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Puritanical   Listen
adjective
Puritanical, Puritanic  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the Puritans, or to their doctrines and practice.
2.
Precise in observance of legal or religious requirements; strict; overscrupulous; rigid; often used by way of reproach or contempt. "Paritanical circles, from which plays and novels were strictly excluded." "He had all the puritanic traits, both good and evil."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Puritanical" Quotes from Famous Books



... desperate trial that very night. Just next to Stanton's apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbors. One of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the madhouse as full of election and reprobation as he could hold,—and fuller. He regularly repeated over the five points while daylight lasted, and imagined ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... he termed the elegant amusements suitable to our wealth and rank and discoursing upon the pleasures of the domestic circle, and such humbugs. All this was exceedingly irksome to me, accustomed as I was to one unvarying round of excitement; but your father was as firm as he was puritanical—and obstinately interposed his authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form. Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not monopolised the helm. There was in society, though it was not strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of "good form." Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for "education" and ignorance of letters. The national fancy for sport was in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of questionableness and not ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... the bill recently passed by the Missouri legislature, making Sunday virtually a Puritanical Sabbath. A powerful protest was presented to the Governor, respectfully requesting him not to sign the obnoxious bill, but it seems he yielded, says the Jewish Times, to the wishes of a few fanatics, backed by ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various

... small, but devout, consisting for the most part of middle-aged and elderly persons in sombre attire and of Puritanical aspect; for the preacher was one of those Calvinistic clergy of Cromwell's time who had been lately evicted from their pulpits, and prosecuted for assembling congregations under the roofs of private citizens, and had shown a noble perseverance in serving God ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... pack thrown on the floor, a hearty greeting from Matalette, and then they saw in the doorway a tall, straight young man, whose blue eyes, heavy, closely curling yellow hair and finely cut features made him extremely handsome, despite a solemn, puritanical look which not even a driving rain and a cold wind had been able to banish ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... required it; had not unfrequently tacked a worldly wise moral to the end of one; and yet, and yet, such had been the tone of her telling, such the allotment of laughter and lamentation, such the acceptance of things as necessary, and such the repudiation of things as Quixotic, puritanical, impossible, that the girl's natural notions of the lovely and the clean had got dismally shaken ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... a notable fact that dancing was taught in nearly all of these institutes. In spite of Puritanical training, in spite of the thunder-bolts of colonial preachers, the tide of public opinion could not be stayed, and the girls would learn the waltz and the prim minuet. Times had indeed changed since the day when Cotton Mather so sternly spoke his opinion on such ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... to friends who had made and remade fortunes in stocks, as well as of others whose horses had brought them riches, or who had brought off what he called coups at foreign gaming tables. The young man, who had been brought up in a strict Puritanical household, was at first rather shocked at the thought of gambling or racing, but Mr. Phillips treated his prejudices in a condescendingly joking way, and Kent gradually grew ashamed of his "insularity" and bourgeois ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... Lettice he had pooh-poohed her exalted ideas and thought them womanish; in Nan, he was inclined to call them beautiful. Of course, he said to himself, her ideas did not affect him; men could not guide their lives by a woman's standard; nevertheless, her notions were pretty, although puritanical; and he had no desire to see them changed. He would not have Nan less conscientious ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... met Old Poodles, the all-firdist gambler in the country. He was afoot and in his shirt-sleeves, and was in a wuss larther nor any race hoss I ever saw. ("All-fired," enormous, excessive, a low Americanism, not improbably a puritanical corruption of "hell-fired," designed to have the virtue of an oath without ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne

... country. To the eye of a mere visitor France is the most moral of the four Great Powers—France, Russia, England, Germany; has the strongest family life and the most seemly streets. Young men and maidens are never seen walking or lying about, half-embraced, as in puritanical England. Fire is not played with—openly, at least. The slow-fly amorousness of the British working classes evidently does not suit the quicker blood of France. There is just enough of the South in the French to keep demonstration of affection away from daylight. A certain ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... he could not have written such lines from a want of proper habits and previous sympathy; and that till some great puritanical genius should arise to do these things equally well without any knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burns the injuries he had done his health and fortune in his poetical apprenticeship to experience, for the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... its own peculiar flowering, developed, not as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross- fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was practically as free as when it came from the hands of the glaciers and ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... the Codfish as very dangerous to literature, unless, indeed, he be of the Roman obedience, like that wonderful Ichthiobibliophage (pardon me, Professor Owen) who, in the year 1626, swallowed three Puritanical treatises of John Frith, the Protestant martyr. No wonder, after such a meal, he was soon caught, and became famous in the annals of literature. The following is the title of a little book issued upon the occasion: ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades

... go to church three times in the day, but the general appearance of Washington on a Sunday is much less puritanical than that of most other American towns; the people walk about, and there are no chains in the streets, as at Philadelphia, to prevent their riding or ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... proof of what has been doubted, namely, that the theatres were not permitted to be open during Lent, in the reign of James I. The restriction was waved in the next reign, as we find from the Puritanical Prynne:—"There are none so much addicted to stage-playes, but when they goe unto places where they cannot have them, or when, as they are suppressed by publike authority, (as in times of pestilence, and in Lent, till now of late,) can well subsist ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle

... many a village churchyard. Often there stands near the village church an old stone cross, its steps worn away by the rains and frosts of thirteen centuries; its head has doubtless gone, broken off by the force of the gales, or by the wild rage of human passion and Puritanical iconoclastic zeal; but it preserves the memory of the first conversion of the Saxon villagers to Christianity, and was erected to mark the spot where the people assembled to hear the new preacher, and to consecrate it for ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... pride of his nation. A late poet has, with propriety, called him "the genius of the British isles." He was the idol of his contemporaries: during the interval indeed of puritanical fanaticism, which broke out in the next generation, and rigorously proscribed all liberal arts and literature, and during the reign of the Second Charles, when his works were either not acted at all, or if so, very much changed and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... Burnett, looking as if he had just received an undutiful communication from the House of Representatives and were inditing a most sharp response. Mr. Cooke hung beside the ruler whom he opposed, sturdy and somewhat puritanical, as befitted a popular leader. The ancient lady of Sir William Phipps eyed them from the wall in ruff and farthingale, an imperious old dame not unsuspected of witchcraft. John Winslow, then a very young man, wore the expression of warlike enterprise which long afterward ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... feel, like these two delightful philosophers, that you were a little above the surroundings. Poor Dick Steele may not always have been above those surroundings; we can fancy him taking things comfortably in some tippling-house, red-faced, happy, and winey, but even the most puritanical of us will forgive him. Read, by the way, what he says of the Spa's morals[A]—"I found a sober, modest man was always looked upon by both sexes as a precise, unfashioned fellow of no life or spirit. It was ordinary for a man who had been drunk in good company, or.... ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... was now ready to die for Jesus Christ, in the eternal gladness that there was such a person as God and such a person as Jesus Christ. Their being was to her the full and only pledge of every bliss, every childlike delight. She believed in the God of the whole earth, not in a puritanical God. She never imagined it could be wrong to dance: merry almost in her very nature, she now held it a duty to be glad. Fond of sweets, she would have thought it wrong to refuse what God meant her to like; but she had far more pleasure in giving than in receiving them. She got ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... Borgia, a Julius II., and a Leo X., was that farce perception of which made Rabelais shake the world with laughter, and which roused such consuming indignation in Luther and Calvin that they created the gloomy puritanical asylums in which millions of Germans, English, and Americans were shut up for two hundred years, as Matthew Arnold puts it. But Duerer was not so immured: even Luther at heart neither was himself, nor desired that others should be, prevented from enjoying the free ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... hesitate to suspect some radical vice in their constitution, which could so far debase female honour as to leave it problematical, whether or not the violaters of it, in any sense or degree, were capable of any thing but infamy. 'Twere too puritanical, perhaps, to join ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... The puritanical party was by far the fewer in numbers, for which two excellent reasons might be given. In the first place, they had enjoyed power for several years, and, of course, became unpopular among the common ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... be of great importance, but who still retained the key to his most material mystery. Nevertheless, decency, to say nothing of the influence of what "folks would say," the Archimedean lever of all society of puritanical origin, exhorted him to consent to ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... than from the 8th to the 23rd page, and as far as the end of section 33. There you will find in what year the excellent man, whose life you write, became a Master of Arts: how his first reading of learned Hooker had been occasioned by certain puritanical pamphlets; and how good a preparative he found it for his reading of Calvin's Institutions, the honour of whose name (at that time especially) gave such credit to his errors: how he erred with Mr. Calvin, whilst he took things upon trust ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... three times in one week to study the inward significance of her dances, he declared. He treated me to a learned discourse concerning them, and was furious when one journal, slightly puritanical in tone, perhaps, said that they were generally unedifying, and in one case, at ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner

... own country. Charles of Anjou, brother of Saint Lewis, was at that time, next to the reigning sovereigns, the most powerful prince in Christendom, and to his aid the Pope appealed. Himself a man of Puritanical strictness in his life, and devoted to the Church, Charles was ready enough to accept the call, which appealed alike to his principles and to his ambition, and to act as the champion of the Holy See ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... outlook—were alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect, she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving, butterfly nature with an aloofly puritanical disdain. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... which, while it may be venial in the life of an artist, takes proportions altogether more serious in that of the people's representative. You understand me, of course. I refer to that handsome Italian woman whom you have in your house. Take care; some puritanical elector whose own morality may be more or less problematical, is likely to call you ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... the family life of crowned heads from being admitted into the scandalous secrets of the household of Hamlet? Or did they wish to see an injured husband following the example of Othello? A thousand times no. These things must be stopped. The Council was very far from taking a Puritanical view of the question—(applause)—they fully recognised that the stage was a necessary social evil, and, as such, must be tolerated until the public taste was sufficiently purified to refuse it further countenance; but, in the meantime, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... in conduct or convention. One hears discussed at dinner-tables and in the presence of young girls matters which our mothers would have blushed to mention at all. The quality of modesty is declared Puritanical and hypocritical. "Hypocritical virtue" is a phrase one frequently meets; and we seem fast going on to the time when all virtue will be regarded as hypocrisy. Customary standards are falling all about us, overthrown in the name ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... I was listening at one of the windows, and I heard you tell mother—dear old puritanical mother—that you had crept away without leave from the learned professor, and had got into difficulties. Oh, didn't I just love you for it! There's a Miss Frost here who tries to teach me; but, bless you! she can't knock much learning into me. She is as terrified of me as she ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... not understand her any more than if she had been speaking a foreign language. She had never any difficulty in penetrating his meaning as he had in penetrating hers, but there were times when she did not understand him any more than he understood her. She was by far the easiest in morals, the least Puritanical. It was not easy to shock Bice, but it was not at all difficult to shock Jock, brought up as he was in the highest sentiments under the wing of MTutor, who believed in moral influence. But the fashion of the intercourse held between these two, was very ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... 1582 for transferring from the patronage of Leicester for his theatrical employees to that of Lord Hunsdon was, no doubt, the fact of Leicester's departure for the Continent in this year. The constant attacks being made by the puritanical authorities upon the London theatrical interests made it expedient for him to have the protection of a nobleman whose aid could be quickly invoked in case of trouble. As I will show later that Burbage was regarded ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... nearly all, the red and the blue, the furious and the tranquil, the puritanical and the licentious, the mystical and the intemperate, those that had voted for the death of kings, and those in which the frauds in the grocery trade had been denounced; and everywhere the tenants cursed the landlords; the blouse was full of spite ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... find frequent references in the writings and newspapers of the times to this truly Puritanical dread of bishops. To the descendants of the Pilgrims the very name smacked of incense, stole, and monkish jargon. A writer, signing himself "America," gives in the Boston Evening Post, of October 14, 1771, a communication ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... of that county. Wood says, that John Dryden was by profession a schoolmaster, and honoured with the friendship of the great Erasmus, who stood godfather to one of his sons.[15] He appears, from some passages in his will, to have entertained the puritanical principles, which, we shall presently find, descended to his family.[16] Erasmus Driden, his eldest son, succeeded to the estate of Canons-Ashby, was high-sheriff of Northamptonshire in the fortieth year of Queen Elizabeth, and was created ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... left the stage to be his alone, to be a good and charming wife.' And somehow Tullia managed to induce the most Puritanical members of du Bruel's family to accept her. From the very first, before any one suspected her motives, she assiduously visited old Mme. de Bonfalot, who bored her horribly; she made handsome presents to mean old ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac

... with what I had heard from Mr. Clifford, of the practices of the law and the courts of justice, and from Dr. Gabriel, with respect to the debaucheries of the most dignified members of the church, and the hypocrisy of many of its puritanical preachers, really made me almost believe that I was got into a new world, and that the men and women of which it was composed were a different species from those with whom I had been in the habit ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... topics; and as for Mrs. Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased. It all passed over the head of the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... know women. In your comprehension we are automatons, puppets, with no hearts nor heats of desire of our own, with no springs of conduct save those of the immaculate and puritanical sort that New England crystallized a century ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... devotion, of the man who had won her as easily as she had conquered Richard Gathbroke. That the young Englishman's nature was hot and tempestuous, with depths that even he had not sounded, and her ideal knight's more effective mien but the expression of a possibly meager and somewhat puritanical nature; that Dwight's heart was a well-trained organ which would never commit an indiscretion, and that young Gathbroke would have sold the world for her if she had been a flower girl, or the downfall of her fortunes ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... art (whatever might be the amount of his genius), had received so careless, or so homely an education when a boy, that he could hardly read. He pronounced also some of his words, in reading, with a puritanical barbarism, such as haive for have, as some people pronounce when they sing psalms. But this was perhaps an American custom. My mother, who both read and spoke remarkably well, would say haive, and shaul (for shall), when she sung her hymns. But it was not so well in reading ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that you turned upon my with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come to me just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream, had suddenly found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at once gushed through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith; and it is you who have ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... in the long coat?" said another, who had not participated in the banter of his companions on the Puritanical devices of Charles and his cronies. He was jerking his head aside to where a man whom we have known in other scenes was pushing his way ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... cold northern woods will not offer. They are too reserved, too lofty, too puritanical to make provision for the grosser wants of humanity. They are not friendly ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... the propriety of drawing from the oblivion of forgotten literature such a story will be questioned. The decay of the chivalrous spirit of the middle ages, and the prudish, puritanical code of morality that has superseded the simple manners of our forefathers, render it hazardous to cast into the hands of the present generation the thrilling records of sin and repentance such as they were seen and recorded in ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... yielded at last, and made an appointment with Sir Antony Wraxall. He took his quarter-hour in due form, and told the great physician all his symptoms as though he believed in the foolish farce. Sir Antony held his head solemnly on one side, weighed him with puritanical scrupulosity to a quarter of an ounce on his delicate balance, listened attentively at the chest with his silver-mounted stethoscope, and perpended the net result of his investigation with professional gravity; then he gave Edie his full advice and opinion to ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... illustrate at length the custom, which has prevailed in various parts of Europe, such as England, France, and Germany, of setting up a village May-tree or May-pole on May Day. A few examples will suffice. The puritanical writer Phillip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, first published at London in 1583, has described with manifest disgust how they used to bring in the May-pole in the days of good Queen Bess. His ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... habit of my boyhood. Salome was my oldest friend. We've played together in this very room, again and again. She was my good angel. Until—No matter. You are her child. Not like her at all in face or manner. She was always gentle, and shrank from giving pain. Truthful and puritanical as she was in her ideas, she had the tact, the knowledge to say things without hurting those whom she corrected. She corrected me often and often, when we were young, but she hurt ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... The young man, the husband, was well enough—apparently a gentleman; but Miss Farrell felt that she would have forgotten his existence when the tea-party was over. So she had fallen back on conversation with her cousin. That Cousin Hester—dear, shapeless, Puritanical thing!—disapproved of her, her dress, her smoking, her ways, and her opinions, Cicely well knew—but that only gave zest to their meetings, which were ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... a puritanical fervor which withstood the lure of expediency. He entered the courts not to juggle with words, fence for loopholes out of which to drag dubious acquittals for his clients. His profession was a part ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... to the throne of England was a bid for the banished and persecuted Protestants to return from foreign lands and again pursue their puritanical philosophy. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... as she was alone in the room, stood in the middle of it, scowling,—for she could scowl. "I'll not go near them," she said to herself,—"nasty, stupid, dull, puritanical drones. If he don't like it, he may lump it. After all it's no such great catch." Then she sat down to reflect whether it was or was not a catch. As soon as ever Lord Fawn had left her after the engagement was made, she had begun to tell herself that he was ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... and more puritanical year by year. There were no half measures with Caesar. Either a man was a saved soul, or he was in the very belly of hell, though the pit might not have shut its mouth on him. If a man was saved he knew it, and if he felt the manifestations of the Spirit he could live ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... not to you, Alice, nor do I ever intend to forgive you. I suppose you followed old Jean and me to the chateau and have drawn your own inference from what you observed. Do you know, Alice, I have often wondered why the puritanical conscience is always so suspicious of other people?" And in this last speech of Sally's there was more of truth ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook

... velvets and silks and ribbons, obviously at a loss before such an unparalleled choice; and he was once more disturbed by the attenuation of her small body. But that could be soon remedied; she had suffered other, far greater, irremedial, oppressions; her very birth had confronted her, in the puritanical self-righteousness of his world, with an almost insuperable barrier to happiness. Still back of that, even before the birth of himself and Essie Scofield, back, back in the unguessed past, Eunice had been shaped, condemned. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Spirit leaves the stage, which is at once invaded by Comus and his rout. A brilliant speech by the god, preceding the first measure, illustrates the strange but yet not infrequent irony of fate by which it has happened that the most puritanical of poets have thrown the full weight of their best work into the opposing scale, and clothed vice in magic colours to outdo the richest fancies of the libertine. No doubt this reckless adorning of sin was intentional on Milton's part; he painted the pleasures of [Greek: komos] in their ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... Cockpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode in the royal apartments, with his "Lady Protectress" and his family. Cromwell's puritanical tastes did not make him averse to the luxury he found there, and, when Evelyn visited Whitehall after a long interval in 1656, he found it "very glorious and well furnished." But the Protectress could not give up her habits of nimble housewifery, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... pride of his nation. A late poet has, with propriety, called him "the genius of the British isles." He was the idol of his contemporaries during the interval, indeed, of puritanical fanaticism, which broke out in the next generation and rigorously proscribed all liberal arts and literature, and, during the reign of the second Charles, when his works were either not acted at all, or, if so, very much changed and disfigured, his fame was awhile obscured, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage," laughed Lovelace. Have not some of the great books of the world been written in prison? Things work by antithesis; and if your discipline is too severe, you get no discipline at all. Puritanical pretense, hypocrisy and a life of repression, with "thou shalt not" set on a hair-trigger, have made more than one man bold, genuine and honest. Draw the bow far enough this way, and your arrow will go a long way that. Forbid ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... Man had really such an Affair upon his Hands, and he knew the Person, he had to do with, to be a resolute Man that understood the Sword, do you think he would have Patience or be at Leisure to hearken to all that puritanical Stuff, which you have been heaping together? Do you think (for that is the Point) it would have any ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... the just criticism pronounced upon the character and diction of Caliban by one of Charles's confidential counsellors, Lord Falkland, that the king's admiration of Shakspeare had impressed a determination upon the court reading. As to Milton, by double prejudices, puritanical and classical, his mind had been preoccupied against the full impressions of Shakspeare. And we know that there is such a thing as keeping the sympathies of love and admiration in a dormant state, or state of abeyance; ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... was not proper for her son's betrothed to run about the streets alone in the evening. Might it not compromise her honor? and later on might it not furnish venomous Madame de Fondege with an opportunity to exercise her slanderous tongue? Thus the puritanical old lady had come to fetch Marguerite, so that whenever occasion required she might be able to ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... 1599, the Hall of the Stationers underwent as great a purgation as was carried on in Don Quixote's library. Warton gives a list of the best writers who were ordered for immediate conflagration by the prelates Whitgift and Bancroft, urged by the Puritanical and Calvinistic factions. Like thieves and outlaws, they were ordered to be taken wheresoever they may be found.—"It was also decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed for the future. No plays were to be printed without ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... carelessness at the least, which can class the Vita Nuova with the Ars Amandi and the Decameron! And among many English Catholics the spirit of poetry is still often received with a restricted Puritanical greeting, rather than with the traditionally Catholic ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... those men who have, in the breaking down of the old Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism, advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and exactions of the native temperament. On the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... freedom. I, therefore, with my usual impetuosity, sold my commission, and travelled into the interior parts of the country, to lay out my money to advantage. Added to this, I did not much like the puritanical manners of the large towns. Inequality of condition was there most disgustingly galling. The only pleasure wealth afforded, was to make an ostentatious display of it; for the cultivation of the fine arts, or literature, had not introduced into the first circles that polish of manners ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... and Lilamani, her clear call could never seem either a puritanical snare of the flesh or a delusion of the senses; but rather, a grace of the spirit, the joy of things seen detached from self-interest: the visible proof that love, not power, is the last word of Creation. Happily for him, its outward form and inward essence had been his daily bread ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... Roger Williams's election, the claim was unjustly rejected. The Salemers then, by the advice of their pastor, wrote to all the other churches in the Bay, and requested them to unite in a remonstrance to the government. This act was in perfect accordance with the spirit of the puritanical principles, which distinctly separated the church from the state; and it ought not, therefore, to have given offence to any one. But their practice differed greatly from their theory; and the feeling against Williams was ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... against May-poles, wakes, fairs, church music, fiddles, dancing, puppet shows, Whitsun ales—in short, everything wearing the attire of popular amusement and diversion. The rhyme recording Jack Horner's gloomy conduct was, in fact, a satire on Puritanical ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... secret of his life was that he had taken pains with his own character. While he was still quite young we find him bewailing the "worldly element which enters so largely into his composition," and which threatens to make a gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, associations of his youth. "But," he says in writing to his sister, "as Thomas a Kempis recommended, frequentur tibi violentiam fac ... so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war against ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... influence of Sankara may have had a puritanical side which partly accounts for the degeneration of later Indian art. His higher teaching inculcated a spiritual creed which needed no shrines, while for those who required rites he recommended the old Brahmanic ritual rather than the modern temple cultus. The result ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... to be given that evening. Mildred coaxed her father to accompany her to hear the violinist. Mr. Wallace was not fond of music; "it had been knocked out of him on the farm up in Vermont, when he was a boy," he would apologetically explain, and besides he had the old puritanical abhorrence of stage people—putting them all in one class—as puppets who danced for played or talked for an idle ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa

... you'd better warn Lady Tallant that the Leichardt'stonian ladies are a bit Puritanical in their ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... there are very many persons here in this house this morning who are ready to exclaim: 'This is intolerable bigotry and puritanical narrowness! This is not the attitude Christ would take on this question. He was too large-minded. He was too far advanced in thought to make the day to ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon

... in some respects. Hildebrand, you don't want Pitt to be formed upon the model of things in this country. You would not have him get radical ideas, or Puritanical.' ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... speaking to them, or, if obliged, did so with awkward formality. Indeed, he was not fond of the society of women, and grew less so every year. His tone with regard to them was marked with an almost puritanical coldness; he visited any feminine breach of the proprieties with angry censure. Yet, before his marriage, he had lived, if anything, more laxly than the average man, and to his wife he had confessed (strange ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... perfect faith in him. Even a scoundrel will hesitate a long while before he makes himself responsible for the future of a girl in your position, and Mr. North is not a scoundrel but an honourable gentleman. Moreover he knows that a scandal would ruin him in his Puritanical State; and he adores his sons, who are prouder of him than if he were ten Presidents. But the world can talk and continue to talk, and to act as viciously about an imprudent friendship as about a liaison, for it has no means of proving anything ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... had changed its face. The scarf and cassock could hardly appear there without calling forth sneers and malicious whispers. Maids of honour forbore to giggle, and Lords of the Bedchamber bowed low, when the Puritanical visage and the Puritanical garb, so long the favourite subjects of mockery in fashionable circles, were seen in the galleries. Taunton, which had been during two generations the stronghold of the Roundhead party in the West, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... another period of power. Partly because of the lack of dash and compelling force in Hayes, but more because of the low standards of political action which were common at the time, his scruples seemed puritanical and were held up to ridicule as the milk-and-water and "old-Woman" policies of "Granny Hayes." His public, as well as-his private life, was unimpeached in a time when lofty principles were not common and ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... descent through the mother was not the primitive custom. Throughout my aim has been to bring into uniformity the opposing theories of the primeval patriarchate and the maternal family. The current view, so often asserted, and manifestly inspired by a Puritanical ideal, insists that mother-descent arose through uncertain fatherhood, and was connected with an early period of promiscuous relationships between the two sexes. This view has been proved to be entirely wrong. The system of maternal descent was a system framed for order, and had in its origin, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... a stronger proof that the puritanical interest prevailed in the house, than the intemperate use of authorities derived from Scripture, especially from the Old Testament; and the queen was so little a lover of that sect, that she was not likely to make any concession merely in deference to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... are models of decorum, and know how to defer to opinion. The nobles, too, are men of a very different stamp from their predecessors of 1762 and 1801. The Russian polity is no longer a despotism tempered by the cord. Fighting the good fight with something of a Puritanical perseverance, the Czar was enabled to triumph over all opposition to his preliminary project; and on the 3d of March, (N.S.,) 1861, the "Imperial Manifesto" emancipating the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... litheness of movement, which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy complexion, at first suggested a foreigner. But his dialect, to the colonel's ears, was distinctly that of New England, and to this was added a puritanical and sanctimonious drawl. "He looked," said the colonel in after years, "like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a blank Yankee parson." For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who may have felt that his ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... since father's death, says of him: "From a boy Pardee was remarkable for his uprightness, and bold and strict honesty, and it was a maxim among the boys to say, 'As honest as Pard, Butler.' He and his father before him were specimens of puritanical honesty and courage, and had they lived in the days of Cromwell and in England, would doubtless have ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... his spear; while David, on the other hand, becomes more calm, collected, and observant as the critical moment approaches, thus denoting his firm and unwavering trust in the God of Israel. David makes but few gestures, but always assumes a reverential attitude when he mentions the name of God—not puritanical by any means, but expressive of ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... years of age—a period of life when men often become very vicious, even when they have been passably virtuous up to that time. He affected an austere and puritanical air; was the great man of the cafe he frequented; and there passed judgment on his contemporaries and pronounced them all inferior. He was difficult to please—in point of virtue demanding heroism; in talent, ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... brother, there were three sisters, one of whom died. His father was a wealthy man, and had built himself a small country house, and planted the few acres of ground round it very skillfully. Major Hamilton was a very religious man, of the self-sufficient, puritanical, and evangelical type, that issues from discipline; a martinet in his regiment, a domestic tyrant, without intending to be. He did not marry till rather late in life; and at the time when Arthur was growing up—the ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... was, I should say, below the average in capacity for friendship. He liked young girls, and was never interested in boys. He was a man of strongly Puritanical morality, capable of condemning with gloomy bitterness. He was also a man capable of great sacrifice for principle, and mentally very well endowed. My mother was a clever, practical woman, with wide sympathies. She was capable ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... "You puritanical old humbug, I'll do you yet. You've heard about Nell and her cursed brat. But the daughter ain't always the same way of thinking with ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... He had the look of a self-righteous ascetic, and dressed with puritanical austerity. No smile ever irradiated his gaunt face and remorseless eyes. His forehead was unusually high and white; his manners high, too; and if his morals were not white, his cravat, that was like a parson's, more than ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... Massachusetts. The first Republican governor, J. M. Alcorn, was a Southern man, very able, but apparently not of the highest moral standards. His successor, Adelbert Ames, was from Massachusetts, conceded now to have been "honest and brave, but narrow and puritanical," and with the mysterious trait of "hating the Aryan race ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... warnings of "vandoos" and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post, pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... the truth, I have not called since we came to Texford," answered Algernon. "You know that they have peculiar notions. Our father, looking upon them as puritanical dissenters, has no wish to have them at the house. I have not seen the old ladies for some years. I remember that they did not make a very favourable impression on me when ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston

... within sight—that in fact you are exploring an inclosed basin." So the ungauged reservoir turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea was prevented by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical "reversion," from foreseeing that. She might have been saved from her gloomy marital voyage "if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... changeless leaden hue of an impassive face, and the thin red line of the lips that seemed made to suck the blood of corpses; and you could guess at once at the black gaiters buttoned up to the knee, and the half-puritanical costume of a wealthy Englishman dressed for a walking excursion. The intolerable glitter of the stranger's eyes produced a vivid and unpleasant impression, which was only deepened by the rigid outlines of his features. The dried-up, emaciated creature seemed to carry within him some gnawing thought ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... mirth and buffoonery, stood this stern old figure, the best sustained character in the masquerade, because so well representing the antique spirit of his native land. The other guests affirmed that Colonel Joliffe's black puritanical scowl threw a shadow round about him; although in spite of his sombre influence their gayety continued to blaze higher, like—(an ominous comparison)—the flickering brilliancy of a lamp which has but a little while to burn. Eleven strokes, full half an hour ago, had pealed from the clock of ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... up to—always scenting poverty, murder, and suicide, in every glass of whiskey, though it were a mile off. The truth is, you are not fit to live in this world at all. Acting in conformity with your more than puritanical rules, would starve any man and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... Englishman, what is the matter with you? You appear to be upset about something. Perhaps my little story jars upon your puritanical English notions? Or perhaps it is—yes, of course you are upset about the news that you have just heard of your friends, for, now that I come to look at you, I see that you are the Englishman whom I met at Don Hermoso's house, and whom I warned to leave this island. How is it that you ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... imparting of information concerning the preventing of conception are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in this country and an untold amount of sickness and sorrow. The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded person who insist upon retaining ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... suppose that the average state of morals is much worse in one county than in another; but it is very remarkable that while education has been more widely diffused than heretofore, and there is a strong Puritanical spirit at work and vast talk about religious observances, there should be such a brutish manifestation of the moral condition of the lower classes, and that they should be apparently so little humanised and reclaimed ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... persons of our time of life—not that you belong to the class, you are still a young man,—but as I was saying, persons of our time of life have been very unfortunate this year. For example, look at the puritanical procureur, who has just lost his daughter, and in fact nearly all his family, in so singular a manner; Morcerf dishonored and dead; and then myself covered with ridicule through the villany ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... have seen them once or twice, but it is a long time back, and we should hardly speak if we met. They are poor silly fellows, brought up by a fool of a mother, and by a puritanical private tutor.' ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... letters of recommendation, and had shown himself acquainted with the learned doctor's notes to Apollonius Rhodius; on which several grounds the doctor, who was himself a better scholar than a priest, had made him his curate, and had heard no complaints, except from a few puritanical souls. These he looked on as barbarians, and had calmly ignored them and their prejudices ever since he transferred his library from St. John's College, Cambridge, to St. Peter's Rectory, and that ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... officially, under the heading of lessons, most earnest lessons if the professor has profound convictions of its significance. But dancing belongs afterwards to the playtime of life. We have outlived the grim puritanical prejudice which condemned it as wrong, and it is generally agreed that there is almost a natural need for dancing as the expression of something very deep in human nature, which seems to be demonstrated by its appearance in one form or another, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart



Words linked to "Puritanical" :   nonindulgent, victorian, puritanic, blue, strict, priggish, tight-laced, puritan, square-toed



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