw that her visitor had the pretension to match her arts against her own; so, to sound her thoroughly, she offered her the hospitalities of the villa for a day or more. The invitation was accepted. Much to Violetta's astonishment, the lady betrayed no anxiety to state ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... certain circumstances, ungodly men take credit for the distinct avowal of their ungodliness, and count on it as a merit. They are not, indeed, submissive in heart and life to the will of God; but they do not tell a lie about the matter; they make no pretension. The frank confession, that they are not good, seems to serve some men as a substitute for goodness. By comparing themselves complacently with fellow-sinners of a different class, they contrive to rivet the fatal error more firmly on their own hearts. Observing among their neighbours ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... instance, the President has treated the pretension of State Rights with proper indifference. Quietly and without much discussion, he has constituted military governments in the Rebel States, with governors nominated by himself,—all of which testifies against the old pretension. Strange ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... que semejante pretension excito sucesivamente la resistencia del centinela, las risas de los ordenanzas 10 y las dudas y vacilaciones de los edecanes[1-4] antes de llegar a conocimiento del Excelentisimo Sr. D.[1-5] Eugenio Portocarrero, conde del Montijo, a la sazon Capitan general del antiguo reino ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... the women outnumbered their less attractive companions by at least a third: these were all in holiday trim, of course; invariably well dressed, but commonly having a pretension to taste and style I have never elsewhere observed so universally prevalent amongst the same class. The men, both in air and dress, were inferior to their female friends; so much so that it was difficult to ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... appeal.[2248] The Marechale de Luxembourg is an authority; there is no point of manners which she does not justify with an ingenious argument. Any expression, any neglect of the standard, the slightest sign of pretension or of vanity incurs her disapprobation, from which there is no appeal, and the delinquent is for ever banished from refined society. Any subtle observation, any well-timed silence, an "oh" uttered in an appropriate place instead ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... noble sculptor; then Master Perino, or Bastiaeo Veneziano, and sometimes Valerio de Vicenca, or Jacopo Mellequino, architect, and Lactancio Tolomei, the acquaintance and friendship of these men I valued much more than others of more parade and pretension (as if there could be greater in the world, and so Rome values them); because from them, and from their works in my art, I obtained some fruit and knowledge. I amused myself in discussing with them many rare and noble works both of ancient and modern times. ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... tolerated, and he would accept the position meekly as only his desert, without a thought of bitterness. Indeed, he himself seemed to have imbibed Nurse Gooch's original opinion, that his genuine love for sacred things was a sort of impertinence and pretension in such as he—a kind of hypocrisy even when they were the realities and helps to which he clung with all his heart. Still, this depression was only shown by reserve, and troubled no one save myself, who knew him best guessed what ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... IS HE of whom this land is proud, Whose name we honour and whose worth is known? He's one who does his duty in the crowd, A worker there—and yet he stands alone! Without pretension, who by deeds endears His name afar beyond his native strand, A son of toil—yet one of Nature's peers! Whose worth's acknowledged in his native land! His is the praise well won for gallant action In saving life along our Humber shore, And ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... to mediate, not only between the coalition and the French, but also between the different members of the coalition. The Imperial Ambassadors claimed a right to sit at the head of the table. The Spanish Ambassador would not admit this pretension, and tried to thrust himself in between two of them. The Imperial Ambassadors refused to call the Ambassadors of Electors and Commonwealths by the title of Excellency. "If I am not called Excellency," said the Minister of the Elector of Brandenburg, "my master will withdraw his troops from Hungary." ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unconscious irony of this speech he was noticing the difference between the young English girl's evident interest in a political problem and the utter indifference of his own countrywomen. Here was a girl scarcely out of her teens, with no pretension to being a blue stocking, with half the aplomb of an American girl of her own age, gravely considering a question of political economy. Oddly enough, it added to his other irritation, and he ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... up a tattered blue net adorned with straggling, crushed, artificial rosebuds, its sole pretension to a waist being a couple of straps of silver tissue attached to a couple of rags of blue net. It looked for all the world like ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... snob, and Medland, if not exactly a gentleman according to the ideas of Eton and Christchurch—and Lord Eynesford adhered to these ideas—scorned a bad imitation where he could not attain the reality, and by his simplicity and freedom from pretension extorted the admission of good breeding. But why compare the men? He would have to accept both, for Medland must offer Coxon a place, and beyond doubt the offer would be accepted. The Governor was alarmed for the ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... as ever lived, but he was no fool neither. He looked at my weapon shining on him in the moonlight and quietly conceded to himself that the game was against him for the moment. From his fingers he slipped the rings, and the watch from his pocket-coat. To carry out our pretension I took them and filled ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the young people care for their books and their school-work, or to present to the clever idle ones among them the most enticing motives to exertion. "He got them on," the fathers and mothers said, and though he made no pretension to being a very good man, and sometimes used sharper words than were pleasant to hear, he loved the truth and hated a lie, and lived an honourable life among them, and all men regarded him with respect, ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... considerable inconvenience, for the Arab gentleman commenced an address to me in French. It has always been to me a source of sorrow that my parents did not teach me the French language, and this deficiency on my part has given rise to an incredible amount of supercilious overbearing pretension on the part of Judkins—who after all can hardly do more than translate a correspondent's letter. I do not believe that he could have understood that Arab's oration, but at any rate I did not. He went on to the end, however, speaking ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... the life of Lewis Carroll as it should be written would tax the powers of a man of far greater experience and insight than I have any pretension to possess, and even he would probably fail to represent adequately such a complex personality. At least I have done my best to justify their choice, and if in any way I have wronged my uncle's memory, unintentionally, I trust that my readers ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... thousand men with him. He is beyond doubt a pirate direct and indirect, and occasionally commands excursions in person, or employs the Illanuns of Tampasuk, and others to the eastward, who for their own convenience make common cause with him. He has no pretension to the territory he occupies; and the authority he exerts (by means of his piratical force) over the interior tribes in his vicinity, and on the island of Palawan, is of the worst and most oppressive description. This ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... said, after reading this story, 'The good old days of Cooper have come again.' It is really refreshing, in the midst of so much literary pretension, to meet with something of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... of Pirate Smee, was 'a kind of a compliment', but it was also, to quote the same hero, 'galling'; and I have wished for an opportunity of disowning the pretension which I found attributed to me of setting up as a pundit, or a pontiff, or a Petronius Arbiter; for I have neither the sure taste, nor the exhaustive reading, nor the ample leisure which would be necessary ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... Mr Featherstone! Jenny felt as if she trod on perfumed air. She was not in the least surprised to be told that she was not to marry the chaplain; the family chaplain, of whom there was one in every family of any pretension, was considered a poor mean creature, whose natural wife was the lady's maid; and Jenny quite understood that Mrs Millicent took ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown vulgarism. Any persons whom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... greatest length runs north and south. Ignoring for the time the teeming noisy swarms of humanity, let our eyes be directed merely upon the encircling buildings. The place is almost completely enclosed by them, although not all are of equal elegance or pretension. Some are temples of more or less size, like the temple of the "Paternal Apollo" near the southwestern angle; or the "Metroon," the fane of Cybele "the Great Mother of the Gods," upon the south. Others are governmental buildings; somewhat behind the Metroon rise ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... is connected with an elevated rank of life: but when this honorable House is informed that my accuser knew (though he suppressed the facts) that this person, of high rank and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to honor, veracity, and credit,—that there are facts recorded on the very Proceedings which my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery of letters from Munny Begum and the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... apartment in a hotel of some pretension was in the rue d'Anjou. There were a large antechamber, two salons, and an inner room, where he wrote, and finally had his bed. His town servants were his German valet, Bastien, who served during the last visit to America, a footman, and a coachman. Cooper wrote: "When I show ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... do I desire to remain behind the age, Wilton, if mere pretension and show be its ruling ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... basis of all Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part in the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over like the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... effort had been made to prop its crumbling walls or to stay the green ruin creeping over it. The fragment of its great eastern window, still standing, was its most imposing feature and showed that it had been a church of no mean architectural pretension. The locality, it would seem, was well supplied with abbeys, for Rievaulx is less than ten miles away, but we learned that Bylands was founded by monks from the former brotherhood and also from Furness Abbey in Lancashire. In the good old days it seems to have ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... and the last," i.e. Mohammed, who claimed (and claimed justly) to be the "Seal" or head and end of all Prophets and Prophecy. For note that whether the Arab be held inspired or a mere imposter, no man making the same pretension has moved the world since him. Mr. J. Smith the Mormon (to mention one in a myriad) made a bold ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... these myriad regions of the Antipodes, heretofore unknown, and for having thus enlarged for writers the field of study. I am proud to have shown them the way by collecting these facts which, as you will see, are without pretension; not only because I am unable to adorn my subject more ornately, but also because I have never thought to write as a professional historian. I tell a simple story by means of letters, written freely to give pleasure to certain ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... through the court-yard, and out at the gate, and down a narrow lane to the sea. Note. The sala goes sheer up to the top of the house; the ceiling being conical, and the little bedrooms built round the spring of its arch. You will observe that we make no pretension to architectural magnificence, but that we have abundance of room. And here I am, beholding only vines and the sea for days together. . . . Good Heavens! How I wish you'd come for a week or two, and taste the white wine at a penny farthing the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... under flattering words, did not show the least resentment for former injuries, extended a hand to everyone who came to him, listened to every complaint that had anything legitimate in it, entertained every pretension that was at all reasonable, and seemed disposed to base his government upon skilful concessions and not upon useless rigour. His star was believed in, his moderation inspired confidence, and people grew eager to participate in his triumph. Already at Vendome, a grandson of Henry ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... our manliness. In France there are no unmarried women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... possible; and they are to be called friends, but suspected as enemies: therefore the Scots are to be kept in readiness, to be let loose upon England on every occasion: and some banished nobleman is to be supported underhand (for by the league it cannot be done avowedly) who has a pretension to the crown, by which means that suspected prince may be kept in awe. Now when things are in so great a fermentation, and so many gallant men are joining councils, how to carry on the war, if so mean a man as I should stand up, and wish them to change all their councils, to let Italy alone, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... wind—can at the same time admire a monitor. Many persons, in truth, will refuse to regard a turret-ship as a ship at all. It overturns our every notion of what a ship should look like. A low, black, mastless, raft-like, cruel-looking machine, without the faintest pretension to form or comeliness, a turret-ship is simply a fighting-engine, a floating battery—an ingenious and formidable instrument of death and destruction, no doubt, but nothing more. Yet these are among the ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... a sequestered and private retirement. The chairs and couches were covered with Eastern wove mats, and were of the simplest and most primitive form. But on touching a spring, an interior apartment was displayed, which had considerable pretension to splendour and magnificence. The furniture and hangings of this apartment were of straw-coloured silk, wrought on the looms of Persia, and crossed with embroidery, which produced a rich, yet simple effect. The ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in the absence of all control over the subject of African slavery, are you agitated in relation to it? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins. [Laughter.] Who gave them a right to decide that it is a sin? By what standard ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... appearance of the place and nature of the buildings differ little from those of the generality of Malayan bazaars, excepting that its superior wealth has occasioned the erection of a greater number of public edifices, chiefly mosques, but without the smallest pretension to magnificence. The country above the town is highly cultivated, and abounds with small villages and groups of three or four ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... back, happy to believe it had something to do with my Lord's decision. The imposition deserved to have its head blown off. Orchan is a dotard. His son's ears are still impaired. In the fall the ground caught him crown first. He will never ride again. The pretension is over.... I rode from the Princess' house directly to Blacherne. The Grand Council was in session: yet the Prefect of the Palace admitted me.... O my Lord, this Constantine is a man, a warrior, an Emperor, surrounded by old women afraid of their shadows. The subject of discussion when I ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... extensive, being included, house and all, in an area of an acre and a half: but the most had been made of it; it sloped prettily to the river, and was absolutely secluded from the road. Thus Surbiton Cottage, as it was called, though it had no pretension to the grandeur of a country-house, was a desirable residence for a moderate family ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... his duty modestly, though he had become the most important person of the party for the time being. There was not a particle of the "brag" and pretension which had caused me to distrust everything he said. As we walked from place to place he kept at a respectful distance from the passengers, and never intruded himself upon them, though he was always ready ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... make this invisible and intangible necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the flesh of Christ was, according to Wycliffe, an impudent fraud, and their pretension to possess this power was only an excuse by which they enforced their claim to collect fees, and what amounted to extortionate taxes, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... thinker finds himself often at a loss for an expression exactly suited to his conception, for want of which he is unable to make himself intelligible either to others or to himself. To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful; and, before recourse is taken to so desperate an expedient, it is advisable to examine the dead and learned languages, with the hope and the probability that we may there meet with some ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... publishing the bill, a consul putting the question at the centuriate assembly, all orders and individuals pressing it on, in fact, with all the forces at its command. Nor is it the case that I afterwards made any pretension, or am making any at this day, which can justly offend anyone, even the most malevolent: my only effort is that I may not fail either my friends or those more remotely connected with me in either active service, or counsel, or personal exertion. This course ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... inclined, on first reconnoitering the city, to suppose that the places of worship were the theatres and cafes of the place. No evening in the week but brings throngs of the young and beautiful to the chapels and meeting- houses, all dressed with care, and sometimes with great pretension; it is there that all display is made, and all fashionable distinction sought. The proportion of gentlemen attending these evening meetings is very small, but often, as might be expected, a sprinkling of smart young clerks make this sedulous ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... Excursions, several other books, including Scenes and Sports in Foreign Lands.[129] It was during his military career at Gibraltar that he met George Borrow at Seville, as the following extracts from his book testify. Borrow's pretension to have visited the East ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... for the magnificent Grand Tour he outlines. We calculate that it would be over L500, for the Earl of Cork paid L1000 a year for his two sons, their governor, only two servants and only saddle-horses:[332] whereas Lassels hints that no one with much pretension to fashion could go through Paris without a coach followed by three lacqueys and a page.[333] Evelyn, at any rate, thought the expenses of a traveller were "vast": "And believe it Sir, if he reap some contentment extraordinary, from what he hath observed abroad, the pains, sollicitations, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... ascertained by the place of the party above or below the salt, or, sometimes, by a line drawn with chalk on the dining-table. Lord Lovat, who knew well how to feed the vanity and restrain the appetites of his clansmen, allowed each sturdy Fraser, who had the slightest pretension to be a Duinhe-wassel, the full honour of the sitting, but, at the same time, took care that his young kinsmen did not acquire at his table any taste for outlandish luxuries. His Lordship was always ready with some honourable apology, why foreign wines and French brandy—delicacies which he ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... truths, hitherto received as indisputable. It denies to the judiciary the interpretation of law, and claims to divide with Congress the power of originating statutes. It extends the grasp of executive pretension over every power of the government. But this is not all. It presents the chief magistrate of the Union in the attitude of arguing away the powers of that government over which he has been chosen to preside; and adopting for this purpose modes of reasoning which, even under the influence of ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... conventionalism of devoting the time of youth to the acquirement of dead words, to the unavoidable exclusion of nearly every thing that is of value? First, we are told that we can not understand the English language without a knowledge of Latin, from which it is derived. The inaccuracy of this pretension is at once made manifest by reference to Webster, where ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... employers seemed to him undutiful towards his late rector. All that she saw of them reassured her. The family manners were full of well-bred good-humour, full of fun, with high intelligence, much real refinement, and no pretension. The father was the most polished, with the scholarly courtesy of the dignified clergyman; the mother was the most simple and caressing; the daughter somewhat uncouth, readily betraying both her feelings and her cleverness and drollery ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... County, in which this tribune of the people was born and reared and which he now represented, there were, as in all the backcountry counties, few great estates and few slaves, no notable country-seats with pretension to architectural excellence, no modishly dressed aristocracy with leisure for reading and the cultivation of manners becoming a gentleman. Beyond the tide-water, men for the most part earned their bread ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... if he be out of sight—in a moment, through some secret aperture, he returns as quickly through another equally unseen passage. Upon an average, I set his bibliomaniacal peregrinations down at the rate of a full French league per day. It is the absence of all pretension and quackery—the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which he opens his well-charged battery of information upon you—but, more than all, the glorious honours which are due to him, for having assisted to rescue the book treasures of the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres from destruction, during the horrors ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... basic in Irish life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... little collection make no pretension to being more than an effort to share the delight found in them; from which most of the world is debarred by the difficulty of the language in which they are written. They have been chosen at random, each for some intrinsic charm or because ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... a reliance on the ultimate victory of true principles. More than this can hardly be expected from me, even on the supposition that I have ascertained the real conditions. No one, it is to be presumed, will imagine that I can have any pretension of giving recipes for Literature, or of furnishing power and talent where nature has withheld them. I must assume the presence of the talent, and then assign the conditions under which that talent can ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... till, eventually, twelve monthly numbers made up a book. A story thus originated could not be other than sketchy and desultory, and open to the captiousness of over-fastidious criticism: it was never meant to be a work of high pretension—only one of those easy trifles which afford a laugh, and require to be read in the same careless spirit of good humour in which they ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... he makes no pretension to the character. He'd ride, or rather fly, an hundred miles to relieve a distressed object, or to do a gallant act in the service of his country; but, should you drop your fan or bouquet in his presence, it is ten to one that some beau at the farther end of the room would have the honour of presenting ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... residence at Benares we sometimes met these naked creatures in the streets; but for many years they have disappeared, as there is a magisterial order that they be flogged for their indecency, however loud may be their pretension of sanctity. At Allahabad there were many devotees with their tangled hair, besmeared bodies, and very scanty clothing—if what they had on could be called clothing. These are yet seen all over the country. The time has not yet come for ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... more genial Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the friend of Shelley and Keats, and the writer of many pleasant essays, called Carlyle's style "a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance." We like Hunt best when he is writing in the vein of the Spectator or as a "miniature Lamb." In such papers as An Earth upon Heaven, Hunt tells us that in heaven "there can be no clergymen if there are no official duties for them"; that ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... it. The point of comparison between the recipients of the kingdom and little children does not lie in any sentimental illusions about the innocence of childhood, but in its dependence, in its absence of pretension, in its sense of clinging helplessness, in its instinctive trust. All these things in the child are natural, spontaneous, unreflecting, and therefore of no value. You and I have to think ourselves back to them, and to work ourselves back to them, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... century was a tinker—namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions do cheat at uncertain times, are traitors in a small proportion, must be perfidious, unless they make an odious hypocritical pretension to the character of angels. That tinkers are not alone in their practice of multiplying the blemishes on which their healing art is invoked, seems broadly illustrated by the practice of verbal critics. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Bhandarkar, p. 90. The subsequent quotations are from the same source but I have sometimes slightly modified them and compared them with the original, though I have no pretension ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... softly-tinted style, all seem to bespeak his moral as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us love the man at the same time that we admire the author. While the productions of writers of loftier pretension and more sounding names are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with ostentation, but they mingle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and harmonize our thoughts; they put us in good humor with ourselves and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... in the iron-gray suit showed a much more minute knowledge of these particulars than I had the least pretension to. He could tell the very year in which the family of De Haga first ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... kind of normal men, and by attempting to obtain legal sanction for this kind of love. Ulrich gives the name Dionings to men whose sexual appetite is normal, i.e., directed toward women. Such a pretension appears necessarily ridiculous to every man whose sexual sense is normal, and it is obviously absurd to apply the term "normal" to a sexual appetite absolutely devoid of its natural object, procreation. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... far as it made any pretension to methods of cure, was either purely empirical, or founded upon the one notion that descended from generation to generation from the earliest antiquity—that there was an excess of bile in the blood, and that it must be expelled ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... this respect has made me ashamed to have written at all upon trees; but with full gratitude to the botanical explorers whose labors have made such superficial observations as mine possible, I venture to send forth these sketches, without pretension as to the statement of any ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... we can say will remove this impression until the world shall be familiarized with the idea of considering the continent of North America to be our proper dominion. From the time we became an independent people, it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension, as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea. Spain had pretensions on our southern, Great Britain on our northern borders. It was impossible that centuries should elapse without finding them annexed to the United States; not from any spirit of encroachment or of ambition on our ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
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