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More "Affectation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your brother, in these troublesome times, as I said, it were less trouble to put him out of the way in a broil. Colour it with the affectation of party spirit, and, as you are on both sides, in a manner, it matters not on which you disagree. You might draw swords yourselves, and have me and one or two stout fellows near, who would rush in and stab him, as it were, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... him with an affectation of patronage, as if she had lately become uneasily conscious of being in a country where there were distinctions of class. She was young, pretty, and tastefully dressed; the national feminine adaptability had not, however, extended to her voice and accent. Both were strongly Southwestern, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the meaning of this scene. These men had done their best to pervert his morals, and to deaden the voice of his conscience, and now that he had hoped to earn their praise by an affectation of cynicism they were displeased with him. Before, however, he could ask a question, Tantaine ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... was the eager candour that one could not help admiring, with the glowing look of gratitude which I had done so ridiculously little to earn; but the fine flushed face betrayed neither pain, nor shame, nor the affectation of one or the other. There was a certain shyness with the candour. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... betyar fashion, flowing curly locks gathered up into a top-knot, black flashing eyes, and a bold expressive mouth, slight of build, but muscular and supple. His dress was rustic, but simple almost to affectation; you would not have found a seal on his white bulging shirt, search as you might, and he wore his cap, with a tuft of meadow-sweet in it, as gallantly as ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... is the soul of all true art. This, it should go without saying, applies to music, literature, and to whatever can be done at all. If it has been done "to the Lord"—that is to say, with sincerity and freedom from affectation—whether with conscious effusion, as by Gaudenzio, or with perhaps robuster unconsciousness, as by Tabachetti, a halo will gather round it that will illumine it though it pass through the valley of the shadow of death itself. If it has been done in self- ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... among the lasses. I will go farther and say the most profitable hours. And some sweet and profitable hours 'twas mine to spend among the fawn-orbed lasses of Puerto, with their childlike gaiety, their desire to please, and their fetching freedom from affectation. Would that the wines exported from the district were half as unsophisticated! These lasses were not learned in the "ologies" or the "isms," but they were sincere; and their locks flowed long and free, and when they laughed the coral ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... change the subject. Poultry with their feathers on don't interest me very much. The male birds remind me of a detestable class of conceited men, that one must see daily in the city, whose gallantry is all affectation, and who never for a moment lose sight of themselves or their own importance. That strutting gobbler there, Mr. Morton, reminds me of certain eminent statesmen whom your paper delights to honor, and I imagine that that ridiculous creature embodies ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... room and sat down by the window musing. "What a strange girl—why this wild issue, this uninvited explanation? Is it a desire to be original, or simply affectation—or pride? Pride, no doubt. She can't endure the idea... the faintest suspicion, that anyone should have a wrong opinion of her. ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... motive that induced Sallust to adopt them. What rose naturally under the pen of the great historian, the minor one must have run after with ridiculous anxiety. Seneca adds several instances of the servile affectation of Arruntius, which seem much like those we once had of Johnson, by the undiscerning herd ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... convinced that there is another Montaigne who has nothing in common with the Montaigne of convention and tradition. I am convinced that the scepticism, the Conservatism, the irony, the moderation, the affectation of humility, frivolity, pedantry, and innocent candour, are only a mask and disguise which Montaigne has put on to conceal his identity, that they are only so many tricks and dodges to lead the temporal and spiritual powers off the track, and to reassure them as ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... which Luther had made the classic tongue of the land, seemed to be on the point of perishing. Spaniards and Italians on the Catholic, Swedes and French on the Protestant side, flooded the country with foreign words and expressions, the use of which soon became an affectation with the nobility, who did their best to destroy ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the size in most common use for manuscripts is what is known as letter. The sheets in any case should be of uniform size. Avoid all eccentricity and affectation in the preparation of your manuscript, or "copy," as printers call it. The more matter-of-fact and businesslike it ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... boldness in it. It was the look of one in whose past there were no secrets—the look of a child who is satisfied with the present and takes no thought for the future. Few women look so after they have entered their teens. Social artifice, affectation, and the insatiate vanity that modern life encourages in the feminine nature—all these things soon do away with the pellucid clearness and steadfastness of the eye—the beautiful, true, untamed expression, which, though so rare, is, when seen infinitely more bewitching than all ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... highly readable and charitable life of her father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... so indefatigably labour'd to supplant: And all this without ever having entertain'd the least previous Design or Thought for that Purpose: No Art used to inflame him, no Coquetry practised to tempt or intice him, and no Prudery or Affectation to tamper with his Passions; but, on the contrary, artless and unpractised in the Wiles of the World, all her Endeavours, and even all her Wishes, tended only to render herself as un-amiable as she could in his Eyes: Tho' at the same time she is so far ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... offered the assistance of his attendants to carry over Edward; but our hero, who had been always a tolerable pedestrian, declined the accommodation, and obviously rose in his guide's opinion by showing that he did not fear wetting his feet. Indeed he was anxious, so far as he could without affectation, to remove the opinion which Evan seemed to entertain of the effeminacy of the Lowlanders, and particularly of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... requested an answer, giving him leave to sit if he had a mind—and of free will he leaves my premises void and redd at Whitsunday. I suspect the house is not in good order, but we shall get it brushed up a little. Without affectation I consider myself the obliged party in this matter—or at any rate it is a mutual benefit, and you shall have grass for a cow, and so forth—whatever you want. I am sure when you are so near I shall find ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... from Mills' pipe drove between my head and the head of Mr. Blunt, who, strange to say, yawned slightly. It seemed to me an obvious affectation on the part of that man of perfect manners, and, moreover, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... girl whom you would like immensely, I can tell you that. A beauty without affectation, a high and tender nature—if one can read the soul in the face. And the old colonel is a noble ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to remove even the least spot, lest, if all examples had their truthfulness disputed, and if the purity of all human virtue were denied, it might in the end be regarded as a mere phantom, and so all effort to attain it be made light of as vain affectation and delusive conceit. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... recognized the handwriting in a moment. He had no time to ridicule or even to think of Mabyn's school-girl affectation of secresy: he had at once rushed off to the place of appointment, and that by a short cut of which she had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... earth is there to oblige him to wear a shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the only conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and then not wear it in the uniform way—this is to be neither a Bohemian nor a gentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English officer of the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it. But it would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a scarlet coat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to have Ritual Commissions and ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... distinguished by "a stained and unnatural style." This "School," which was satirized by Aytoun while editor of Blackwood's Magazine, was thought to include Tennyson, Gilfillan and other popular authors of the time. I incline to the view that no writer of whom we have any knowledge exhibits less affectation in the matter of style than does the subject of this essay. It is rugged and massive; but so is his mind. It were impossible to imagine the author of "Sartor Resartus" and "The French Revolution" expressing himself in the carefully ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to the Institute, and his affectation in putting at the head of his proclamation his title of member of that learned body before that of General-in-Chief, I omitted to state what value he really attached to that title. The truth is that; when young and ambitious, he was pleased with the proffered title, which he thought would raise him ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... an affectation, sir," said Chiffield, aloud, "to pretend that I do not understand to whom ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... mouth. The new school emits the scrut into the fingers of its left hand and therewith deposits it on the rim of the plate. Albert noticed that Emily was of the new school. But might she not despise as affectation in him what came natural to herself? On the other hand, if he showed himself as a prop of the old school, might she not set her face the more stringently against him? The chances were that whichever course he took ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... my judgment, that nothing but servile attachment to a party, affectation of singularity, lamentable dulness, mistaken zeal, or studied hypocrisy, can have the least reasonable objection against this excellent moral performance of the ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... make her at once the most unhappy and the most absurd of women. She never knows what she wants, what she fears, whom she loves, or whom she hates. There is no nature in her expression: with her chin in the air she poses eternally as tender or disdainful, absent or haughty; all is affectation. . . . She is feared and hated by all who live in her society. Yet she has truth, courage, and honesty, and is such a mixture of good and evil that no steadfast opinion about her can be entertained. She pleases, she provokes: we love, hate, seek, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... at first, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare; and then a departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it. "What affectation of diffidence was this at first?" they might have demanded; ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... seriousness of anything on earth. He despised their whole-hearted passion for sports at an age when he was beginning to be interested in less wholesome and far more complex absorptions.... He despised their straight, clean affections and quarrels and their tortuous sense of humour; the affectation that led them to take cold baths instead of hot ones: their shy, rather knightly mental attitude towards their ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... concerned, is, that their linen-drapers, and lacemen, and rich perfumers, are represented assuming a character that does not belong to them, and aping people whom they falsely suppose to be their betters; whereas the genuine Paul paints the Parisian tradesmen without any affectation at all. Ours are made laughable by the common farcical attributes of all pretensions, great or small; while real unsophisticated shopkeeping (French) nature is the staple of Paul's character-sketches, and they are more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... forget the angel who wrestled with Jacob, and, as the account suggests, somewhat over-stepped the bound of fair play, at the end of the struggle? Surely, we must agree with Dr. Newman that, if all these camels have gone down, it savours of affectation to strain at such gnats as the sudden ailment of Arius in the midst of his deadly, if prayerful,[63] enemies; and the fiery explosion which stopped the Julian building operations. Though the words of the "Conclusion" of the "Essay on Miracles" may, perhaps, be quoted against me, I may ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to talk with entire sincerity,—I said,—always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the reflection of his sullen gravity that had eclipsed their own vivacity. The instant, therefore, that he led the way, the hall began to resound with jest and laughter. The poet, with some humiliation, which he endeavored to conceal beneath an affectation of wounded dignity, commenced rolling up his manuscript, not before a splash of wine from a carelessly filled flagon had soiled the fair-written characters. More flasks were placed upon the table by ready and obedient hands—and from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cried the mother, starting to her feet, white with rage, all her langour and affectation forgotten in the burst of malicious surprise, that trembled on her thin lips, and gave to her pale, watery eyes the expression, without the brilliancy, that we find in those of a trodden serpent. "What have you done, ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... was very kind. He noticed at once that her manner was as natural almost as a frank, manly schoolboy's, carelessly, strikingly natural. There could never, he thought, have been a grain of affectation in her. The idea even came into his head that she was as natural as a tramp. Nevertheless the stamp of the great lady was imprinted all over her. She had a voice that was low, very sensitive ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... observed the affectation which, for many years past, has prevailed in Paris even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put any one out of humour with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of insidious ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... twice as dear by high ones; for by this means, we cou'd get Drunk with the Loss of less Time, and Health, and Money. If even such a Tax was laid on it, as would make its Consumption less general, and hinder the poorer part of our People, from being ruin'd by the dreadful Affectation, of drinking like the Men of Figure and Fashion, it wou'd be an excellent Method; and above all if the additional Taxes, were appropriated to extend the Linen Manufacture thro' the Southern Provinces. This wou'd soon enrich us, and impoverish at the same Time, the great Enemy to the repose of ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... talents, conversation the least exigeante of any author, female at least, whom I have ever seen, among the long list I have encountered. Simple and full of humor, and exceedingly ready at repartee; and all this without the least affectation of the blue-stocking. The general strain of her writing relates to the foibles and oddities of mankind, and no one has drawn them with greater breadth of comic humor or effect. Her scenes often resemble the style of our best old comedies, and ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... by a conscious aim to entertain. His engaging humor, free of all affectation, sentimentality, and exaggeration, is spontaneous and natural. His most original writing is The Child's Garden of Verses. His touch is light and his thought is clear and lucid. Across the Plains is written in his ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... early spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh before they are jaded with the crowded beauties of May. A really modest flower would wait for the other flowers to come first. A subtle affectation is surely a different thing from modesty. The violet is simply artful, the young widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower as an example is not doing one's duty by the young. For true modesty commend me to the agave, which flowers ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... heavens! how difficult it seems, and how ugly it is! As if this could give them any pleasure! For some of them it seems as if it were day-labour, and as if it were a frenzy to others; and for a third, a kind of affectation; nay, I must go my ways, for I shall become mad or splenetic if I look any longer on ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... imitation of antiquity was carried to absurd lengths. Ghiberti, who was a literary man, says that Andrea Pisano lived in the 410th Olympiad.[122] But Ghiberti remained a Renaissance sculptor, and his classical affectation is less noticeable in his statues than in his prose. Filippo Strozzi went so far as to emancipate his favourite slave, a "grande nero," in his will.[123] But Gothic art died hard. The earlier creeds of art lingered on in the byways, and the Renaissance was flourishing ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... powers were called into requisition. She was ever ready to contribute her mite (so she termed it) toward the general entertainment, and she would have despised the petty affectation of pretended reluctance to draw forth entreaty, or give value to her performance. Her voice had never sounded more touchingly, mournfully pathetic, and her listeners hung entranced upon the sounds. Maurice drank in every ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... therefore, instead of "serenely" marking time for a "tranquil" tympanist, appears to be crying, "Galene! you bad thing! you are having, or trying to have, an affair with my Comus!"—an accusation which this writer verily believes to have been just. The lady's attitude in affectation of surprised denial is not ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... or it retrogrades: having reached its meridian point, when the hour of perfection has gone by, it must verge to its decline. In all Art, perfection lapses into that weakened state too often dignified as classical imitation; but it sinks into mannerism, and wantons into affectation, till it shoots out into fantastic novelties. When all languishes in a state of mediocrity, or is deformed by false tastes, then is reserved for a fortunate genius the glory of restoring another golden age of invention. The history of the Caracci family serves as ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... can do. Snow produces a glow and a tingle, if applied rightly. Your indifference is half affectation, and a good stirring up ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterward, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so "easy;" Josie would roundly rate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... was a clean, honest fellow. In his peculiar American way, he was very religious, and I knew that his piety was not a mere affectation. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... was thoroughly at home in this primitive environment. His freedom from affectation and false dignity recommended him to the laity, while his fairness and good-nature put him in quick sympathy with his legal brethren and their clients. Long years afterward, men recalled the picture of the young judge as he mingled with the crowd during ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... viii. c. 15. The life of Maurice was composed about the year 628 (l. viii. c. 13) by Theophylact Simocatta, ex-praefect, a native of Egypt. Photius, who gives an ample extract of the work, (cod. lxv. p. 81—100,) gently reproves the affectation and allegory of the style. His preface is a dialogue between Philosophy and History; they seat themselves under a plane-tree, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... last of the important modern languages to develop, perhaps because in Italy Latin remained longest intelligible to the mass of the people. But Dante believed that the exclusive use of Latin for literary purposes had already in his time become an affectation. He was confident that there were many people, both men and women, who knew only Italian, who would gladly read not only his verses but his treatise on science,—The Banquet,[220] ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... waistcoat—and more especially that cock of the hat—indicate, as surely as inanimate objects can, that Chalk Farm and not the parish church, is their destination. The girl colours up, and puts out her hand with a very awkward affectation of indifference. He gives it a gallant squeeze, and away they walk, arm in arm, the girl just looking back towards her 'place' with an air of conscious self-importance, and nodding to her fellow-servant ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... done?' asked Nancy, stopping some turbulent exclamation on the part of Mr. Sikes, expressive of the disgust with which he received Fagin's affectation of humanity. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... belle and the beauty, held a middle position between Mrs. Hilson and Elinor. Frivolous as they were, there was more latent good about them, than could be found in the 'city lady,' who was one frothy compound of ignorant vanity, and vulgar affectation. The class she represented was fortunately as small in its extreme folly, as that to which Elinor ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... says the Roman Oratorian who wrote his Life, "had a particular dislike of affectation both in himself and others, in speaking, in dressing, or ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... thrown off a great deal that was artificial in behaviour and in habits of speech, that he had reverted to that self which came to him from his parents, and he felt better for the change. The air of simplicity in the room and its occupants was healthful; of natural refinement there was abundance, only affectation was missing. Would it have been a hardship if his father had failed to amass money, and he had grown up in such a home as this? He knew well enough that by going, say, next door he could pass into a domestic sphere of a very different kind, to the midst of a life compact of mean slavery, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... perhaps; they lash'd, at least, And turn'd them out of office with a jest. No fool could peep abroad, but ready stand The drolls to clap a bauble in his hand. Wise legislators never yet could draw A fop within the reach of common law; For posture, dress, grimace, and affectation, 10 Though foes to sense, are harmless to the nation. Our last redress is dint of verse to try, And Satire is our Court of Chancery. This way took Horace to reform an age, Not bad enough to need an author's ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... properly point out the limits within which no such bearings obtain. Now, from what has just been said, it will be apparent that I am not going to minimise the change which has been wrought. On the contrary, I believe it is only stupidity or affectation which can deny that the change in question is more deep and broad than any single previous change in the whole history of human thought. It is a fundamental, a cosmical, a world-transforming change. Nevertheless, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... he have been happy? Surely no man was ever blessed with a better wife! He had made a reach into the matrimonial grab-bag and drawn forth a jewel. This jewel was many-faceted. Without affectation or silly pride, the clergyman's wife did the work that God sent her to do. The sense of duty was strong upon her. Babies came, once each two years, and in one case two in one year, and there was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... affectation which arises through a misunderstanding of the limit of individuality, the way which many children and young persons have of supposing when they see models finished and complete in grown persons, that they ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... which, he affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at Boulogne. I do not suppose this officer to be above thirty years of age, of which he has passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses or in watch-houses; but no tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or a more abject courtier. His affectation to extol everything that Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is at last become so habitual that it is naturalized, and you may mistake for sincerity that which is nothing but imposture or flattery. This son of a Swiss porter is now one of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... would arrange a meeting between her and Chang. If An Ching were willing to help, it would be quite possible to get the children over the wall by means of ropes. Chi Fu, who certainly had a good head on his shoulders and could use it to some purpose when he forgot his affectation, suggested also that in case of an extra courier being sent from the mission, or the arrival of a missionary, Nelly had better write a letter to her parents, ...
— The Little Girl Lost - A Tale for Little Girls • Eleanor Raper
... moon-beams as they fall; whilst the quiet dash of little waves against the ship's side, and the rushing noise occasioned by the moving of her bow through the water, produce altogether an effect which may, without affectation, be termed absolutely refreshing. It was my common practice to sit for hours after night-fall upon the tafferel, and strain my eyes in the attempt to distinguish objects on shore or strange ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... fates entirely have the choice Of all the lots—fair form is yours; The eagle's strength his prey secures; The nightingale can sing an ode; The crow and raven may forebode: All these in sheer contentment crave No other voice than Nature gave." By affectation be not sway'd, Where Nature has not lent her aid; Nor to that flatt'ring hope attend, Which must ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Presently, a nuptial procession was formed, and took its way towards the church. All eyes rested on the bride and bridegroom; they did not wear the Corsican dress, but adopted French fashions. Everything about them betokened wealth, and an affectation of continental manners. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... class, would here have told against him. He knew when to abstain, and carried the art of deception far enough to be able to lay aside the appearance of hypocrisy. He had described all the circumstances without affectation, and if this unexpected accusation was wholly unproved, it yet rested on a possible fact, and did not appear absolutely incredible. The magistrate went through it all again, and made him repeat every detail, without being able to make him contradict ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... house the most worthy men and the most beautiful ladies of Babylon. He gave them delicious suppers, often preceded by concerts of music, and always animated by polite conversation, from which he knew how to banish that affectation of wit which is the surest method of preventing it entirely, and of spoiling the pleasure of the most agreeable society. Neither the choice of his friends, nor that of the dishes was made by vanity; for ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the household; her very faults to their partial eyes added to her charm; for, according to Lydia, "they were uncommon innocent and funny, Miss Dorry's ways were." In fact, the young lady, who had a strong will of her own, would have been spoiled to a certainty but for her scorn of affectation, her love of truth, and genuine faithfulness to whatever she believed ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... hour I am puzzled whether to attribute this strange conduct to the careless levity of national character, or to a studied and well "got up" affectation. In all probability both influences were at work; while a third, not less powerful, assisted them—this was the gross ignorance and shameless falsehood of many of the Irish leaders of the expedition, whose boastful and absurd histories ended by disgusting every one. To listen to them, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... towards Medallion was not marked by any affectation. She was friendly in a kind, impersonal way, much as a nurse cares for a patient, and she never relaxed a sort of old-fashioned courtesy, which might have been trying in such close quarters, were it not for the real simplicity of the life and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... defect which Lord Beaconsfield recognised when he spoke in later life of his own earliest efforts. "Books written by boys," he says, "which pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of human nature must necessarily be founded on affectation." To this rule the personages of Love in Several Masques are no exception. They are drawn rather from the stage than from life, and there is little constructive skill in the plot. A certain booby squire, Sir Positive ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... so hungry since I was in Holloway Jail," said Lady Agatha. And she ate with a candid gusto that pleased Cleggett, who loathed in a woman a finical affectation of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... look; but the General met it suavely with a flourish of his wide-brimmed hat and a blandishing smile. He was one of those gentlemen of the old school, I came to know later, to whom it was an inherent impossibility to appear without affectation in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. A high liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy, charming, and without vanity, when in the midst of men; but let so much as the rustle ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... directly at me, and his stare is by far the most intense I ever beheld. This time, however, curiosity made me a match, for I vanquished him. It is when he regards you, that you mark the singular expression of his eyes—no frown—no ill-humour—no affectation of appearing terrible; but the genuine expression of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... her appearance in triumph on the greensward where dancing was in progress, and opened three successive dances with her three lovers. Germain watched her, and concluded that she danced well, but with affectation. ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... evil in men, especially such as have least judgment, that everyone repents him of his own condition and admires that of others. Whence it comes to pass that all her gifts, elegancy, and graces corrupt and perish. For what benefit is beauty, the greatest blessing of heaven, if it be mixed with affectation? What youth, if corrupted with the severity of old age? Lastly, what is that in the whole business of a man's life he can do with any grace to himself or others—for it is not so much a thing of art, as the very life of every action, that it be done with a good mien—unless this my friend ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... and the materials don't agree," suggested the fifth, "how will you get on then, if they won't co-operate? As for our national character, to be following out that in architecture will be sheer affectation, and the requirements of modern civilization will drive you perfectly mad. I see you will none of you ever be anything, though of course you won't believe me. But do as you please, I shall not be like ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... this sort of euphuism established; and it was not for a very young woman to oppose it. But her masculine understanding and powerful good sense, shaken free, besides, from all local follies by travels and extensive commerce with the world, first threw off these glittering chains of affectation. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Self-Affectation sways his little Sense; Nought but Himself he Loves, and Ignorance. By fatal Chance, if such a Man you Wed, Better, Melissa, thou had'st Dy'd a Maid: Ev'n such a Lover, were a Plague too great; From such a Husband, ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... familiar that they could not dread it,—where, in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts. But in Zenobia's case there was some tint of the Arcadian affectation that had been visible enough in all our lives ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her own advantage. She made use of as many occasions as she could find for humiliating herself without any affectation. What she said, she said so well that it could not be better said. She listened much, never interrupted, and never showed any eagerness to speak. She spoke sensibly, modestly, charitably, and without ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... passed it with a self-satisfied smile. "That proud little minx must be deucedly cross-grained and unappreciative," said he, "if she does not perceive how much more worthy I am of her admiration than that shabby de Sigognac. Oh, yes! she'll be sure to come round, in spite of her obstinate affectation of such ferocious virtue, and her tiresome, Platonic love for her impecunious suitor. Yes, my little beauty, your portrait shall figure in one of those oval frames ere long. I think I'll have you painted as chaste ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... we do hate all impostures, and lies; insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing, adorned or swelling; but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness. ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... 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
... strictly honest, and could not bear the absence of this quality in others; so that his patience was pretty well tried by his Irish allies. "At the same time, he expressed his contempt for religion in a way which the bishop saw reason for ascribing to vanity—"the miserable affectation of appearing worse than he really was." One officer there was, named Truc, whose brutality recalled the impression, so disadvantageous to French republicanism, which else had been partially effaced by the manners and conduct of his comrades. To him the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... else; reminiscences of the Republic and the Laws are continually recurring in them; they are too like him and also too unlike him, to be genuine (see especially Karsten, Commentio Critica de Platonis quae feruntur Epistolis). They are full of egotism, self-assertion, affectation, faults which of all writers Plato was most careful to avoid, and into which he was least likely to fall. They abound in obscurities, irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms, inconsistencies, awkwardnesses of construction, ...
— Charmides • Plato
... seem either trifling, or obscured by the pedantic affectation of the writers, they, like the signatures of well-respected men, endorse the impression produced by Duerer's works and writings. As we study the character of Duerer's creative gift in relation to his works, several of the phrases used by Erasmus, Camerarius, and ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... an original judgment on each emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... may be simple and sincere without either affectation or vulgarity. It is well to be a little neutral, perhaps, a little grey for the most part, so that upon occasion the more delicate hues may stand out clearly, while a rhythm may be employed to advantage which is in harmony with actual ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... which the Christian artist entered was under the direction of Friedrich Fuger, a painter of the French type, not without renown, but given over to the service of Jupiter, Prometheus, and Venus, and when he chanced to turn to sacred subjects, such as The Death of Abel and The Reading Magdalen, affectation and empty pretence were his resource. I have seldom seen works more contemptible. Overbeck was in despair, and wrote to a friend that he had fallen among a vulgar set, that every better feeling, every noble ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... we pine in this sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... known to too many, to make, on this subject, a solemn assertion falsely. I did not lay the same restriction on wine; yet, even that I always avoided, when I could do so without the appearance of affectation. My reason, such as it was, never in the slightest degree tottered on her throne, either with a weakness or a strength not her own. The wine-cup never gladdened or sorrowed me. Even when the tepid, fetid, and animalised water was served out to us in quantities so minute, that our throats could count ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... aware that the eyes of many people were upon them, and she was thankful that she had married a man whose self-possession, at any rate, she could rely on. Majendie's manner was perfect. He avoided both the bridegroom's offensive assiduity and his no less offensive affectation of indifference. It had occurred to him that, in the circumstances, Anne might find it peculiarly ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... encourage polite learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language, to establish purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced; and all those innovations in speech, if I may call them such, which some dogmatic writers have the confidence to foster upon their native language, as if their authority were sufficient to ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... Lee and Gates and even Hamilton himself experienced. The signature, "Common Sense," Paine preserved through life. It became what our authorlings, who ought to know better, will persist in calling a nom [1] de plume—a Yankee affectation, unknown to French idioms. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... retrograding, pointing to the snowy plains completely black with the enemy's troops, when a Russian, detaching himself from their army, descended the hill; he presented himself alone to their marshal, and either from an affectation of extreme politeness, respect for the misfortune of their leader, or dread of the effects of his despair, covered with honied words ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... without affectation. "I don't expect I can, Albert," he said. "I'd like to if I could, but the way it looks now, you tell her I wouldn't be much surprised maybe I was startin' in with typhoid fever or pretty near anything at all. You tell her I'm pretty ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... have already made your exit from the moral world, and by numberless acts both of passionate and deliberate injustice engraved an "here lieth" on your deceased honor, it must be mere affectation in you to pretend concern at the humors or opinions of mankind respecting you. What remains of you may expire at any time. The sooner the better. For he who survives his reputation, lives out of despite of himself, like a man listening to ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Whatever poses you employ to augment the things you say should be used as means for the better communication of truth, not to falsify in any degree. And you will need to be extremely careful lest you over-do a particular pose and suggest affectation. Doubtless you have characteristic poses. Analyze yourself. Determine what your habits of pose mean to other people. Then make such changes in your characteristic poses as will signify only ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... me. I saw myself in a fearful trap and nothing but consummate coolness could keep them from questioning me. My heart beat fast, but with an affectation of indifference I saluted and said: "Buenos noches, senores." They all returned my salutation, but looked at each other eagerly, each waiting for the ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... working-men of Tyneside. In his speech he exaggerated the burr of the Newcastle tongue. Most of us were anxious to get rid of that undesirable distinction. Mr. Cowen clung to it as one of the most precious of his possessions. He had to pay for this piece of affectation in later life, when he became a figure in the House of Commons. His first notable speech in that assembly was on the Royal Titles Bill of Mr. Disraeli. It was a very brilliant performance, greatly admired by those who were able to appreciate it. But, unfortunately, it was ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... by your account," said Fred. "But come, Henrietta, you must not spoil the whole affair by such nonsense and affectation." ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remarked, "that the tears which used to be shed over 'Oft in the sully night,' or 'Auld Robin Gray,' or 'A place in thy memory, dearest,' were honest tears, coming from the true sources of emotion. There was no affectation about them; those songs came home to the sensibilities of young people,—of all who had any sensibilities to be acted upon. And on the other hand, there is a great amount of affectation in the apparent enthusiasm of many persons in admiring and applauding music ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... circumstances under which the undertaking progressed. Income from the land as the result of agricultural operations was not absolutely necessary. This acknowledgment does not imply the possession of, or any disrespect for, "the cumbersome luggage of riches," nor any affectation; but rather an accommodating and frugal disposition—the capacity to turn to account the excellent moral that poor Mr Micawber lamented his inability to obey. Profit from the sale of produce and poultry would ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... brilliant compositions pretending to describe Gypsy life, but written by persons who are not of the Gypsy sect. Such compositions, however replete with fiery sentiments, and allusions to freedom and independence, are certain to be tainted with affectation. Now in the Gypsy rhymes there is no affectation, and on that very account they are different in every respect from the poetry of those interesting personages who figure, under the names of Gypsies, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... world should be amused Affectation of familiarity Air of determined enjoyment Always did what he said he would do Desire to do something rather than the desire to make something Don't know what it's all for—I doubt if there is much in it Easier to make art fashionable ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... justly celebrated during her lifetime as one of the most natural writers of Italian verse. Her poems consist principally of sonnets consecrated to the memory of her husband, or composed on sacred and moral subjects. Penetrated by genuine feeling, and almost wholly free from literary affectation, they have that dignity and sweetness which belong to the spontaneous utterances of a noble heart. Whether she treats of love or of religion, we find the same simplicity and sincerity of style. There is nothing in her pious meditations ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... besides for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief without any sort of present or future hope cannot be purely greatness of spirit; there must be a mixture in it of affectation and an alloy of pride, or perhaps is ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... doing nothing bad," said he, curling himself into a long chair with a studious affectation of the Colonel's langour after a hot parade. He buried his freckled nose in a tea-cup and, with eyes staring roundly over the rim, asked: "I say, Coppy, is it pwoper ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... to inform her of what was passing in Rhoda's mind. But she forestalled any words which might have come, by an affectation of ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... dark tunics and richly coloured stoles standing out in sombre notes against the more gaily-decked-out gilded youth of Rome, whilst their serious and oft-times stern manner, their measured and sober speech, seemed almost set in studied opposition to the idle chattering, the flippant tone, the bored affectation of the outwardly more ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... visible change took place in her manners. A scornful affectation and awkward dignity began to be assumed. A greater attention was paid to dress, which was of gayer hues and more fashionable texture. I rallied her on these tokens of a sweetheart, and amused myself with expatiating to her on the qualifications ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... talk to children, without affectation or condescension, as if they too were grown-ups. My parents were always entertaining people, and it was assumed without comment that I too was host no less than they. Twice a day I had to be in evidence: at tea ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... but the wisdom of our day will have it thus. I wish you success. If you fall short of your hopes, come to me and we will talk once more. Befall what may, I am to the end your father who wishes you well." The signature was very large, and might have drawn censure of affectation from the unsympathetic. As, indeed, might the whole epistle: very significant of the mind and temper of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... He walked with that uneasy affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... sting. There is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says, briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned his play ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... feeling heart, affectation or art Unknown to its deepest recesses; A brow fair and high, where her thoughts open lie ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... one's while to enter as a candidate. The qualifications are so easy, that he need never doubt the chance of his success, for he has only to knock, and it shall be opened unto him. The principal requisites for admission, in a literary point of view, are as follows. First, an inordinate share of affectation and conceit, with a few occasional good things sprinkled, like green spots of verdure in a wilderness, with a "parca quod satis est manu." Secondly, a prodigious quantity of assurance, that neither God nor man can daunt, founded on the honest principle of "who is ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... chair. All looked on with some surprise, and Prince S. and her sisters with feelings of decided alarm, to see what new frolic she was up to; it had gone quite far enough already, they thought. But Aglaya evidently thoroughly enjoyed the affectation and ceremony with which she was introducing ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... sinful. On the contrary, Smith believed that with a normal person the gratification of wishes was the natural result of their possession. If he felt hungry, he ate; if he wanted to see Helen, he went and saw her. Against this hopeless lack of affectation ordinary feminine weapons were badly blunted; in fact, they came to strike Miss Maitland as rather silly. After all, if he wished to see her, why shouldn't he do so? The mere fact that he had seen her the day before was not germane. The one germane thing would have been a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Ammiani who gave the order. 'I am despicable in distrusting her for a single second,' said Laura. That did not the less encourage her to question Beppo rigorously forthwith; and as she was not to be deceived by an Italian's affectation of simplicity, she let him answer two or three times like a plain fool, and then abruptly accused him of standing prepared with these answers. Beppo, within his own bosom, immediately ascribed to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Prim bent closer. "What is it, St. George, some old Port?" he asked in a perfunctory way. Rare old wines never interested him. "They are an affectation," he used ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... on the part of the peasant!" returned the baron. "I have always suspected him of affectation. I have no patience ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Teachers as we have spoke of, have the necessary complaisance for those they Teach, there is then, on the other side, a yet greater danger to be apprehended from them, which is that their Pupils will become fond of them; the bad effect of which will be, That by an Affectation Natural in Children of imitating those they Love, they will have their Manners and Dispositions Tinctur'd and Tainted by those of Persons so dear ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... theory that modesty has been put out of court by women's rights. But, though not modest, the woman I describe is ferocious in her propriety. She ignores the whole world around her as she sits; with a raised chin and face flattened by affectation, she pretends to declare aloud that she is positively not aware that any man is even near her. She speaks as though to her, in her womanhood, the neighborhood of men was the same as that of dogs or cats. They are there, but she does not hear them, see them, or even acknowledge ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... went; and here the same dissimilarity marked their conduct as at school. Anthony applied intensely to his studies, and made rapid progress in mental and moral improvement. Serious without affectation, and pious without cant, he daily became more attached to the profession he had chosen, hoping to find through it a medium by which he could one day restore to the world the talents which for half a century his father had ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless, wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an affectation ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and Americans, seeing the French so serious and intent on matters of beauty, fancy it to be mere affectation. To be serious on a barrel of flour, or a bushel of potatoes, we can well understand; but to be equally earnest in the adorning of a room or the "composition" of a bouquet seems ridiculous. But did not He who made the appetite ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that we employ in treating of human affairs, those of natural and unnatural are the least determinate in their meaning. Opposed to affectation, frowardness, or any other defect of the temper or character, the natural is an epithet of praise; but employed to specify a conduct which proceeds from the nature of man, can serve to distinguish nothing; for all the actions of men are equally the result of their nature. At most, this ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... fine specimen, a fine piece of affectation to be in love with! I see nothing in her but the most common attractions, and you will find a thousand girls more worthy of your love than she is. To begin with, her eyes are small... [Footnote: It is Moliere's ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... master's career there fit very well the two portraits in which he appears, painted by himself, on the confines of old age, vigorous and ardent still, fully conscious, moreover, though without affectation, of pre-eminent genius and supreme artistic rank. The portraits referred to are those very similar ones, both of them undoubtedly originals, which are respectively in the Berlin Gallery and the Painters' ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed—but I shall not make believe I am charmed." Dear man! he never would "make believe." Transparent, sincere soul, how he puts to shame all affectation and pretense! Mr. Jackson says his townsmen found it hard to realize that he was great. They always thought of him as the kindly neighbor. One old farmer told of his experience in driving home a load of hay. He was approaching a gate and was just preparing to climb down to open it, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... and E. B., i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (Letters of E. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Mrs. Morrell seldom rose before noon, and detested early morning hours and glorious sunshine. She was inclined to consider the usual remarks in their praise as sheer affectation. But she adored fires, and often went to them when they promised well enough. Sometimes she attended in company with certain of her men friends; and sometimes alone, cloaked as a man. She liked the destruction and stimulation of them. She had been ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... family thus assembled, an old glee-man sung to a harp, which had but four strings, a long and apparently interminable legend, upon some religious subject, which was rendered almost unintelligible to Eveline, by the extreme and complicated affectation of the poet, who, in order to indulge in the alliteration which was accounted one great ornament of Saxon poetry, had sacrificed sense to sound, and used words in the most forced and remote sense, provided they could be compelled into his service. There was also all the obscurity arising from ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the ring, attired in what resembled the uniform of an officer of the navy, stepped into the middle of the arena, and with the affectation of good breeding characteristic of the class, said, "Ladies and gentlemen: I have the honor to announce that John Brinton, the most extraordinary and celebrated tamer of lions in the world, will appear before you in his remarkable performance, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... a determined gaze fixed straight before him on vacuity, and with a desperate affectation of spontaneity in his tone—"Well, Madeline, mother and father have gone to Aunt Marcia's, I suppose to spend a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... as the invitation was given; Mrs. Cardross exchanged a few words with her husband in that perfectly natural drawl which at first might have been mistaken for languid affectation; then she smiled at Hamil and turned around in her basket chair, parasol tilted, and the black boy began slowly pedalling her away across ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... seemed suddenly to have expanded; and she felt more respect for herself than she had ever done before. She had always been one who thought for herself, notwithstanding there were so many to think for her; and, with a spirit above all affectation, she looked at things in a plain, common-sense, and true light. When the first shock was over in regard to her relationship to Minny, she had struggled with her natural feelings of wounded pride, till the matter stood before her as it was. Her father ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... the Knight of Ramorny retired into his sleeping apartment, agonized by pains of body and anxiety of mind. Here he found Henbane Dwining, on whom it was his hard fate to depend for consolation in both respects. The physician, with his affectation of extreme humility, hoped he saw his exalted ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... repeat the question before he answer is well, that he be sure to understand it, to avoid absurdity; for it is less dishonour to hear imperfectly than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused, the understanding is not. And in things unknown to a man, not to give his opinion, lest by the affectation of knowing too much he lose the credit he hath, by speaking or knowing the wrong way what he utters. Nor seek to get his patron's favour by embarking himself in the factions of the family, to inquire after domestic simulties, their sports or affections. They are an odious and vile ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... apparently united much of that craft and spirit of artifice which, according to all history, sacred as well as profane, it was not deemed sinful in patriarch or philosopher to indulge. Where he could not win his object by reason, he could stoop to attain it by the affectation of madness. And this quality of craft was necessary perhaps, in that age, to accomplish the full utilities of his career. However he might feign or dissimulate, the end before him was invariably excellent and patriotic; and the purity of his private ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Affectation! Affectation! It is the nauseating disease of the day! If a thinking man, a sincere philanthropist, takes into consideration the condition of the working classes and endeavors to lay bare their necessities, scarcely has his work made an impression ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... last learned schoolmaster who was professedly an amateur of the rod; and in that profession there was more of humour and affectation than of reality, for with all his habitual affectation and his occasional brutality, Parr was a good-natured, generous, warm-hearted man; there was a coarse husk and a hard shell, like the cocoa-nut, but the core was filled with the milk of human ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... indulged in when he wished to bamboozle people of a lower class, would here have told against him. He knew when to abstain, and carried the art of deception far enough to be able to lay aside the appearance of hypocrisy. He had described all the circumstances without affectation, and if this unexpected accusation was wholly unproved, it yet rested on a possible fact, and did not appear absolutely incredible. The magistrate went through it all again, and made him repeat every detail, without ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are people who pretend that this section of Gulliver's Travels is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing—and I believe with sufficient reason—to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanity—not excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseau—falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... his moral instruction, he finds that so much attention is paid to sexual things. It is not the actual accounts of sexual things in the Bible which constitute the danger, but the contrast between the plain speaking of the Bible in these matters, and the general affectation of secrecy outside its pages. An additional point of importance is the fact that in the Bible sexual topics are handled in a way which is by no means always delicate. I may recall the frequency with which the idea of the whore ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... in order that their children might spring from a healthy source and so grow up strong, and that they themselves might have strength, so as easily to endure the pains of childbirth. He did away with all affectation of seclusion and retirement among the women, and ordained that the girls, no less than the boys, should go naked in processions, and dance and sing at festivals in the presence of the young men. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... also gave them a subject of common interest apart from themselves; and thus they were once more able to converse with one another, without having that sense of violent self-restraint which had thus far afflicted them. Brooke was able to be lively, without any affectation of too extravagant gayety, and Talbot was no longer crushed ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... was addressed to the Captain, now emerging from the back parlour with a most transparent and utterly futile affectation ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... (Mem.) The Socratic method is nominally retained; and every inference is either put into the mouth of the respondent or represented as the common discovery of him and Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of enquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view. The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when he describes himself ...
— The Republic • Plato
... completed expediency for nothing. Principle is only another name for a proposition stating the terms of one of these larger expediencies. When principle is held in contempt, or banished to the far dreamland of the philosopher and the student, with an affectation of reverence that in a materialist generation is in truth the most overweening kind of contempt, this only means that men are thinking much of the interests of to-day, and little of the more ample interests ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... dignity; if his words are seldom bathed in tears or steeped in fire, yet he never writes beneath his subject. He had a rare command of an excellent work-a-day dramatic style, clear, vigorous, free from conceit and affectation. But he is apt to grow didactic, and tax the reader's patience; and there is often a want of coherence in his sentences, which amble down the page in a series of loosely-linked clauses. I will not examine scene by scene in detail; ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the FASHION ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... bow, courtly enough, but there was no smile—not even an affectation of cordiality. Sir Bale, however, was chatty, and did not seem to care much what he said, or what people thought of him; and there was a suspicion of sarcasm in what he said that the rustic literality of good Mrs. Bedel ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... village. Having made his bow, which she accepted with a smile, he could do no less than open the gate for her; and as their ways must thence lie together, up the long ilex-shaded avenue to the castle, it would be an awkward affectation not to speak. And yet (he ground his teeth at having to admit it) his heart had begun to pound so violently, (not from emotion, he told himself,—from a mere ridiculous sort of nervous excitement: ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... for oste, marciare for andare, accio for acciocche, onde for affinche; that numerous imitations of Dante can be traced in it; and that to an acute student of early Italian prose its palpable quattrocentismo is only slightly veiled by a persistent affectation of fourteenth-century archaism. This argument from style seems the strongest that can be brought against the genuineness of the 'Chronicle'; for while it is possible that Dino may have made innumerable blunders about the events in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... away, and Cochrane stared at his own watch. Since a lunar day and night together fill twenty-eight Earth days of time, a strictly lunar "day" contains nearly three hundred forty Earth-hours. To call one-twelfth of that period an hour would be an affectation. To call each twenty-four Earth hours a day would have been absurd. So the actual period of the moon's rotation was divided into familiar time-intervals, and a bulletin-board in the hotel lobby in Lunar City notified those interested that: "Sunday will be from 143 o'clock to 167 o'clock ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... but for its bilious colour, the face could scarcely be termed ill-looking. The eyes do not squint; and the thin lips appear making a constant effort to look smiling and saint-like. Perhaps it is this outward affectation of the saintly character— belying, as it evidently does, the spirit within, that produces the unfavourable impression. In earlier youth, the face may have been better favoured; but a career, spent in the exercise of evil passions, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... and feign a sorrow for Stephen Verner which I do not feel? I know it is his burial-day as well as you know it; but I will not make that a reason for abstaining from questions on family topics, although they do relate to money and means that were once his. I say it would be hypocritical affectation to do so. Lionel," she deliberately continued, "has Jan an interest in Verner's Pride after you, or is it left to you unconditionally? And what residence is appointed for ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was quite a company waiting to go up or down the river. Among them were six or eight young people—Colonel Thompson with his son and daughter, whom he was taking home from their school in Helena, Arkansas, and a young Dr. Jackson, who was very talkative and filled to over-flowing with affectation. With a twirl of his little cane, and half-bent bow, in a simpering manner he addressed the four young ladies sitting on the ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... that she never would have discovered the passion of Orondates, had not her woman, who was jealous of his favour, given her a hint; at the same time remarking, under affectation of good will, how well the circumstances of the lovers were suited, and that as her ladyship was in years, and would certainly not think of providing for a creature she had bought in the public market, it would be charitable to ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... in most common use for manuscripts is what is known as letter. The sheets in any case should be of uniform size. Avoid all eccentricity and affectation in the preparation of your manuscript, or "copy," as printers call it. The more matter-of-fact and businesslike ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... which imply moral perversity—not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A 'prude' is now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been profound, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... eleven mortal hours detailing the facts to you. What did he tell you the conspiracy consisted of? He made a long statement, and when he came to the end, he told you to go back to the beginning, find out the conspiracy, and what it consisted of. I say, gentlemen of the jury, without tire least affectation, if any gentleman could have found out evidence of a conspiracy, it would have been found by the attorney-general." Mr. O'Connell proceeded at great length to defend the means of his agitation, and then proceeded to vindicate its object—the repeal of the union. On the latter ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... his savage guardian gazing contemplatively at the distant prospect. Martin's heart beat audibly as he rose and walked with an affectation of carelessness to the edge of the cliff. As he gazed down, a feeling of horror seized him; he gasped for breath, and almost fainted. Then the idea of perpetual slavery flashed across his mind, and the thought of freedom and home nerved him: He clenched ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... revolver. They were always a revolutionary people, were the French, and revolving seems, therefore, to suit their temper to a T, (Gunpowder T, of course.) Since the slaying of NOIR by BONAPARTE, the affectation of readiness with the pistol has become quite the thing in Paris. New-York and Paris will soon be exactly alike in the bullet business—especially Paris. PAUL DE CASSAGNAC, it seems, has been invited by some anonymous person to meet him at a certain hour in front of the mairie of the Seventeenth ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... therefore she sought another opening. She had made up her mind to begin humbling his conceit by voicing her contemptuous regard for newspaper men in general when he once more forestalled her by giving crisp expression to the very sentiments she was rehearsing. Of course, it was all affectation, like his slovenly disregard of fashion—and yet, she was interested to hear him ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... concerning their footmen's calves. Nevertheless, to the end he was not kinder to Dives' oppression, less sympathetic towards the troubles of Lazarus, nor more indulgent to the vulgarity of the snob; nor a whit more tolerant of viciousness, affectation, or ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... outward movements: for Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 18): "A becoming gait is one that reflects the carriage of authority, has the tread of gravity, and the foot-print of tranquillity: yet so that there be neither study nor affectation, but natural and artless movement." Therefore seemingly there is no virtue about the style ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... positively freezing in her coldness. Troubled and inwardly enraged, he was yet more than ever determined to carry out his purpose. His orders to his men were given sharply and sternly, and his mood was so fierce that there was no longer any affectation or assumption on his part. The girl's heart fluttered with nameless fears, but she had the strength of will to maintain the cold, impassive demeanor she had resolved upon. She felt that it would be useless to make further effort ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... the fading light; and ere he had forced the animal back into the path, his bridle was caught by a half-naked lad, whom the rider at once recognized as an emissary he had often before employed to be the bearer of secret intelligence, and who, under an affectation of being half-witted, concealed much shrewdness of observation and ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... cried the bard;—"whose to it?" "Your own." "Indeed! hah! well, I had quite forgotten it." Was this affectation, or was it not? In sooth, he seemed to push simplicity to puerility. This imitation contained in manuscript the following lines, after describing certain Sunday newspaper critics who were supposed to be present at a new play, and who were ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... too, asking when he would come and eat a chop with his old uncle, and saying that he was commissioned to take him to dinner at Gaunt House, for Lord Steyne liked anybody who could entertain him, whether by his folly, wit, or by his dulness, by his oddity, affectation, good spirits, or any other quality. Pen flung his letter across the table to Warrington: perhaps he was disappointed that the other did not seem to be much affected ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from every kind of self-assertion; and in matters outside his own province often showed to men of abilities very inferior to his own a deference which to those who did not know him might pass for affectation. The life of a recluse had strong attractions for him. He was profoundly convinced that the happiest of all lives was that of a clergyman, who could devote himself to study and to the quiet duties of his profession. Circumstances had forced a different career upon him. He had as a very ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... an unaffected, agreeable woman. But it is Caroline Mounteney whom I wish you particularly to meet. She is one of those delicious creatures who, in spite of not being married, are actually conversable. Spirited, without any affectation or brusquerie; beautiful, and knowing enough to be quite conscious of it; perfectly accomplished, and yet never annoying you with tattle about Bochsa, and Ronzi de Begnis, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... beauty, and he shrank from discussing it with Volochine. However, after a pause, he observed with much affectation: ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Acquaintance, shew yourselves to no other Purpose than to gain a Conquest over some Man of Worth, in order to bestow your Charms and Fortune on him. There's no Indecency in the Confession, the Design is modest and honourable, and all your Affectation cant ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... services. They are useless against high-class players. Sharp breaking underhand cuts can be easily angled off for points by a man who knows anything of the angles and effects of twist. These deliveries are affectation if used more than once or twice in a long match. A sudden shift may surprise your opponent; but to continue to serve these freaks is to ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... friends, some of which were disgusting, some horrifying, and some stupid. But with it all he had an air as if he believed everybody at heart was bad, and as if morality and sobriety and unselfishness were mere affectation and cant. ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... affectionate, playful and commanding all at once. She bade Cassandra put her creatures in the charge of a groom, and come to them for a week or so. They would go and hear some music together. Cassandra's dislike of rational society, she said, was an affectation fast hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the long run, isolate her from all interesting people and pursuits. She was finishing the sheet when the sound she was anticipating all the time actually struck upon her ears. She jumped up hastily, and slammed the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... lids and silky lashes had a penetrating and peculiar expression—a mixture of audacity and weakness; his thin and somewhat pale lips were apt to curl in an ironical smile; his hands were of perfect beauty, his feet of dainty smallness, and he showed with an affectation of complaisance a well-turned leg above his ample boots, the turned down tops of which, garnished with lace, fell in irregular folds aver his ankles in the latest fashion. He did not appear to be ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... his great shoulders with a clumsy affectation of good humour, and held out his hand. "Well, shake hands, parson. You'll have to take care of Mrs. Frere on the voyage, and we may as well make up our differences ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... "That affectation of valetudinarianism is growing on Mrs. Winstanley," Mrs. Scobel said one day to her husband. "It is a pity. I believe ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... they did. Tiberius, who appears to have read him truly, spoke of educating him "for the destruction of the Roman people," and Caligula seemed eager to make these words good. At first, indeed, he seemed generous and merciful, mingling this affectation with a savage profligacy and voluptuousness. Illness, however, apparently affected his brain or destroyed what little moral nature he possessed, and he quickly embarked on a career of frightful excess ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... religious poems. From these we can best judge the reality of Chesterton's poetic impulse, for here, knowing that affectation would be almost indecent, he has expressed what he had to express with a care denied to most of his other works. In one of his essays, G.K.C. exults in that matchless phrase of Vaughan, "high humility." He has both adopted and adapted this quality, and the results are wonderful. In The Wise ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... implacable irony. How the natural-born aristocrat Turgenev hated the Russian aristocracy! When Solomin appears in this household, he seems like a giant among manikins, so truly do the simple human virtues tower above the arrogance of affectation. The woman Marianna is a sister of Elena, whom we learned to know in "On the Eve;" she has the purity, not of an angel, but of a noble woman. She has that quiet, steadfast resolution so characteristic of Russian heroines. As for Mariusha, she ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... goddess poverty, and the god of riches: he has from his father his daring genius; his elevation of thought; his building castles in the air; his prodigality; his neglect of things serious and useful; his vain opinion of his own merit; and his affectation of preference and distinction: from his mother he inherits his indigence, which makes him a constant beggar of favours; that importunity with which he begs; his flattery; his servility; his fear of being despised, which is inseparable from ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... in close proximity to that of other nations. Aside from that, a natural sequence of artistic development by developing the more decorative arts of making useful things beautiful - such things as pots and pans, rugs, and jewelry - would be much more becoming than this European affectation. The real art of the Filipinos is to be seen in their art industries in the ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... her hand, and he took it; on each side with an elaborate affectation, each inwardly incandescent. He led her out by the private door, following where Gondremark had passed; they threaded a corridor or two, little frequented, looking on a court, until they came at last into ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of foolery, at any rate,' he said. 'Jeanbernat, you are a deceiver. I suspect you are in love, in spite of your affectation of being blase. You were speaking very tenderly of the trees and stones ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... have not put Mr. Moss to any inconvenience, for I only requested an answer, giving him leave to sit if he had a mind—and of free will he leaves my premises void and redd at Whitsunday. I suspect the house is not in good order, but we shall get it brushed up a little. Without affectation I consider myself the obliged party in this matter—or at any rate it is a mutual benefit, and you shall have grass for a cow, and so forth—whatever you want. I am sure when you are so near I shall find some literary ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... account of two days spent with Bismarck in a Prussian country-house, during the triumphant days of the winter which followed on Sadowa. The story was brilliantly told, and of some political importance. But it was disfigured by arrogance and affectation, and Ashe's eyes began to dance a little. Cliffe meanwhile could not forget that he was in the presence of a rival and an official, could not refrain after a while from a note of challenge here and there. The conversation ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... coquette in his own nature, Marivaux had no patience with it in others. D'Alembert relates another incident, which will serve to show that not only affectation, but also everything that seemed to him too studied, received his condemnation. "One day, he went to see a man from whom he had received many letters, which were almost in his own style, and, which, as one may well imagine, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Drayton might not inaptly be termed the English Theocritus. If not so distinctly superior to every other English pastoral poet as Theocritus was to every other Greek, he yet stands in the front rank. He is utterly free from affectation, the great vice of pastoral poetry; his love of the country is sincere; his perception of natural phenomena exquisite; his shepherds and shepherdesses real swains and lasses; he has happily varied the conventional form of the pastoral by a felicitous lyrical treatment. ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... onions, lest they find out thy boorish origin by the smell; walk slowly and speak deliberately, but not in such a way as to make it seem thou art listening to thyself, for all affectation ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... executants approach and retire, and at the middle of the dance change positions. It finishes with a great clapping of hands, the maiden sinks down among her friends and begins violently to fan herself, while her partner, with a great affectation of nonchalance, takes a ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... good-hearted, deluded father. Now, don't you think the lad would be handsomer cropped? It makes a dog fiercer, and I love something fierce—get me a scissors—something fierce and trim! Besides, it's infernal affectation—devilish conceit it is, to cherish our ears—we're asses enough without them. Hush, child, hush! Well then, it is my darling! wisht, dry thy eyes—there's a joy; kiss me. What! it won't? Kiss me, Hareton! Damn thee, kiss me! ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... represented; and broad obscenities in words, ought in good manners to be avoided: expressions therefore are a modest clothing of our thoughts, as breeches and petticoats are of our bodies. If I have kept myself within the bounds of modesty, all beyond it is but nicety and affectation; which is no more but modesty depraved into a vice. They betray themselves, who are too quick of apprehension in such cases, and leave all reasonable men to imagine worse of them, than of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... and when Moona Chivvey lost her temper it was not easily forgotten. She insulted him, called him a blighter, a silly ass, a mass of affectation. ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... salt and sting. There is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says, briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... altered mood of their host; for it was merely the reflection of his sullen gravity that had eclipsed their own vivacity. The instant, therefore, that he led the way, the hall began to resound with jest and laughter. The poet, with some humiliation, which he endeavored to conceal beneath an affectation of wounded dignity, commenced rolling up his manuscript, not before a splash of wine from a carelessly filled flagon had soiled the fair-written characters. More flasks were placed upon the table by ready and obedient hands—and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... niece, Mr. Benfield (who, like many others that feel strongly, wore in common the affectation of indifference and displeasure) yielded to his fondness, and folding her in his arms, kissed her affectionately, while a tear glistened in his eye; and then pushing her gently from him, he exclaimed, ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... habitually composed to one intense expression of dissatisfaction with all about him. Like the Dutchman he looked away from the company towards the fire, and appeared to take no interest in any thing which went on: but this in him was mere affectation. The Dutchman, as a child could see, was most sincerely indifferent to every thing but the festoons of smoke which formed about him; nor ever seemed to suffer in his peace of mind except when this aerial drapery was rent or too much attenuated: then indeed he puffed ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... records of the academy, and returned it to the author, Bonaparte destroyed it after he had read a few pages. He also laboured under the temptation of writing a journey to Mount Cenis, after the manner of Sterne, which he was fortunate enough finally to resist. The affectation which pervades Sterne's peculiar style of composition was not likely to be simplified under the pen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... longest speech the Prince had made, yet he never spoke better; he had both mastered his nervousness and his need for notes. Decrying his abilities as an orator, he yet won his hearing by his very lack of oratorical affectation. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... homely ways and speech, which smacked of the Vermont farm as strongly as if he had just come thence, whereas in truth he had lived in Florence, at this time, about twenty years, and had won high fame as a sculptor, tempted one to suspect him of affectation—of a pose; and there is no doubt that Powers was aware of the contrast between his physical presentment and his artistic reputation, and felt a sort of dramatic pleasure in it. Nevertheless, it would be unjust to call him affected; he was a big man, in all senses of the term, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... only human nature to dread a battle,—and I think it would be mere affectation to deny it, yet I also know that we common soldiers strongly felt that when fighting did break loose close at hand, or within the general scope of our operations, then we ought to be in it, with the ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... One day in the spring he stopped an hour in Washington to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs. All three friends knew that they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the one it would be the other; but the affectation of readiness for death is a stage role, and stoicism is a stupid resource, though the only one. Non doles, Paete! One is ashamed of it even in ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... artist of this kind. The mass of the verse he produced, or rather published, was small. It might have been very large. It is not (as a foolish modern affectation will sometimes pretend) necessary to the endurance or even the excellence of work that it should be the product of exceptional moments; nor is it even true (as the wise Ancients believed) that great length of time must always mature it. But the small ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... meeting between her and Chang. If An Ching were willing to help, it would be quite possible to get the children over the wall by means of ropes. Chi Fu, who certainly had a good head on his shoulders and could use it to some purpose when he forgot his affectation, suggested also that in case of an extra courier being sent from the mission, or the arrival of a missionary, Nelly had better write a letter to her parents, which ...
— The Little Girl Lost - A Tale for Little Girls • Eleanor Raper
... many a license, many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive. His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... poor palliative is probably all we shall obtain. The Marquis de la Fayette goes hand in hand with me in all these transactions, and is an invaluable auxiliary to me. I hope it will not be imputed either to partiality or affectation, my naming this gentleman so often in my despatches. Were I not to do it, it would be a suppression of truth, and the taking to myself the whole merit where ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... But nativism was powerful, and position important at that time, as Lee and Gates and even Hamilton himself experienced. The signature, "Common Sense," Paine preserved through life. It became what our authorlings, who ought to know better, will persist in calling a nom [1] de plume—a Yankee affectation, unknown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the man would not be denied, she allowed her hand to rest in his for just the barest fraction of a second. As Leslie approached, he heard Potter anxiously inquiring after her welfare, and doing the honours of his ship generally, with a ludicrous affectation of manner that amused him greatly, and even brought the ghost of a smile to ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of its undeniable ability. Then it comes, too, in early spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh before they are jaded with the crowded beauties of May. A really modest flower would wait for the other flowers to come first. A subtle affectation is surely a different thing from modesty. The violet is simply artful, the young widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower as an example is not doing one's duty by the young. For true modesty commend me to the agave, which flowers once only in ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... made to do the things that humanity is the happier for! I can't do such things myself, but when I see a young man of genius standing helpless and hopeless for want of capital, I feel—and it 's no affectation of humility, I assure you—as if it would give at least a reflected usefulness to my own life to offer ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Du Plessis, with much simpering and affectation, quite unworthy of the original, drew the working geologist out, and inspired him with hopes of securing her hand and property. Mr. Rawdon spoke very freely of the wealth he had in the hand and in the bush, of his readiness ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... languid love for Lilies does not blight me! Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me! I do not care for dirty greens By any means. I do not long for all one sees That's Japanese. I am not fond of uttering platitudes In stained-glass attitudes. In short, my mediaevalism's affectation, Born of a morbid ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... his Essay upon Eloquence, expresses an opinion that the modern deficiency in this art is to be attributed to "that extreme affectation of extempore speaking, which has led ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... were Elder Brewster and Myles Standish, and well did they prove themselves fit to be rulers among the people, for they became servants of all, without hesitation and without affectation, nursing, cooking, dressing loathsome wounds, and ministering in all those homely ways repugnant to refined senses, and especially, perhaps, to the dignity of man. The doctor also kept on foot, although ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... are however not necessarily 'corrupted' dialects. Corrupt language is that gathered by ignorance, invented by vice, misused by insensibility, or minced and mouthed by affectation, especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half the meaning is understood, or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's 'aperiently so'—and the 'undermined' with primal sense of undermine, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother's eyebrows, that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness, but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the weather. It occurred ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... celebrities of the Quarter, grew impatient. Cronshaw was taking his time to wake up that evening, though the saucers at his side indicated that he had at least made an honest attempt to get drunk. Clutton watched the scene with amusement. He fancied there was something of affectation in Cronshaw's minute knowledge of cricket; he liked to tantalise people by talking to them of things that obviously bored them; Clutton threw in ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... obviously fought for the purpose of someone being at least hurt if not killed outright. The civilian got hurt. That also was in order. Lieutenant Feraud was perfectly tranquil. But Lieutenant D'Hubert mistook this simple attitude for affectation and spoke ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... coarser qualities, the accentuated bitterness, the startling irony, the vigorous, characteristic phrase. Those black strokes were not introduced to throw up the grey wash or pencilled shading; Wyndham's cynicism was no mere literary affectation, it was engrained in his very nature. He had gone through many phases of disillusionment (including disgust at his own success) before that brief crisis of feeling which ended in his engagement to Miss Fraser. Then, for the first time in his life, a woman's nature ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... French writer, and told me Tolstoy liked him. The other day I happened to read a novel of his and flung up my hands in amazement. He is equivalent to our Matchtet, only a little more intelligent. There is a terrible deal of affectation, dreariness, straining after originality, and as little of anything artistic as there was salt in that porridge we cooked in the evening at Bogimovo. In the preface this Rod regrets that he was in the past a "naturalist," and rejoices that the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... which we have it was given it by the famous St. Jerome, who sends the tale as a letter to Asella, one of the many noble Roman ladies whom he persuaded to embrace the monastic life. The style is as well worth preserving as the matter. Its ruggedness and awkwardness, its ambition and affectation, contrasted with the graceful simplicity of Athanasius's "Life of Antony," mark well the difference between the cultivated Greek and the ungraceful and half-barbarous Roman of the later Empire. I have, therefore, given it as literally as ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... the negotiations accepted this gentle rebuke in silence, and withdrew. On the next day he appeared again at the office in his ordinary costume, and an idea crossed Sir Raffle's brain that he had been partly "done" by the affectation of a costume. "I'll be even with him some day yet," said Sir ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
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